The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Ministers such as Franz Gürtner, who had been Reich Justice Minister in the last two cabinets before Hitler’s and continued in office under the Third Reich, still made strenuous efforts to try and get the arbitrary authority of the Leader mediated through formal acts of law. This required the repeated invention of phrases and concepts designed to make it look retrospectively as if Hitler’s orders were in conformity with existing legal rules and regulations. In some cases, as with the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, it also meant the passing of legislation giving retroactive legality to the regime’s most blatantly illegal acts. On 1 December 1933, the supremacy of the prerogative over the normative state was formally proclaimed in a Law for Guarantees of the Unity of Party and State, though the vague terms in which the legislation was couched meant that it had little real effect in practice. In reality, this situation meant that there was continual skirmishing between the organs of Party and state, with Nazi bosses interfering with state policy and decision-making at every level from local authorities upwards. Hitler tried to control the interference by Nazi Party Regional Leaders and other Party officials in the business of the state in 1934 in particular, as they threatened to disrupt economic policy in some areas. He declared the Party to be mainly an instrument of propaganda now that the state was in Nazi hands. But this too in the end meant very little.70

  To begin with, Hitler also introduced a number of measures to make the Party more effective. The decentralization of its organization after the resignation of Gregor Strasser at the end of 1932 was creating problems. Constant faction fighting and struggles for power within the Party organization allowed clever civil servants to reduce the Party’s influence by playing off the factions against one another. Anxious to centralize the Party again without putting power in the hands of a potential rival, Hitler first made the ever-faithful Rudolf Hess ‘Leader’s Deputy for Party Affairs’, but without control over the organizational apparatus. Then, on 1 December 1933, he appointed him to a cabinet post. On 27 July 1934, Hitler decreed that all laws and decrees proposed by Reich Ministries had to pass through Hess’s office. In 1935 Hess got the power to vet senior civil service appointments and promotions as well. All this gave the Party very extensive influence over the state. Hess himself was scarcely capable of wielding it. He had no serious ambitions apart from abnegating himself to Hitler’s will. His powers were increasingly used, however, by the undoubtedly ambitious Martin Bormann, Chief of Staff in Hess’s office since 1 July 1933. Bormann created an elaborate apparatus of the ‘Staff of the Leader’s Deputy’, organized into different departments and manned by loyal supporters who shared his determination to centralize the Party and use it systematically to create policy and push it through the civil service. In 1935 Bormann took over the management of Hitler’s rural headquarters on the Obersalzberg, in Bavaria. He used his presence there to act as Hitler’s private secretary and exert growing control over access to the Leader. It was typical of the way the Third Reich was run that Bormann’s office now rivalled the official, state institution of the Reich Chancellery, run by the top civil servant Hans-Heinrich Lammers. When Hitler was in Berlin, Lammers had more access and thus more influence; but the Leader spent increasing amounts of time on the Obersalzberg, where Bormann could deny access even to Lammers himself.71

  This kind of duality was repeated at every level. As the chaos of the seizure of power in the first half of 1933 subsided, the Third Reich was left with a mass of competing institutions across the board. Reich Governors, Minister-Presidents and Regional Leaders all competed for supremacy in the federated states, and in Prussia, which covered over half the land surface of Germany, with the regional state governors as well. These clashes were partly solved by the appointment of the top Regional Leader of every federated state as Reich Governor in his particular area in April 1933. Another step was taken on 30 January 1934 when, under pressure from the Reich Interior Ministry under the Nazi Wilhelm Frick, a new law abolished all the federated states, from Prussia downwards, along with their governments and parliaments, and merged their Ministries into the corresponding Reich Ministries. Thus the federal constitution which in one form had characterized the German political system for over a thousand years, and was to do so again after 1945, was swept away. Characteristically, however, some elements of federalism remained, so the process of dissolution was incomplete. The Party Regional Leaders retained their position as regional Reich Governors, and continued to occupy powerful positions within the Party hierarchy. They wielded considerable influence over local and regional affairs, though here the Reich Local Government Law of 1935, in abolishing local elections, placed the appointment of mayors largely within the competence of the Interior Ministry in Berlin. This in turn aroused the hostility of the District Leaders (Kreisleiter) of the Party, who often exploited the right of participation accorded them by the law in the appointment of local officials to interfere in local government and place their cronies and clients in offices for which they were often quite unsuited.72

  Map I. Nazi Party Regions in the Third Reich, 1935

  None of this infighting, needless to say, involved any real opposition to the Nazi leadership or its policies. After the purges of 1933, the vast majority of state bureaucrats were themselves either Nazi Party members or broadly sympathetic to the movement. The heads of some of the key Ministries in Berlin were the same. Their position was reinforced by such leading figures in the movement as Hermann Goring, who managed characteristically to prevent most of the proposed changes in the administration of the Prussian state from being put into effect. Indeed, the opposition of the Regional Leaders among others ensured that the whole reform never went as far as the Reich Interior Ministry intended, so that the administrative structures of the federated states remained largely intact even after most aspects of their autonomy, and all remaining vestiges of their representative institutions, had been abolished.73 There was nothing neat about the administration of the Third Reich, and the idea that it was a smoothly functioning, completely centralized state has long since been abandoned by historians. Instead, the mess of competing institutions and conflicting competencies effectively prevented the ‘normative’ state machine from asserting itself against the arbitrary interventions of the ‘prerogative’ apparatus and doomed it to a slow decline in its power and autonomy.

  Meanwhile, after the upheavals of the summer and early autumn of 1934, Hitler moved quietly to make arrangements for the eventuality that he himself might be incapacitated or struck down unexpectedly. It was not Hess, nor was it Himmler, who had played the key role in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, but the redoubtable, ruthless and decisive figure of Hermann Goring. On 7 December 1934, Hitler issued a decree making Göring ‘his deputy in all aspects of national government’ should he be unable to carry out his duties himself. Göring’s position as the second man in the Third Reich was cemented a few days later by another law, issued on 13 December, in which Hitler named Goring as his successor, and instructed the civil service, the army, the SA and the SS to swear an oath of personal allegiance to him immediately after his own death. Goring was to use this position in the next few years to build up a position for himself in the Third Reich so powerful, it has been said, as to amount to a state within the state. What his designation as Hitler’s deputy and successor also showed, however, was how quickly after Hindenburg’s death the real and formal distribution of power within the Third Reich had become a matter of personalities rather than constitutional rules and regulations. This was now a fully fledged dictatorship, in which the Leader could do as he wished, including naming his own successor without reference to anyone else.74

  I I

  Nowhere was the personal nature of Hitler’s authority clearer than in the rise to prominence and power of the SS. Originating as Hitler’s private bodyguard and ‘Protection Squad’ (Schutzstaffel, hence the abbreviation ‘SS’), it owed allegiance solely to him and obeyed no laws apart from its own. Heinrich Himmler, its leader since 1929, had built
it up rapidly, until it reached a strength of over 50,000 by the spring of 1933. From this large force Hitler once more selected an elite to form a new ‘Headquarters Guard’, renamed ‘Adolf Hitler’s Bodyguard’ in September 1933; other elite groups of SS men were put into special detachments to be placed at Hitler’s disposal for particular tasks of policing, terror and operations such as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.75 Already by 1934, Himmler was thinking of the SS in more ambitious terms than just a special force of loyal troops to be used by Hitler whenever he needed them. He conceived the ambition of turning the SS into the core elite of the new Nazi racial order. In deliberate contrast to the plebeian disorder of the brownshirts, Himmler intended his SS to be strictly disciplined, puritanical, racially pure, unquestioningly obedient, incorporating what he regarded as the best elements in the German race. Bit by bit, the older generation of SS men, with histories of violence often going back to the Free Corps of the early years of the Weimar Republic, were pensioned off, to be replaced by a younger, better-educated generation of officers.76

  Himmler created an elaborate hierarchy of SS officers, each level with its own grandiose-sounding title - Senior Group Leader, Standard Leader (Obergruppenführer, Standartenführer) and so on - and its own subtle indications of status in the insignia borne on the smart, military-style uniforms all the officers wore. These redesigned uniforms included now not only the original silver death’s head badge of the organization but also a pseudo-runic version of the letters ‘SS’, shaped like a double bolt of lightning; SS typewriters were soon supplied with a special key carrying the runic title to use in official correspondence and memoranda. More grades and insignia followed. Himmler even raised money for his organization by doling out honorary ranks and titles such as ‘Sponsoring Member’ to donors, and money duly began to flow in from industrialists, bankers and businessmen. The ‘Friends of the Reich Leader-SS’, another source of funds, included men like the banker Friedrich Flick, the I.G. Farben Director Heinrich Bütefisch, and representatives of firms like Siemens-Schückert, the Deutsche Bank, Rheinmetall-Borsig and the Hamburg-America Shipping Line. Many of these men received honorary SS titles as a reward. This, as they no doubt realized, was more than an empty gesture, since their association with the SS could protect them from interference by over-zealous members of the Party in their business. Not surprisingly, the magazine started by Himmler for his ‘Friends’ had a circulation of 365,000 by September 1939, and the collective financial contributions of the Friends ranged between half a million and a million Reichsmarks a year.77

  All this threatened to dilute the close-knit, elite character of the SS, so between 1933 and 1935 Himmler expelled no fewer than 60,000 men from its swollen ranks. In particular he purged homosexuals, alcoholics and men who had obviously joined out of opportunism and were less than fully convinced Nazis. Above all, from 1935 he required proof of pure Aryan ancestry, as he termed it, going back to 1800 for the rank and file, 1750 for officers. Serving and aspirant SS men combed the parish registers for proof of their racial purity, or hired professional genealogists to do it for them. Recruits now had to undergo a physical examination to confirm their ‘Aryan’ qualities; Himmler considered that in time, with suitably directed racial evolution, only blond men would be accepted. Already since 1931 every SS man had to receive special permission from Himmler or his office to get married; it would only be granted if his fiancée was racially suitable as well.78 But these plans fell far short of the ideal. For example, out of 106,304 SS men who applied for marriage certificates issued from 1932 to 1940, only 958 were turned down, despite the fact that all the requirements were satisfied only by 7,518. The few hundred men who were expelled for contravening the marriage rules were subsequently reinstated. The new racial elite would clearly be a long time in coming.79

  The elite formed by the SS gradually came to acquire a different characteristic from the racial supremacy originally intended by Himmler. It was above all, and in sharp contrast to the SA, highly educated.80 Leading SS figures like Werner Best, Otto Ohlendorf, Walter Schellenberg and Franz Six possessed university degrees, even doctorates; born in the run-up to the First World War, they were too young to have fought at the front, but were imbued instead with the compensatory nationalist fanaticism that was so prevalent in the universities they attended during the 1920s. Coming to maturity in an era of uncertainty, in which the political system was in flux, money, for a time at least, had lost its value, and a steady job or a stable career seemed out of the question, they had lost their moral compass, perhaps even never acquired one in the first place. To such young men, only the Nazi movement appeared to offer a solid identity, moral certainties and a perspective on the future. Typical of this generation was Otto Ohlendorf, who was born in 1907 into a well-off Protestant farming family of conservative, Nationalist political inclinations. Ohlendorf joined the brownshirts in 1925 while still attending grammar school, and was transferred to the SS in 1927, when he also joined the Nazi Party. From 1928 to 1931 he studied Law and Political Science at the Universities of Leipzig and Göttingen, then he spent a year at the University of Pavia in order to learn about Italian Fascism. The experience left him disillusioned with the rigidities of the ‘Corporate State’ but also directed his attention towards economics, which he began to study seriously, although his attempts to take a doctorate and build an academic career for himself failed. From 1936 onwards he concentrated on developing his ideas within the SS, where he became Director of the economics section of the SS Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD), where his attacks on Nazi economics for damaging the middle classes got him into trouble, but also won him a reputation for intelligence and assertiveness. It was probably these abilities, denoting a willingness to digest and articulate unpalatable truths, that in September 1939 secured him the position of Director of the German-speaking areas covered by Security Service operations.81

  The Security Service itself had its origins in reports early in 1931 that the Nazi Party had been infiltrated by its enemies. Himmler established the Security Service to investigate the claims, and put the business in the hands of a man who subsequently became perhaps more universally and cordially feared and disliked than any other leading figure in the Nazi regime - Reinhard Heydrich. Born in 1904 into a highly cultured middle-class family - his father was an opera singer, his mother an actress - Heydrich was an accomplished violinist, who, contemporaries reported, played with feeling, often weeping as he did so. Tall, slim, blond, his striking good looks marred for some only by his narrow face and small, close-set eyes, he also became an expert swordsman who excelled at fencing. Joining a Free Corps at the age of sixteen, he enlisted as an officer cadet in the navy in 1922 and had become a lieutenant by 1928, working in the signals department. His future in the armed forces had seemed assured.82 But Heydrich also found it easy to make enemies. The sailors disliked his abrupt, overbearing manner and mocked his high, almost falsetto voice. His numerous affairs with women got him into trouble with his superiors when the father of one of his girlfriends, a director of I.G. Farben and a friend of Admiral Raeder, head of the navy, complained; not only was the girl pregnant, but at the naval court of honour summoned to hear the case, Heydrich tried to pin the blame for the conception on her, causing general outrage amongst the officers and leading to his being cashiered from the navy in April 1931. Marrying his new girlfriend, Lina von Osten, who held strong Nazi convictions and had family connections with the SS chief in Munich, Karl Baron von Eberstein, Heydrich found new employment in the SS and was immediately set to work rooting out infiltrators. So thorough was he at this task that he convinced Himmler that the Security Service needed to widen the scope of its activities to become the core of a new German police and surveillance force. His intrusive investigations aroused the hostility of a number of old Nazis, including the Regional Leader of Halle-Merseburg, who riposted with the malicious allegation that Heydrich had Jewish ancestry in his blood. An investigation ordered by Gregor Strasser, Reich Organ
ization Leader of the Nazi Party at the time, came to the conclusive finding that the allegations were untrue, though they continued to dog Heydrich for the rest of his career and have surfaced periodically since his death as well.83

  None of this stopped Heydrich’s meteoric rise to power within the SS. Unsentimental, cold, efficient, power-hungry and utterly convinced that the end justified the means, he soon won Himmler over to his ambitious vision of the SS and its Security Service as the core of a comprehensive new system of policing and control. Already on 9 March 1933, the two men took over the Bavarian police service, making the political section autonomous and moving SS Security Service personnel into some of the key posts. They went on to take over the political police service in one federated state after another, with the backing of the centralizing Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. At this point they ran into a major obstacle to their plan to create a unified national political police system, however, in the formidable shape of Hermann Goring, the Prussian Minister-President, who on 30 November 1933 established a separate political police service for Prussia. This was based on the political police section of the Berlin police presidium, which had acted as an information-gathering centre on Communists during the Weimar Republic and was staffed by professional policemen, headed by the career police officer Rudolf Diels. Göring’s new, independent force was known as the Secret State Police, Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo for short.84

  The conflicts that rumbled on through the early months of 1934 were eventually resolved by the need felt by Goring to counter what he saw as the growing menace of Röhm’s brownshirts. Diels had implemented Nazi policy with gusto in the course of 1933, but his professional detachment was unsuited to the task of fighting the brownshirts by fair means or foul. On 20 April 1934 Goring replaced Diels with Himmler at the head of the Gestapo.85 Himmler and Heydrich now played off Goring and Frick against one another, and gained further room for manoeuvre thanks to the cutting of the formal ties that bound the SS to the SA after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. Goring and Frick were forced to recognize that they were unable to control the Gestapo, whatever the formal powers they might claim to possess over it. While Goring effectively abandoned his efforts in November 1934, Frick and the Interior Ministry continued the bureaucratic struggle. It was finally resolved in Himmler’s favour in 1936. A new law, passed on 10 February, took the Gestapo out of the jurisdiction of the courts, so that there could henceforth be no appeal to any outside body against its actions. Then a decree, issued by Hitler on 17 June, made Himmler Chief of the German Police. In this capacity, Himmler put Heydrich in charge of the Gestapo and the Criminal Police, as well as the SS Security Service, while the uniformed police were also run by an SS man, Kurt Daluege. Police and SS began, in effect, to merge, with professional policemen now joining the SS in increasing numbers, and SS men taking up an increasing number of posts within the police force. Thus a key law enforcement agency in the Reich began to move decisively from the ‘normative’ to the ‘prerogative’ state, a transition symbolized in 1939 by the subordination of the SS Security Service and the security police to the Reich Security Head Office, controlled from the top by Himmler and Heydrich.86