The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  III

  Other professional groups were somewhat less satisfied, in particular Germany’s vast and ramified state civil service. Despite Hitler’s attempt in 1934 to try and sort out a division of labour between the traditional state service and the Party, tensions and struggles between the normative and prerogative arms of the ‘dual state’ continued and if anything got worse as time went on. While institutions like the Interior Ministry felt obliged to warn civil servants not to accept instructions from Nazi Party agencies or individuals without any formal capacity in the state, Hitler himself, notably in a proclamation read to the Nuremberg Party Rally on 11 September 1935, insisted repeatedly that if state institutions proved ineffective in implementing the Party’s policies, then ‘the movement’ would have to implement them instead. ‘The battle against the inner enemy will never be frustrated by formal bureaucracy or its incompetence. ’65 The result was that the civil service soon began to seem very unattractive to ambitious young graduates eager to make their way in the world. As the SS Security Service noted in a report in 1939:The development of the sphere of the civil service has in general again been in a negative direction. Well-known, threatening phenomena have in the period under review once more increased in dimension, such as the shortage of personnel, negative selection and absence of younger recruits because of the poor pay and public defamation of the civil service, failures in personnel policy because of the lack of any unity of approach, and so on.66

  There were serious problems of recruitment already by 1937. The law faculties of Germany’s universities, upon which the civil service largely depended for recruits, had shrunk dramatically in size since 1933, as students went into more fashionable subjects like medicine. On the other hand, the bureaucratization of Nazi Germany - a term actually used in 1936 by the Reich Statistical Office - had led to a 20 per cent growth in public employment in federal, state and local administration between 1933 and 1939. But better-paid administrative posts were still to be had in the Party and its affiliated organizations. By 1938 there were serious staff shortages in state offices at all levels. Yet it was not until the summer of 1939 that the salary cuts imposed by Brüning’s austerity programme during the Depression were at least partially reversed. Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick painted a drastic picture of civil servants’ chronic indebtedness and predicted that the civil service would soon be unable to carry out its tasks any more. For the sharp decline in the prestige and position of civil servants, however, the Party and its leaders, who constantly poured scorn upon the state apparatus and those who staffed it, only had themselves to blame.67

  In view of these developments, it was not surprising that a thoughtful civil servant, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, himself a member of the Nazi Party since 1932, voiced his despair at the way things were going in September 1937. He drew Ministers’ attention to the new Reich Civil Service Law, which described the civil service as the main pillar of the state. Without it, he pointed out, the Four-Year Plan could not be properly implemented. Yet its efficient functioning was being blocked by a sharp decline in strength as a result of repeated political and racial purges, while the proliferation of Party and state institutions had led to a chaos of competing competences that made proper administration virtually impossible. He went on:Although it has considerable achievements to its credit since the take-over of power, it is publicly ridiculed as a ‘bureaucracy’ either by the Leader or by the community and decried as alien to the people, disloyal, without anyone being prepared to reject officially this disparagement of a class on which the state depends. Civil servants, especially leading ones, are exposed to attacks on their work, which in fact are directed against the state as such . . . The consequences of this treatment of the civil service are that the civil service feels increasingly defamed, without honour, and in some degree of despair. Recruitment is beginning to dry up . . . The civil service is largely reduced to the economic status of the proletariat . . . By comparison, business offers many times the salary . . .68

  Among senior civil servants such as Schulenburg, disappointment at the dashing of the high hopes they had held in 1933 was palpable. Things, he declared, were even worse than they had been under Weimar. The long and honourable tradition of the civil service was being destroyed.69

  Schulenburg’s disillusion was to lead him rapidly into a position strongly hostile to the regime. As far as the great majority of civil servants were concerned, however, the forces of tradition and inertia proved superior. The civil service had held a special place in German society and politics since its formation in eighteenth-century Prussia. Some of the ideals of duty to the nation, contempt for politics, and belief in efficient administration, survived into the twentieth century and informed civil servants’ reaction to the Nazis. Rigid bureaucratic procedures, formal rules, a plethora of grades and titles, and much more besides, marked out the civil service as a special institution with a special consciousness. It was not easily displaced. Some decided to soldier on in the interests of the nation they thought the civil service had always represented. Others were attracted by the authoritarian style of the Third Reich, its emphasis on national unity, on the removal of overt political conflict, and particularly, perhaps, its effective removal of a whole range of constraints on bureaucratic action. Efficiency replaced accountability, and that too was attractive to many civil servants. In every Ministry in Berlin, every regional and local government office, civil servants obeyed the laws and decrees handed down to them by Hitler, Göring and other Ministers to implement because, above all, they considered it their duty to do so. Dissenters, of course, had been weeded out in 1933; but the vast majority of German bureaucrats were in any case arch-conservatives who believed in an authoritarian state, considered Communists and even Social Democrats traitors, and favoured renewed national expansion and rearmament.70

  One such bureaucrat, typical in many ways, whose voluminous family correspondence has by chance survived to give us a detailed view of a middle-class perspective on the Third Reich, was Friedrich Karl Gebensleben, City Planning Officer in Braunschweig. Born in 1871, the year of German unification, Karl Gebensleben had trained as an engineer and worked for the German railway system in Berlin before taking up his post in 1915. He was obviously a man of integrity who was trusted by his colleagues, and by the early 1930s he was combining his administrative post with the office of deputy mayor of the city. His wife Elisabeth, born in 1883, came from a prosperous farming background, as did her husband. The couple were pillars of Braunschweig society, frequented concerts and patronized the theatre, and were to be seen together at all major public celebrations, receptions and similar events. Their daughter Irmgard, born in 1906, had married a Dutchman, and her presence in Holland was the occasion for most of the family’s letter-writing; their son Eberhard, born in 1910, studied law at a series of universities, as was normal at the time, including Berlin and Heidelberg, and aimed to take up work in the Reich civil service as a career. This was a solid, conventional, bourgeois family, therefore. But in the early 1930s it was clearly in a deep state of anxiety, plagued above all by fears of a Communist or socialist revolution. Elisabeth Gebensleben expressed a widely held view when she wrote to her daughter on 20 July 1932 that Germany was in mortal peril from the Communists, aided and abetted by the Social Democrats. The country was swarming with Russian agents, she thought, and the violence on the streets was the beginning of a planned destabilization of the country. Thus any measures to ward off the threat were justified.71

  Well before the Nazi seizure of power, Elisabeth Gebensleben had become an admirer of Hitler and his movement: ‘This readiness to make sacrifices, this burning patriotism and this idealism!’ she exclaimed in 1932 on witnessing a Nazi Party demonstration: ‘And at the same time such tight discipline and control!’72 Not surprisingly, she was full of enthusiasm for the coalition government headed by Hitler and appointed on 30 January 1933 - in the nick of time, she thought, as she witnessed a Communist demonstration against
the appointment (‘Has Hitler grasped the tiller too late? Bolshevism has taken far, far deeper anchor in the people than one suspected’).73 The mass, brutal violence meted out by the Nazis to their opponents in the following months did not, therefore, cause her many sleepless nights: ‘This ruthless, decisive action by the national government’, she wrote on 10 March 1933, ‘may put some people off, but first there surely has to be a root-and-branch purge and clear-out, otherwise it won’t be possible to start reconstruction.’74 The ‘purge’ included the Social Democratic Mayor of Braunschweig, Ernst Böhme, who had been elected in 1929 at the age of thirty-seven. On 13 March 1933 Nazi stormtroopers burst into a council session and hauled him roughly out onto the street. Within a few days he had been forced under duress to sign a paper resigning all his offices in the town. A band of SS men took him to the offices of the local Social Democratic newspaper, stripped him naked, threw him onto a table and beat him unconscious, after which they threw a bucket of water over him, dressed him again as he was, paraded him through the streets and put him in the town gaol, from which he was eventually released some time later, to return to private life. As his deputy, Karl Gebensleben took over temporarily and without demur as the city’s new mayor. Although he was upset by the dramatic and unexpected scene he had witnessed in the council chamber, Karl nevertheless took strong exception to newspaper reports that he had wept as the mayor was carried off to his fate. He had indeed worked closely with Böhme over the past few years, but his probity as a civil servant would not have allowed him such an unrestrained show of emotion. His wife Elisabeth, though disapproving (‘I would have wanted Böhme to have a somewhat less ignominious sendoff’), consoled herself with the thought that in the Revolution of 1918 the conservative mayor of the time had himself been humiliated by the ‘Reds’.75

  Like other conservatives, the Gebenslebens were reassured by the obeisance to tradition paid in the opening ceremony of the Reichstag at Postdam on 21 March. They dusted off their black-white-red imperial flag and hung it out in triumph, while Karl took part in a celebratory march through the streets of Braunschweig.76 Anything the Gebenslebens disliked, especially acts of violence committed by the stormtroopers and SS, they dismissed as the work of Communist infiltrators.77 They believed implicitly the trumped-up charges of peculation brought by the Nazis against trade union officials and others.78 As Elisabeth reported to her daughter Hitler’s speeches over the radio, what shone through in her words was a strongly reawakened national pride: Germany now had a Chancellor to whom the whole world paid attention.79 A staunch Protestant, she joined the German Christians (‘So, reform in the Church. I’m pleased’) and listened excitedly as her pastor compared Hitler to Martin Luther.80 The family’s illusions were as significant as their enthusiasms. Karl Gebensleben applauded the ‘strict discipline’ introduced into public life and the economy by ‘the leadership principle, which alone has validity’ and the ‘co-ordination down to the tiniest institutions’, but thought that in time a moderate opposition along English lines would be permitted to exist. Towards the end of May, he and his wife finally joined the Nazi Party, not out of self-preservation, but out of a positive sense of commitment to the new Germany. As he wrote proudly if somewhat self-consciously to his daughter:So your ‘old’ dad has also had to procure for himself a brownshirt, peaked cap, belt, tie and party badge as fast as possible. Mum thinks the uniform fits me fantastically and makes me look decades (?) younger!!! Oh!!! Well, well, my dear, if only someone had told me before! But it’s a grand feeling to see how everyone is trying through discipline to do the best for the Fatherland - strictly according to the motto: The public interest comes first.81

  As an administrator, Karl welcomed the decision to exclude the city council from most future issues and to decide them instead in a small committee. ‘By this means, time and energy are made available for useful work.’82 Before him, he saw a new time of efficiency and coherence in administration. Things, of course, did not quite turn out that way.

  This was not the only point on which the Gebenslebens deceived themselves. There were illusions too in the family’s attitude to the regime’s posture towards the Jews. Antisemitism initially played little part in the family’s support for Nazism. When Elisabeth Gebensleben saw the shattered display windows of Jewish-owned shops in the town in mid-March 1933, she ascribed this to ‘provocateurs . . . who, as has been ascertained, have smuggled themselves into the NSDAP in order to discredit the nationalist movement at home and abroad . . . Communists and fellow travellers’. If any Nazis were involved, it was clear that Hitler disapproved, she thought.83 She found antisemitic speeches by Goebbels and Goring ‘terrible’ and was alarmed by the Nazis’ disruption of Fritz Busch’s work as a conductor in Leipzig (she thought this was because he was Jewish, although in fact he was not). Such attacks on Jewish artists were ‘catastrophic’, she wrote, and added: ‘There are rogues amongst the Jews too, but one mustn’t forget all the great men amongst the Jews, who have achieved such an enormous amount in the fields of art and science.’84

  Yet she was soon taking a different view, following the boycott of Jewish shops on 1 April 1933 and the accompanying massive propaganda. ‘The era in which we are now living’, she wrote to her daughter with unintentionally prophetic force on 6 April 1933, ‘will only be judged fairly by posterity.’ She went on:It’s world history that we’re experiencing. But world history rolls over the fate of the individual, and that makes this epoch, which is so pure and elevated in its aim, so difficult, because side-by-side with the joy we are experiencing, there is also sympathy with the fate of the individual. That applies to the fate of the individual Jew too, but does not alter one’s judgement of the Jewish question as such. The Jewish question is a worldwide question just like Communism, and if Hitler intends to deal with it, just as he does with Communism, and his aim is achieved, then perhaps Germany will one day be envied.85

  She considered the boycott justified in view of the ‘smear campaign against Germany’ that the regime claimed was being mounted by Marxists and Jews abroad. All stories of antisemitic atrocities in Germany were ‘pure invention’, she roundly declared to her daughter in Holland, following Goebbels’s injunction to anyone who had contacts with foreigners to take this line; either she had forgotten the incidents she had found so shocking only three weeks before, or she had decided deliberately to suppress them. Germany had been robbed of the ‘possibility of life’ by the Treaty of Versailles, she reminded her daughter: ‘Germany is protecting itself with the weapons it has. That the Jews are partly being shown the door of their offices in the legal system, in medicine, is also correct in economic terms, as hard as it hits the individual, innocent person.’ She believed, wrongly of course, that their number was merely being reduced to the same proportion as that of Jews in the population as a whole (though this principle, she failed to reflect, did not apply to other groups in Germany society, for example Protestants, whose share of top jobs was proportionately far higher than that of Catholics). In any case, she said, demonstrating how far she had taken Nazi propaganda on board in the space of a mere few weeks, perhaps because it built on prejudices already latent in her mind, the Jews were ‘cunning’: ‘The Jews want to rule, not to serve.’ Her husband Karl told her stories of Jewish ambition and corruption that seemed to justify the purge.86 By October 1933 she had slipped effortlessly into the use of Nazi language in her letters, describing the Communist-front Brown Book of Nazi atrocities as a work of ‘lying Jewish smears’.87

  As far as Karl was concerned, the achievement of the Third Reich was to have replaced disorder with order. ‘When the National Socialist government took power,’ he said in a speech welcoming the new Nazi mayor of Braunschweig as he took up his office on 18 October 1933, ‘it found chaos.’ The removal of the endlessly quarrelling political parties of the Weimar years had paved the way for orderly municipal improvements. Beyond this, Germany’s pride had been restored.88 When disorder seemed to raise its head once more at the
end of June 1934, in the shape of Ernst Röhm and the brownshirts, Elisabeth breathed a sigh of relief as Hitler acted. Unlike her daughter, she expressed no doubts about the rightness of the murders committed at Hitler’s behest. ‘One feels absolutely insignificant in the face of the greatness, the truthfulness and the openness of such a man,’ she wrote.89 After these events, the family had little more to say to each other about politics. Their concerns turned inwards, to the birth of grandchildren, and to Karl and Elisabeth’s son Eberhard, who was planning to study for a doctorate with the conservative, pro-Nazi jurist Walter Jellinek in Heidelberg; after much discussion, Jellinek suddenly disappeared from their correspondence: it turned out that he was Jewish and he therefore lost his job.90

  Eberhard signed on for paramilitary training with the brownshirts, did his military service, then entered the Reich Economics Ministry as a junior civil servant, joining the Nazi Party on 29 November 1937. The family’s interest in politics did not revive. Nazi Germany for the Gebenslebens provided the stability they had longed for, a kind of return to normality after the upheavals of the Weimar years. In comparison with this, small doubts and niggles about the way in which it had been done seemed insignificant, hardly worth bothering about. The defeat of Communism, the overcoming of political crisis, the restoration of national pride were what the Gebenslebens wanted. Everything else they ignored, explained away, or, more insidiously, gradually took on board as the propaganda apparatus of the Third Reich incessantly hammered its messages home to the population. The conformity of middle-class families like the Gebenslebens was bought at the price of illusions that were to be rudely shattered after 1939. Karl and Elisabeth did not live to see this happen. Karl died on the day he retired, 1 February 1936, of a heart attack; his widow Elisabeth followed him on 23 December 1937. Eberhard’s career in the civil service did not last long: by 1939 he had been drafted into the army.91