Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Where the state administration failed to deliver, Hitler ordered or encouraged the establishment of alternative structures. ‘Wherever the formal bureaucracy of the state proves itself unfitted to solve a problem,’ Hitler vowed, ‘there the German nation will bring into play its own more living organisation in order to clear the way for the realisation of its vital necessities… Whatever can be solved by the state will be solved through the state, but any problem which the state through its essential character is unable to solve will be solved by means of the movement.’53 Contrary to his recent announcement that the revolution was over, Hitler repeatedly urged party leaders in private not to rest on their laurels but to show greater activism.54 ‘The conquest of power,’ he remarked, ‘is a process that will never ever be finished.’55

  The political consequences of all this were twofold. First, there was the emergence of a ‘court’ around Hitler.56 This was partly a social phenomenon, and the Führer proved adept at managing it,57 but its most important manifestation lay in the exercise of authority. Every political system, even western democracies, generates some sort of antechamber of power, but the greater the authority vested in the leader, the more important that space will be. Access to Hitler brought power, or at least the appearance of it. Like Charlemagne, who progressed from one imperial palace to another, when Hitler moved between the Chancellery in Berlin, his Munich flat, the Bayreuth Festival, his retreat at Berchtesgaden and later between military headquarters, the seat of power and much of his entourage went with him. On the Obersalzberg, in particular, Hitler held court as a monarch would at his summer residence. A whole ersatz Imperial Chancellery was established in a neighbouring village so that government could continue to function.

  The most striking sign of the new politics was Hitler’s preoccupation with his mortality, and thus with the question of the succession. In the absence of democratic procedures this would have to be regulated in advance in order to avoid chaos. Hitler therefore decreed in early December 1934 that Hermann Göring should succeed him as ‘Führer und Reichskanzler’. The government, the Wehrmacht, the SA and the SS were all instructed to swear an oath of allegiance to his successor personally. Hitler also laid down that in the event of his absence or incapacity, his functions should be exercised by a triumvirate, with Göring taking on the leadership of the state, Blomberg of military matters, and Hess those pertaining to the party.58 The distinction between the two arrangements seems to reflect a reserve on Hitler’s part about empowering any one potential rival while he was still alive.

  There were still important restraints on Hitler’s power. Some of these were voluntary. Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the Third Reich was not, or at least not yet, a totalitarian state. Hitler was convinced that mere outward conformity without inner conviction was worthless, because it would crumble under challenge. For that reason, Hitler never tired of exhorting and persuading Germans, and–in his own way–consulting them at various levels. Rather than abandoning referenda after the fiasco of August 1934, he continued holding them until the late 1930s. The cabinet functioned normally for another few years, despite the removal of Papen and the weakening of the conservative faction there. Most importantly of all, Hitler did not avoid collective meetings with his Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter. On the contrary, these remained an important forum for the discussion and announcement of policy–and not merely its acclamation–throughout the Third Reich.59

  The other limits to Hitler’s authority were structural. For all the partial identity of aims, important constituencies within key institutions, such as the Foreign Office and the army, remained profoundly hostile–to him personally, and to National Socialism generally. The same was true of the churches. Some resistance from the ‘Confessing Church’ aside, the Protestant confessions posed relatively few problems. Though born a Catholic, Hitler was politically more comfortable with Lutheranism and Calvinism, because they were largely national in structure and focus. German Protestants were also generally more at ease with him, though the overtly Nazi Deutsche Christen were still a minority. Relations with the Catholic Church were much more fraught, despite the Concordat. Hitler remained deeply suspicious of the hold which the Catholicism maintained over millions of Germans and he profoundly feared its international reach. ‘The Catholic Church,’ he warned a meeting of Reichsstatthalter in early November 1934, had ‘always been an enemy of a strong state power’.60 From the mid 1930s onwards, in fact, this ‘black’ threat loomed much larger in his imagination than the ‘red’ menace from Social Democracy and German communists. Hitler was determined to take on the church at some future point, but for now he bided his time. He gave the order that there should be ‘no creation of unnecessary new areas of conflict with the churches’.61

  In early February 1934, Hitler introduced a highly symbolic new pan-German citizenship law, which removed the need for a qualifying state citizenship, which was abolished; Hitler had experienced the rigours of the old system at first hand in the 1920s. Seven months later he merged the interior ministries of the Reich and its largest state, Prussia. His much heralded ‘imperial reform’, however, made little headway. In late 1934 and early 1935, Frick announced his intention to divide Germany into some twenty Reichsgaue, with about a million inhabitants each, whose boundaries were to be determined by economic and strategic factors.62 Hitler’s attempt to introduce some demographic and geographic rationality into the historically developed hodge-podge of German Länder foundered in the face of the determination of local actors, most of them Nazis, to preserve their power and identity. Hitler managed only to achieve the amalgamation of the two Mecklenburgs, a meagre outcome for all the effort invested. In the face of this controversy, Hitler twice forbade public discussion of changes and eventually backed off.63

  In day-to-day matters, Hitler’s bêtes noires, the bureaucrats, continued to drag their feet on everything, not only because they wanted to, but because they couldn’t help it. ‘The Führer is now very angry with the ministerial bureaucracy,’ Rosenberg noted in mid July 1934, and had announced that ‘I will teach these gentlemen the right pace’.64 Five months later, he erupted at a meeting of Reichsstatthalter, expressing the view that ‘even today the state has tens of thousands of bureaucrats’, some of whom were ‘secret’ and others of whom were ‘lethargic’ enemies of the movement. ‘Years will pass,’ he continued, ‘until these enemies are removed.’65 Such explosions were to remain routine until the end of the Third Reich. Hitler’s frustration was not confined to the state administration but also extended to the many party bureaucracies set up after 1933. For example, when Hitler passed on a petition from four Hamburg workers to Hess’s office, which in turn entrusted the matter to a local agency, the matter seems to have been lost in the system for four months.66 ‘It is an outrageous waste of the authority of the Führer,’ Wiedemann thundered after repeated failed attempts to gain clarity, ‘if assignments issued in his name are ignored.’67 The result of all this was an impenetrable administrative thicket.

  These problems were greatly aggravated by endemic personal rivalries and high political manoeuvring. Throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich, Gauleiter, ministers, Reichsstatthalter, the SA and the SS faced off against each other in a series of arguments without end, just as the Nazi leaders had battled each other incessantly before 1933. Göring continued to fight Goebbels; Feder battled Schacht over the economy; the Reichsstatthalter of Braunschweig und Anhalt, Wilhelm Loeper, tangled with the Anhaltine Staatsminister Alfred Freyberg; and the interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, the Reichsstatthalter of Bavaria, Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp, and the Bavarian chief minister, Ludwig Siebert, fought a three-way battle in the best traditions of German particularism. All these, and many other, differences landed on Hitler’s desk for adjudication,68 with each side claiming that the other was subverting ‘the will of the Führer’. In a particularly heated exchange, Walther Darré ‘literally’ told Hitler’s personal adjutant over the phone that his letters were ‘an arse-wipe’ and t
hat he ‘should kiss my arse’.69 Sometimes, the rows took place in the Führer’s presence such as that between the Nuremberg chief of police, Freiherr von Malsen-Ponickau, and Gauleiter Julius Streicher of Franconia, which exploded in front of Hitler just before the 1933 party congress.70 In short, far from pulling together to transform the Third Reich and prepare for the next war, authorities and personalities competed for everything: for Hitler’s favour, his attention, for status, power and, as rearmament took off, resources.

  There is little evidence that Hitler encouraged these rivalries as a way of enhancing his own position. It is true that Meissner, who served as head of Hitler’s Presidential Chancellery after Hindenburg’s death, recalls his ‘tendency to assign several associates the same task simultaneously’, which he partly attributed to his ‘keen mistrust and the principle of “divide and rule”’. While this may have been the result of his actions and his personality, Hitler himself never articulated any such theory. Instead, as Meissner also records, Hitler ‘often expressed the view’ that ‘such a parallel entrustment of many with the same task’ helped to forestall ‘passivity’ among individuals, and to ‘motivate’ them to greater achievement. Besides, the resulting ‘competition’ led him to be ‘better informed about what was going on’.71 In other words, the Führer sought the ‘survival of the fittest’ in a kind of bureaucratic Darwinism, rather than paralysis through perpetual strife. Hitler wanted to shake up the system, not to seize it up through the creation of a ‘polycratic chaos’.

  In fact, the interminable personal struggles which plagued the Nazi system even more than they do most polities wearied and infuriated Hitler. ‘In the National Socialist state,’ Hitler decreed, ‘only one person is ever responsible for something.’72 He also preferred party leaders to resolve their own disputes wherever possible instead of constantly seeking his mediation. His main concern, as he put it on one occasion, was ‘to avoid that everyone came running to him when there were differences of opinion’.73 This is evident from his handling of a clash between Rosenberg and Rust. ‘When the Führer heard that we were in agreement,’ Rosenberg recorded, ‘he laughed happily,’ adding that ‘he did not want to hear any more’ and would bless anything they agreed.74 The squabbles in Munich–‘the confused governing situation of the Bavarian government’, as he put it to Lammers75–reduced the Führer to despair. To be sure, Hitler wanted to be consulted about and to pronounce on major matters of policy, but he had no desire to superintend everything. He was not what one would today call a ‘control freak’.

  That said, Hitler had only himself to blame for the way in which matters great and small landed at his door. It was a product not merely of the fact that he was the font of all authority, but also of his tendency to make decisions on the hoof. Hitler would promise one thing on one occasion, and the contrary on another occasion, either changing his mind or forgetting what he had said in the first place. In some cases, Hitler may have been misunderstood, or have expressed himself so Delphically as to invite misunderstanding. For example, when Christian Weber appealed to him in his struggle with Hermann Göring over the establishment of a hunting museum in Munich, Hitler responded that he had ‘not [emphasis in the original]’ agreed to Weber’s request. Such denials were routine throughout the Third Reich, whether it was his supposed commitment when visiting a coal mine to achieve a ‘just distribution of wages’, his promise to make Julius Lippert mayor of Berlin, or his offer to fund construction work in Breslau in advance of the ‘Festival of the League of German Singers’ and the ‘German Gymnastics Festival’ in that city.76

  The nature of the resulting high political culture defies easy characterization. Hitler was beyond doubt its primary motor and focus, but Nazi initiatives did not necessarily originate with him. Where Hitler gave a direct steer, the bureaucracy responded with alacrity, filling out the detail, and providing options for the Führer to choose from. On other occasions, the execution of policy was left to the various institutions. This modus operandi was, in some ways, the Nazi equivalent of the old ‘mission tactics’ in the Prussian army. Hitler set out the ideological parameters within which politics and policy unfolded. Ministers and bureaucrats thus sought to anticipate his will, even before it had been expressed. This tendency was vividly described by Werner Willikens, the state secretary for food, in February 1934, when the Third Reich was just over a year old. ‘Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it,’ he wrote, ‘knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realise sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer.’ Willikens condemned those who ‘simply waited for orders and instructions’. ‘Anyone who makes mistakes,’ he continued, ‘will notice it soon enough.’ ‘But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal,’ Willikens concluded, ‘will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.’77

  Perhaps the best analogy for Hitler’s style of governance comes from the world of music. If he conceived of his programme as a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, the execution of it resembled more closely a giant jamming session than a formal symphony. There was no score or individual parts, and no rehearsals, but only an agreed ideological chord progression following the Führer’s lead, characterized by multiple improvisations by party leaders, ministers and bureaucrats. Much of the time no conductor was needed, so that the music did not stop when Hitler was out of the room. Intentionally or not, Hitler had turned the supposed weaknesses of the German people–a Volk (and thus a party) noted for its divisions, divas and primadonnas78–into strength; he harnessed their creative destructiveness and destructive creativity. This partly explains the ‘cumulative radicalization’ of the regime, as institutions and individuals vied for the Führer’s favour,79 though, of course, Hitler’s radicalism had been there from the start, and at the latest from Mein Kampf, and he did not always choose the most radical option presented to him. It certainly accounts for the stupendous range and quantity of legislation which Hitler managed to produce during his tenure as chancellor, and for the extreme murderousness of the regime during the war.

  The regime sought to obscure the many fractures in the German polity through carefully choreographed displays of national unity, in parades and rallies. These took place on many occasions, for example on Hitler’s birthday, but easily the most important was the autumn annual party congress at Nuremberg. In September 1934, no doubt in an attempt to show that the ghosts of the Röhm putsch had been laid to rest, the proceedings involved hundreds of thousands of brownshirts, and Hitler himself appeared in SA uniform. The Reichswehr participated for the first time, partly in order to demonstrate its commitment to the new state and partly to impress outside observers with the military vitality of the new state. Hitler was ubiquitous throughout, or at least appeared to be.80 Leni Riefenstahl filmed the whole event, and Hitler willingly put up with the disruption caused by her 170-odd collaborators, and their accompanying plethora of wires, cranes and cameras. The end product–entitled The Triumph of the Will at Hitler’s suggestion–has entered cinematic legend; a good third of its two hours were devoted solely to the Führer.81

  The party congress took place against a background of anxiety about the performance of the economy. This was partly a geographical concern. Some areas had not benefited much from the upswing since 1933. One of these was Hamburg, a city Hitler had always been intensely concerned about; he visited no fewer than twenty-seven times. This was partly because he saw it as the sea gate into the Reich from abroad, especially Anglo-America, and partly because it was the port through which emigrants had left for the United States. In April 1934, in a highly symbolic move, the legendary Ballinstadt–where huge numbers of mainly eastern European, but also German, emigrants, had waited for their passage–was closed. Stopping the export of people was one thing, the reduced exports of goods as
a result of the focus on rearmament and the domestic market was another. Hamburg, which had never really recovered from the 1929 slump, languished economically, and this may explain the fact that nearly one-quarter of the city’s electorate voted against Hitler in the August referendum after Hindenburg’s death. This was twice the national average, and by far and away the worst result of any region. Hitler responded with alacrity. He proclaimed the city an ‘emergency area’ in early November 1934, effectively putting it under special measures, banning further inward migration and pushing industrial contracts in its direction.82

  The economic position in the Third Reich was aggravated by the fact that while there had been considerable spending on civilian work creation throughout 1933 and much of 1934, the military budget surged ahead by the end of that year. The economy struggled to export enough to maintain the balance of payments for raw material imports, so that military experts warned of dire consequences for rearmament. This led to a raw materials shortage and credit ‘squeeze’.83 In the autumn of 1934, Schacht reacted by announcing his ‘New Plan’, whose very name suggested an affinity with Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’. Unlike its American counterpart, however, the plan was driven by the need to speed up rearmament by replacing trade with world markets on a purely economic basis with bilateral relationships underpinned by political connections. Some of these were with South American countries, but the closest links were forged in the Balkans. It was to prove a valuable source of raw materials and agricultural products, and a captive market for German manufactured goods.84 These were traded using special ‘clearing’ arrangements that amounted to mass barter on credit. Economic, or rather resource, considerations rather than political influence remained the driving force here.