Hitler
Page 75
Starting in the summer of 1933, a new legislative practice established itself which rendered cabinet consultations obsolete. Before a draft law was submitted to the Chancellery, the ministers concerned had to clear up all matters of potential disagreement. State Secretary Lammers would then send the law to cabinet members with a request to register any objections by a certain date. Only when this cycle of correspondence was complete would Lammers take the law to Hitler for signature. Hitler either accepted or rejected it—he showed little interest in any of the preliminaries.71 As the cabinet declined in importance, Lammers gained more and more power since his new function as an intermediary between the ministers and Hitler put him in a key position. He was informed early on about what laws which ministers intended to formulate and could intervene in the approval process since he was able to influence Hitler depending on how he presented a given law. In November 1937, the dictator honoured the work of this senior civil servant by naming him a Reich minister, elevating him to the same level as the other cabinet members. In the last years of the regime, however, Lammers would lose a battle for power with Martin Bormann, who had become the director of the party chancellery and the “Führer’s secretary” and who would regulate privileged access to the dictator in the Führer’s main headquarters.72
—
The dissolution of conventional forms of government was accelerated by Hitler’s tendency to appoint special agents to take care of what he considered the most urgent tasks. As a rule, they were responsible neither to the party nor to the government administration, but rather only to Hitler personally. Their authority was based solely on the Führer’s faith in them. Hitler largely kept out of the inevitable ensuing rivalries and battles for responsibility between newly established special staffs, on the one hand, and ministries and party offices on the other. As a social Darwinist, he was guided by the idea that whoever was stronger, and therefore better, would prevail in the end. He was also convinced that this was the way to overcome bureaucratic limitations and create incentives for greater competition, which would lead to a more effective mobilisation of forces. Finally, he was also inspired by a Machiavellian strategy of divide and conquer, playing rivals off against one another, and so shielding himself against potential usurpers of his power.73
The first in this series of special agents was the engineer Fritz Todt, whom Hitler named general inspector for the German road system on 30 June 1933 with a mandate to build the German autobahn network. Eltz-Rübenach was forced to turn over his Department K (automobile and roads division) to Todt. When ministerial experts complained at a cabinet meeting on 23 November 1933, Hitler replied that a gigantic enterprise like the construction of the autobahn required the creation of a new institution. As soon as the new autobahn was complete, Hitler promised, this new institution would be incorporated back into the Transport Ministry.74 But because the energetic Todt performed his duties to Hitler’s great satisfaction, in December 1938 he was also named general agent for the regulation of the construction industry. The companies and projects he directed were the genesis of the Organisation Todt, whose first projects included the construction of the West Wall along the Reich’s western border. It was the only special organisation in Nazi Germany to bear the name of its director.75
The development of the Labour Service was a further example of how Hitler prised areas of responsibility away from traditional governmental institutions and entrusted them to individuals. In the summer of 1931, Heinrich Brüning had introduced a volunteer labour service, nominating a Reich commissioner to direct it in July 1932. After Hitler became chancellor, the new labour minister, the head of the Stahlhelm, Franz Seldte, laid claim to this position. Hitler, however, gave the job of heading the service to former Colonel General Konstantin Hierl, whom he appointed to the rank of a Labour Ministry state secretary in early May 1933. The result was permanent friction between the labour minister and the “Reich labour leader,” as Hierl started calling himself in November 1933, which Hitler put an end to in early July 1934 when he officially appointed Hierl Reich commissioner for the labour service. He was formally responsible to Frick’s Interior Ministry, but de facto Hitler’s support made him the director of a special office. With the introduction of mandatory labour service in 1935, it developed into a huge organisation that forced hundreds of thousands of young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 to perform six months of “voluntary labour for the German people.”76
Much the same as Hierl, Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach sought to expand his organisation into a “superior Reich office” and transform the Hitler Youth into a mandatory state institution that would inculcate the National Socialist world view in all young males between the ages of 10 and 18. In late 1935, Hitler approved the basics of this plan. In the spring of 1936, Hans Heinrich Lammers passed on a draft Reich Youth Law to the relevant government offices, but it met with resistance. Education Minister Bernhard Rust protested against the idea of “separating the guidance of youth completely from the Reich’s existing responsibility to educate young people.” Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk objected to the creation of a “new, expensive apparatus separate from the general government administration,” and Frick complained that “the establishment of a new Reich special administration disrupts the necessary organic unity between the state and its administration.”77 Apparently surprised by such stiff opposition, Hitler decided to delay the drafting of the law. It was not until October that Schirach was able to discuss the project with Hitler and get him to reaffirm his support. On 1 December 1936, the cabinet approved the Law Concerning the Hitler Youth that made enrolment in the organisation mandatory. Prior to that Hitler had urged his education minister not to voice his reservations in the cabinet meeting. Thanks to Hitler’s support, Schirach triumphed over the ministries. Paragraph 3 of the law gave him and the leadership of the Reich Youth “the status of a superior Reich office based in Berlin” and made them responsible “directly to the Führer and Reich chancellor.”78
The clearest and most significant example of what the historian Martin Broszat called the “amalgamation of party and state functions in a special organisation immediately under the Führer” was the creation of the SS power complex.79 From their Bavarian springboard between the autumn of 1933 and the spring of 1934, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich gradually succeeded in taking over the political divisions of the police in all the German states. Only in Prussia did their urge for expansion meet with resistance—from State President and Interior Minister Göring. In April 1934, the two sides agreed that Himmler would become inspector of the Prussian secret police and Heydrich director of the Secret Police Office. Although formally that subordinated Himmler to Göring, in practice it gave the SS leadership control over the political police force. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, where the Gestapo had their headquarters, soon became synonymous with the National Socialist system of terror.80
The bloody purge of the SA leadership in the summer of 1934 represented a further strategic triumph for Himmler and Heydrich. The SS gained full independence from the SA, and the Security Service was acknowledged as the only official surveillance organ of the Nazi movement. Simultaneously, the SS assumed command over all of Germany’s concentration camps. Theodor Eicke, previously the commandant of the Dachau camp, was named “inspector of concentration camps and leader of the SS security associations.” He reported directly to Himmler. The Dachau system was a model copied throughout the Reich. The SS leadership rebuffed repeated complaints by Justice Minister Gürtner about the arbitrary use of protective custody and the high number of fatalities in the camps by claiming everything was being run in line with the Führer’s will.81
But that did not by any means satisfy Himmler’s ambitions. His next target was control over the entire police force, which he wanted to amalgamate into the SS. In conversation with Hitler on 18 October 1935, he succeeded in gaining the dictator’s basic support for the idea, although it would take nine months for his plan to be reali
sed. Wilhelm Frick as interior minister was dead set against police powers being taken away from his ministry. On the contrary, he wanted to reintegrate the political divisions of the police back into the police force as a whole and put concentration camps under normal state supervision. Here, too, battles between Hitler’s paladins were decided in favour of whoever could claim to be carrying out a “task for the Führer.” On 10 February 1936, Himmler achieved a partial victory with the Prussian Law Concerning the Gestapo, which confirmed the autonomy of the political police as a special institution. His decisive breakthrough followed on 17 June, when Hitler named him “Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police in the Interior Ministry,” a title which also gave him the rank of state secretary. Frick had insisted on the phrase “in the Interior Ministry” as a qualifier, but it was illusory to think that Himmler could be kept on a leash. Nominally he was subordinate to Frick, but as Reichsführer-SS he was responsible only to Hitler and could go over the interior minister’s head whenever he wanted.82
Hitler’s order of 17 June 1936 was, in the words of Heydrich’s biographer, the “cornerstone of a new type of apparatus for political repression,” which knew no more legal limits, operating instead in a situation of permanent state-of-emergency rule.83 The immediate result was the reorganisation of the police into two main departments along SS lines: the “Order Police” (gendarmerie and uniformed police) under SS Obergruppenführer Kurt Daluege, and the “Security Police” (Gestapo and criminal police) under Heydrich. Himmler and his underlings envisioned a comprehensive “state protection corps” that would pre-emptively intervene against putative dangers to the “German people and race.” In the spring of 1936, Werner Best—Heydrich’s deputy at the Secret Police Office—defined the political police in an “ethnic-popular Führer state” as “an institution…that carefully monitors the political health of the body of the German people and recognises in timely fashion every symptom of illness, identifying and employing appropriate means to eradicate the destructive bacilli, whether they be products of self-induced decay or intentional infection from without.”84
Operating under the premise that they were carrying out racial-hygienic preventative measures, the police could extend their persecution of Jews, Communists and socialists to more and more “enemies of the state” and “parasites on the people.” Their victims included Freemasons, politically active clergymen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, homosexuals, prostitutes, “antisocials,” the “work-shy” and “habitual criminals.” Nonetheless, recent historical research has contextualised the two-dimensional picture of an all-powerful, omnipresent secret police in the Third Reich: the Gestapo’s efficiency depended on the participation of ordinary Germans who were willing to inform on people they did not like.85
At the same time they were intensifying their terror campaigns, Himmler and Heydrich pressed on with the amalgamation of the SS and the police. The process was completed on 27 September 1939, a few weeks before the beginning of the Second World War, with the founding of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). It combined the Security Police and the Security Service into one super-entity, which would become the central executive institution carrying out the National Socialist policies of annihilation during the war.86
—
In terms of accumulating posts and expanding his own responsibilities, there was no competing with Göring, who in fact dubbed himself “the Führer’s first paladin.” In addition to his position as Prussian state president and interior minister, Göring was named Reich aviation minister in May 1933. In May 1934 he had to yield the Prussian Interior Ministry to Frick, but he was compensated for that in July, when he was appointed as the Reich forestry and hunting master in the newly created Reich Forestry Office.87 Hitler occasionally made light of Göring’s obsession with uniforms and glamour, but he valued the former military officer’s political gravitas so much that in a secret decree in December 1934, he made Göring his successor. “Immediately after my death,” Hitler ordered, “he is to have the members of the Reich government, the Wehrmacht and the formations of the SA and SS swear an oath of loyalty to himself personally.”88
The most important instrument of personal power for the Reich’s “second man” was the Luftwaffe, command of which he assumed in the rank of colonel in early March 1935 and whose expansion into a third and equal branch of the armed forces, alongside the army and navy, he oversaw. Göring sought to use this position to extend his influence upon economic and rearmament decisions. This put him on a collision course with Hjalmar Schacht, who had been named “general agent for the war economy” in the Reich Defence Law of May 1935.89
As an acknowledged expert on economic questions and as the financial architect of Germany’s rearmament programme, Schacht had enjoyed Hitler’s special regard in the early years of the regime. That gradually changed as the finance minister and Reichsbank president began to draw insistent attention to the potentially ruinous consequences of accelerated rearmament for the German economy. Indeed, the problems were impossible to ignore even as early as 1934. Lacking sufficient currency reserves, the Reich had increasing difficulties importing raw materials for the arms build-up and foodstuffs to feed the population. Schacht had been a dedicated adherent of rearmament for years before and after the Nazis’ rise to power, he told Blomberg in December 1935, but his sense of duty required him “to point out the economic limits that constrain any such policy.”90 Schacht pursued a running feud in particular with Agriculture and Food Minister Walter Darré over the availability of foreign currency. A decision by Hitler was required, but as was so often the case, he let things slide—in part because his attention in the spring of 1936 was monopolised by his riskiest endeavour to date, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. In a secret decree of 4 April 1936, however, he did name Göring “Reich agent for raw materials and foreign currency matters.”91
Schacht initially welcomed the appointment, assuming that Göring would protect him against attacks from the party. That soon proved to be a capital mistake. Göring was anything but content to referee conflicts over foreign currency. As commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, he had a vested interest in accelerated rearmament, and he used his new “Führer mandate” to gain control over the entire military economy. In early May 1936, without informing the Economic Ministry or any other government institution, he set up a new, autonomous office called the Raw Materials and Currency Staff of State President Göring.92 Hitler brusquely rejected Schacht’s subsequent request to rein in Göring’s authority over currency matters, saying he did not want anything more to do with the matter. Schacht, Hitler said, “should settle such issues with Göring” and forbade the economics minister from ever raising the topic with him again.93 Goebbels, another enemy of the acid-tongued finance expert, noted with satisfaction: “Things won’t go well for long with Schacht. He’s not one of us with all his heart. The Führer is very angry with him.”94 Considering himself irreplaceable, Schacht had overestimated Hitler’s support. For him, the ensuing struggle for power with Göring was a losing battle.
Schacht’s and Göring’s positions collided head on at a meeting of the Prussian Ministerial Council on 12 May 1936 to discuss the general economic situation and the financing of armaments. Schacht emphasised his “unshakeable loyalty to the Führer” but warned of the danger of inflation if the pace of rearmament were not decelerated. For the first time he also threatened to resign. Göring continued to insist on the primacy of the arms build-up and argued that the currency problem could be got round by extracting more domestic raw materials and using “replacement materials.” “If we have war tomorrow,” Göring said, “we’ll have to help ourselves with replacement materials. Money will no longer play a role. If that’s the case, we have to be prepared to create the conditions for it during peacetime.”95 It was clear right from the start, given Hitler’s ideological premises and the political goals he derived from them, which side of this fundamental economic disagreement he would favour. In late August 1936,
he wrote a lengthy secret memo concerning the future direction of economic policy. It adopted the essentials of Göring’s position and concluded with a pair of unambiguous commands: “1. The German army must be capable of being deployed in four years. 2. The German economy must be capable of waging war in four years.”96
On 4 September, Göring used a ministerial council meeting declared as a “secret Reich matter” to reveal the content of Hitler’s memo to Schacht, Blomberg and Krosigk. Göring interpreted it as a “general instruction,” which he alone had been charged with executing. “Thanks to the genius of the Führer, seemingly impossible things have become reality within the shortest span of time,” he responded when Schacht objected. “All measures are to be carried out as if we were under the immediate threat of war.”97 On 9 September 1936 Hitler announced the new “Four Year Plan” for the economy at the Nuremberg rally, and on 18 October, he officially named Göring “the agent of the Four Year Plan,” giving him the authority to issue orders to all Reich and party offices.98 Göring felt he had achieved his goals. Supported by a generous interpretation of the Führer’s will, he had gained a nearly all-powerful position in the armaments economy. The “specialists” he recruited for his new office from the party, the military and the private sector—including Carl Krauch, an IG Farben board member and an expert in the production of synthetic fuels—allowed him to usurp major responsibilities from the Economics Ministry. Nonetheless, Schacht kept his position, and Hitler never thought of firing him. “The Führer is very sceptical about Schacht,” Goebbels noted in mid-November 1936. “But he’s not relieving him of his responsibilities for foreign-policy reasons.”99