The ‘Führer’ between state and Party
As in the years before 1933, Hitler continued to lead the Party in a way that allowed him to pursue his policy of avoiding as far as possible any rigid structures that might limit his own position in it or restrict it through institutions. In particular, he prevented the formation of any collective leadership body or the creation of a central office with comprehensive powers to direct the Party.
With the aid of a rapidly expanding bureaucracy (the staff of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy led by the dynamic Martin Bormann) Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy for Party matters, did in fact succeed in 1934/35 in assuming a central role within the complex of offices within the NSDAP headquarters. Yet Hess had no general authority to give instructions either to the Gauleiters or to the Reichsleiters whom Hitler had appointed in June 1933.12 Hess derived his powers with regard to the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters only from the ‘authority’ assigned to him in 1933 as Hitler’s deputy. As this authority was not specified (and Hitler was careful not to be more precise) Hess and Bormann worked on the basic assumption that their offices, in line with Hitler’s omnipotence, had ‘unlimited’ scope. On the other hand, Robert Ley, the head of the Reich Party organization and Hess’s most important adversary within the Party leadership, was constantly trying to define areas of responsibility within the leadership and thus restrict Hess’s freedom of action. The Reichsleiters and also the numerous heads of the central main offices of the NSDAP who did not hold the rank of Reichsleiter were in any case dependent on Ley’s agreement when making decisions on organizational, personnel, and financial matters, although in other respects they were answerable only to Hitler.13
The position of the Party Treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz, who was head of the biggest office within the Party headquarters, also remained out of reach of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy. On 16 September 1931 Hitler had assigned him sole authority to act for the Party in legal affairs involving property, and this was expressly confirmed by Hess on 2 July 1933.14
Hess and Bormann managed, however, to take control of the personnel matters of those Party functionaries whose appointment or dismissal Hitler had reserved for himself. This involved all office holders from district leader upwards and also the political leaders in the Reich Party headquarters. As a result, they both acquired considerable influence over Hitler’s personnel policy. In addition, by greatly increasing the number of regulations and reports, Hess’s office attempted to make the Party apparatus the vehicle by which it carried out its own policies,15 while also asserting its claim to be the sole representative of the Party in its relations with the state. In concrete terms this meant that during 1934/35 Hess successfully insisted on being involved in the legislative process and in the appointment of senior Reich and state [Land] civil servants. Whenever political issues of ‘fundamental’ importance arose with regard to the state, his office insisted on its right to intervene.16
As a result of the limit imposed in 1933, the number of NSDAP members was stable at around 2.5 million. (It was not until 1937 that this restriction was gradually lifted; by the outbreak of war the Party had a total of 5.3 million members and finally, by the beginning of 1945, eight to nine million.)17 There was a remarkable concentration of functionaries in the Party. On 1 January 1935 there were more than 500,000 members of the political cadre (two-thirds of whom had only joined after the seizure of power) out of about 2.5 million members in all. In other words, one member in five held some kind of post in the Party.18 This ratio remained for the most part constant. At the beginning of 1940 there were more than 1.2 million members of the political cadre in the NSDAP.19 More than 90 per cent of Party functionaries held their office as unsalaried volunteers. On top of that the various sections and organizations linked to the Party, such as the NS Welfare Organization and the German Labour Front, made use of many additional helpers (so-called wardens), whose numbers had already grown to more than 1.3 million by the start of 1935 and went on rising.20
The greatest concentration of functionaries in the Party organization was at local level, where over 90 per cent of them were active.21 In 1936 the organization of the Party’s work at local level was revised. Unlike in the period before 1933, the ‘period of struggle’, the Party structure was no longer to be geared to the number of members, but rather it was to establish a network covering the whole of Germany that would be as dense and as evenly spread as possible, so that the whole population would be accounted for, supervised, and controlled.22 ‘Education’ and ‘surveillance’ were the tasks Hitler had sent the political cadre home with from the Party Rally of 1935.23
To this end the following benchmarks informed the reform of the Party structure in 1936. The ‘block’, the smallest unit of the Party organization, was to be responsible for forty to sixty households. To maximize the level of surveillance, the block leader (often called the block warden) could be given additional helpers. ‘Cells’ consisted of between four and eight blocks and were overseen by local branches, which were not to cover more than 3,000 households. The leader of the local branch had a staff with a variety of responsibilities (secretary, treasurer, head of organizational matters, head of personnel, head of training, head of propaganda, press liaison officer). All these jobs were done on a voluntary basis.24 As a visible sign of their power, the leaders of local branches were also allowed to carry a handgun.25 In 1938 there was a further reform, the main purpose of which was to increase the number of local groups to make the network even more dense.26
For the population this meant that they were systematically ‘processed’ by countless Party workers. Thus the boundaries between education, supervision, surveillance, and intimidation were fluid. Local groups were instructed to concern themselves with people’s everyday worries by giving individual counsel and so, for example, they helped people in dealing with various government agencies or with rental disputes. They also pressed those for whom they were responsible for donations, or urged them to put up flags, or pictures of Hitler in their homes, to use the officially recognized greetings, to attend meetings, or to cast their vote in elections. They also put pressure on them to be actively involved in National Socialism. A dissenting or even just a reserved attitude towards the Party’s representatives or comments on political events and the like were not only carefully documented in the local branch’s files, but awkward ‘national comrades’ or those who drew attention to themselves were kept under constant observation and could, for example, be summoned to an ‘interview’ with the local branch leader.27
The local branches drew on this fund of information when they had to provide details of people’s political attitudes, such as in the case of promotions in the civil service, when people were claiming various kinds of state aid (such as loans for married couples or child support), or if they were applying to be admitted into state licensed professions. Enquiries might also come from private companies who wanted reassurance from the Party before appointing or promoting people.28 Detailed information in the reports of local branches make clear to what extent the local branch leaders, helped by volunteer assistants and informers from the neighbourhood, were capable of keeping tabs on the everyday life of ‘their’ national comrades. It is therefore hardly surprising that local branches were urged to assist the Security Service (SD) as a matter of routine.29 It has also been shown that when starting investigations the Gestapo relied on information held by local Party offices.30 The Party organization, in other words, prepared the ground for a police state that ruled by terror.
The significance of this surveillance, carried out close to home by an army of several hundred thousand Party functionaries, cannot be overestimated when it comes to explaining the conformity and docility of the overwhelming majority of the population under the Nazi dictatorship and the way in which the Nazi vision of a ‘national community’ actually worked.
In addition to the political organization proper, the NSDAP had formations (which had no individual legal status and no funds of their own),
associated organizations (which had both but were under the financial supervision of the Reich Party Treasurer), and other groups supervised by it but whose relationship to the Party was not clearly defined from a legal point of view.31 Formations and associated organizations and other groups were as a rule structured in a similar hierarchical way to the Party and were thus represented by their own head offices within the Reich Party headquarters. Their ‘offices’ within the Gau and district headquarters and the organizations within the local Party branches were subordinate to this head office in matters relating to their specialist role. At the same time, these offices were subordinate in political matters to the various territorial Party leaders in charge at the different levels of the Party hierarchy [Gau, district, local branch]. This dual structure inevitably caused problems in practice but it also produced a finely graduated, stable, and at the same time flexible organizational machine.
Examples of such formations and associated organizations were the SA, which after 1934 became much less important, and the SS, which gained from the SA’s loss of status and, after being combined with the police, formed the core of a self-contained, continuously expanding fiefdom. Particularly relevant here are the mass organizations that after 1933 had set about supervising individual sectors of German society and since then had greatly expanded. In a speech in December 1938 to NSDAP district leaders, Hitler described his view of how ‘national comrades’ were to be gathered into the fold. We shall ‘train’ the ‘new German youth’, he said, ‘from an early age for this new state’. After four years in the Jungvolk and four in the Hitler Youth ‘we shall admit them immediately to the Party, the Labour Front, the SA or the SS, or the NSKK, and so on. And when they have been in them for two years or a year and a half they will be put in the Labour Service and will have the edges knocked off them for another six or seven months. . . . And whatever they still have in the way of class consciousness or social superiority after six or seven months will be worked on for another two years by the army, and when they return after two, three, or four years we’ll take them back immediately into the SA, SS etc., so that there’s no chance of them backsliding, and then we’ll have them for life.’32 The individual organizations were to devote themselves zealously to this task.
Figure 7. A private celebration watched over by the ‘Führer’. This wedding group from 1936 used a family photo to make a clear statement of loyalty.
Source: IMAGNO/Skrein Photo Collection
The German Labour Front (DAF ), which in October 1934 Hitler charged with ‘forming a true German national and productive community’,33 succeeded gradually in encompassing the great majority of people in employment. Membership rose from seven to eight million in the middle of 1933 to around 14 million in March 1934, over 22 million in 1939, and finally 25 million in 1942.34 It became impossible to imagine everyday working life without the DAF’s practical involvement in it and it was very difficult to avoid becoming a member. It offered legal advice and special mentoring programmes for working women and young people. It was active in the provision of healthcare in the workplace and also in vocational training.35 Alongside those activities, the DAF built up a business empire that included, among other things, insurance companies, building societies, book clubs, and its own bank – all from the enterprises it had acquired through the incorporation of the trades unions.36 The ‘Strength through Joy’ [KdF] organization, which was a subsidiary of the DAF, was concerned amongst other things with improving working conditions (‘Beauty of Work’) and it organized the ‘German firms’ productivity competition’, promoted workplace sport and participation in sports, and organized holidays, even including cruises on its own KdF cruise ships.37
The National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization (NSV) also continued expanding rapidly after 1933. In addition to its labour-intensive general welfare work it expanded the assistance it gave through institutions such as the Mother and Child organization, which ran aid and advice centres and also arranged stays in the countryside for city children to improve their health, the German People’s Recuperation Support, which did the same for adults, or the NSV Youth Support. Alongside this, the NSV also created its own nursing service and took over a large number of German nursery schools.38 By the end of 1939 more than 12.4 million members had joined the NSV. Only a small fraction of these were active, however, while the majority merely supported the organization by contributing money, attempting in this way to show they were doing their bit for the ‘national community’ in an area that, ostensibly at least, was relatively ‘unpolitical’.39
The Hitler Youth under Baldur von Schirach, ‘Youth Leader of the German Reich,’ had since 1933 set about drawing the whole of German youth into its ambit.40 In addition to the regular Hitler Youth commitments – ‘home evenings’ involving ideological instruction every Wednesday and sport on Sundays – the organization offered a broad range of activities. It ran music groups, marching bands, and special units of the Hitler Youth such as the aviation, mounted, naval, or motorized units (in particular to provide training in the immediate run-up to military service). It also gave members the opportunity to engage in sports that at the time were still exclusive such as tennis or fencing. At the same time the Hitler Youth was engaged in all kinds of ‘services’, such as taking part in collections or helping out at big rallies. The Hitler Youth’s own patrol service was in effect a kind of youth police that disciplined the members when they were off duty and kept a watchful eye on the other youth organizations.41
Hitler himself gave the watchword for how the Hitler Youth was to be trained in his speech to the Reichstag in 1935: ‘In our eyes the German youth of the future must be slim and supple, swift as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must train up a new type of man so that our nation is not ruined by the degenerate features of our age.’42 In line with these requirements, children and young people were taught to value loyalty, a sense of community, strength of will, and toughness and this was done by means of a ‘community experience’ totally geared to appeal to the mentality of the young. One of the principles was that ‘youth leads youth’ and thus the Hitler Youth was turned into a vast training ground where the NSDAP could shape the next generation. The Hitler Youth produced a total of 2 million male and female voluntary leaders for the Party.43 At the beginning of 1935 3.5 million young people belonged to the organization and from 1936 onwards all ten-year-olds became members on 20 April of each year. By the end of 1936 the membership had risen to 5.4 million, and by 1939 to 8.7 million, by which time 98 per cent of young people were members.44 In December 1936 a law was enacted making membership obligatory for all young people, male and female. The Youth Leader of the German Reich was elevated to the status of a Supreme Reich Authority and was answerable directly to Hitler.45 It was not, however, until March 1939 that compulsory youth service was introduced.46
In 1933/34 the National Socialist Women’s Organization [NS-Frauenschaft], which had existed since 1931, had difficulty in finding a distinctive role in the new state and there were numerous changes of leadership. Moreover, in the autumn of 1933 the German Women’s Organization [Deutsches Frauenwerk] was founded as an umbrella organization for the middle-class women’s associations that had been coordinated. It was not until early in 1934 that the regime’s somewhat confused efforts to organize women were stabilized, when Gertrud Scholtz-Klink took over the leadership of both organizations.47 Hitler’s speech to the NS Women’s Organization at the Party Rally in 1934 can be read as giving the new women’s leader some essential pointers regarding her tasks. In it he attacked the ‘term “the emancipation of women”’ as ‘a term invented by Jewish intellectuals’ and went on to defend a conservative view of women’s roles where men and women occupied distinct spheres. A woman’s world, he said, is ‘her husband, her family, her children and her household. . . . Providence has allotted to women the care of this, her very own, world, out of which men can then fashion and construct their world.’ These
two worlds should, however, remain strictly ‘separate’.48
At the beginning of 1935 the NS Women’s Organization and the German Women’s Organization now linked to it had 1.4 million and 2.7 million members respectively.49 Both organizations shared responsibility for the Reich Mothers’ Service, which in particular organized motherhood courses in which by 1939 more than 1.7 million women had taken part.50 The Reich Women’s Leadership’s department for economics/home economics provided consumer advice and courses in effective household management. In view in particular of the food shortages and the Four-Year Plan’s policy of autarky, these played a significant part in the regime’s food policy.51
The NS Motor Vehicle Corps [NS-Kraftfahrkorps], which in the wake of coordination combined all the existing automobile clubs in one association, also grew steadily from more than 70,000 members in May 1933 to more than 520,000 in 1941. The organization catered for technical buffs and promoted mass motorization in a variety of ways. It took over motor racing in its entirety, gave pre-military training in its motor racing schools to future army drivers, and was active in intensive road safety training with an ideological flavour. The ‘traffic community’ that had been trained to behave correctly in traffic situations was intended to represent a solid component of the national community.52
There were further formations and associated organizations that took responsibility for ‘supervising’ individual professions, such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, academics, and students.53
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