Nazi Germany

Harald Kleinschmidt, Harald Kleinschmidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351915557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The volume reproduces a set of recently-published articles demonstrating the embeddedness of Nazi genocide and other crimes against humanity in a German society that was haunted by practices of denunciation. Far from being an inexplicable invasion of evil into otherwise sound German society, the genocide and other crimes against humanity were committed not merely by members of SS organizations but by common people, civilians and military men alike, within Germany as well as in occupied territories, during the late 1930s and World War II. Although analyzing the past, the book also seeks contribute to current debates on the causes of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

Part I
The SS-State

[1]
‘Working Towards the Führer.’
Reflections on the Nature of
the Hitler Dictatorship

IAN KERSHAW

The renewed emphasis, already visible in the mid-1980s, on the intertwined fates of the Soviet Union and Germany, especially in the Stalin and Hitler eras, has become greatly intensified in the wake of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. The sharpened focus on the atrocities of Stalinism has prompted attempts to relativise Nazi barbarism – seen as wicked, but on the whole less wicked, than that of Stalinism (and by implication of communism in general).¹ The brutal Stalinist modernising experiment is used to remove any normative links with humanising, civilising, emancipatory or democratising development from modernisation concepts and thereby to claim that Hitler’s regime, too, was – and intentionally so – a ‘modernising dictatorship’.² Implicit in all this is a reversion, despite the many refinements and criticisms of the concept since the 1960s, to essentially traditional views on ‘totalitarianism’ and to views of Stalin and Hitler as ‘totalitarian dictators’.

There can be no principled objection to comparing the forms of dictatorship in Germany under Hitler and in the Soviet Union under Stalin and, however unedifying the subject matter, the nature and extent of their inhumanity.³ The totalitarianism concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination, and this, too, must be seen as legitimate in itself.⁴ The underlying assumption that both regimes made total claims upon society, based upon a monopolistic set of ideological imperatives and resulting in unprecedented levels of repression and attempted indoctrination, manipulation and mobilisation – giving these regimes a dynamic missing from more conventional authoritarian regimes – again seems largely incontestable. But the fundamental problem with the term ‘totalitarianism’ – leaving aside its non-scholarly usage – is that is a descriptive concept, not a theory, and has little or no explanatory power.⁵ It presumes that Stalinism and Hitlerism were more like each other than different from each other. But the basis of comparison is a shallow one, largely confined to the apparatus of rule.⁶

My starting point in these reflections is the presumption that, despite superficial similarities in forms of domination, the two regimes were in essence more unlike than like each other. Though seeing greater potential in comparisons of Nazism with other fascist movements and systems rather than with the Soviet system, I would want to retain an emphasis upon the unique features of the Nazi dictatorship and the need to explain these, alongside those characteristics which could be seen as generic components of European fascism in the era following the First World War, through the specific dominant features of German political culture. (In this I admit to a currently rather unfashionable attachment to notions of a qualified German Sonderweg)⁷

Sometimes, however, highlighting contrasts can be more valuable than comparing similarities. In what follows I would like to use what, on an imperfect grasp of some of the recent historiography on Stalinism, I understand to be significant features of Stalin’s dictatorship to establish some important contrasts in the Hitler regime. This, I hope, will offer a basis for some reflections on what remains a central problem of interpretation of the Third Reich: what explains the gathering momentum of radicalisation, the dynamic of destruction in the Third Reich? Much of the answer to this question has, I would suggest at the outset, to do with the undermining and collapse of what one might call ‘rational’ structures of rule, a system of ‘ordered’ government and administration. But what caused the collapse and, not least, what was Hitler’s own role in the process? These questions He at the centre of my enquiry.

First, however, let me outline a number of what appear to me to be significant points of contrast between the Stalinist and Hitlerist regimes.

• Stalin arose from within a system of rule, as a leading exponent of it. He was, as Roland Suny puts it, a committee man, chief oligarch, man of the machine;⁸ and, in Moshe Lewin’s phrase, ‘bureaucracy’s anti-Christ’, the ‘creature of his party’,⁹ who became despot by control of the power which lay at the heart of the party, in its secretariat. In a sense, it is tempting to see an analogy in the German context in the position of Bormann rather than Hitler. Is it possible to imagine Stalin echoing Hitler’s comment in 1941: ‘I’ve totally lost sight of the organisations of the Party. When I find myself confronted by one or other of these achievements, I say to myself: “By God, how that has developed!’”?¹⁰

At any rate, a party leader and head of government less bureaucratically inclined, less a committee man or man of the machine, than Hitler is hard to imagine. Before 1933 he was uninvolved in and detached from the Nazi Movement’s bureaucracy. After 1933, as head of government he scarcely put pen to paper himself other than to sign legislation put in front of his nose by Lammers. The Four-Year Plan Memorandum of 1936 is a unique example from the years 193 3–45 of a major policy document composed by Hitler himself – written in frustration and fury at the stance adopted during the economic crisis of 1935–6 by Schacht and some sectors of business and industry. Strikingly, Hitler only gave copies of his memorandum to two persons, Goring and Blomberg (much later giving a third copy to Speer). The Economics Minister himself was not included in the short distribution list! Business and industrial leaders were not even made aware of the existence of the memorandum.¹¹

Hitler’s way of operating was scarcely conducive to ordered government. Increasingly, after the first year or two of the dictatorship, he reverted to a lifestyle recognisable not only in the party leader of the 1920s but even in the description of the habits of the indolent youth in Linz and Vienna recorded by his friend Kubizek.¹² According to the post-war testimony of one of his former adjutants:

Hitler normally appeared shortly before lunch, quickly read through Reich Press Chief Dietrich’s press cuttings, and then went into lunch. So it became more and more difficult for Lammers [head of the Reich Chancellory] and Meissner [head of the Presidial Chancellory] to get him to make decisions which he alone could make as head of state. ... When Hitler stayed at Obersalzberg it was even worse. There, he never left his room before 2.00 p.m. Then, he went to lunch. He spent most afternoons taking a walk, in the evening straight after dinner, there were films.... He disliked the study of documents. I have sometimes secured decisions from him, even ones about important matters, without his ever asking to see the relevant files. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out on their own if one did not interfere.¹³

As this comment points out, even Lammers, the only link between Hitler and the ministries of state (whose heads themselves ceased definitively to meet around a table as a cabinet by early 1938), had difficulty at times with gaining access to Hitler and extracting decisions from him. Lammers himself, for example, wrote plaintively to Hitler’s adjutant on 21 October 1938 begging for an audience to report to the Führer on a number of urgent matters which needed resolution and which had been building up since the last occasion when he had been able to provide a detailed report, on 4 September!¹⁴

Hitler’s increasing aloofness from the State bureaucracy and the major organs of government seems to mark more than a difference of style with Stalin’s modus operandi. It reflects, in my view, a difference in the essence of the regimes, mirrored in the position of the leader of each, a point to which I will return.

• Stalin was a highly interventionist dictator, sending a stream of letters and directives determining or interfering with policy. He chaired all important committees. His aim appears to have been a monopolisation of all decision-making and its concentration in the Politburo, a centralisation of state power and unity of decisionmaking which would have eliminated Party–State dualism.¹⁵

Hitler, by contrast, was on the whole a non-interventionist dictator as far as government administration was concerned. His sporadic directives, when they came, tended to be delphic and to be conveyed verbally, usually by Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellory, or, in the war years (as far as civilian matters went), increasingly by Bormann.¹⁶ Hitler chaired no formal committees after the first years of the regime, when the Cabinet (which he hated chairing) atrophied into nonexistence.¹⁷ He directly undermined the attempts made by Reich Interior Minister Frick to unify and rationalize administration, and did much to sustain and enhance the irreconcilable dualism of Party and State which existed at every level.¹⁸

Where Stalin appeared deliberately to destabilise government (which offered the possibility of a bureaucratic challenge),¹⁹ Hitler seems to have had no deliberate policy of destabilisation, but rather, as a consequence of his non-bureaucratic leadership position and the inbuilt need to protect his deified leadership position by non-association with political infighting and potentially unpopular policies, to have presided over an inexorable erosion of ‘rational’ forms of government. And while the metaphor of ‘feudal anarchy’ might be applied to both systems,²⁰ it seems more apt as a depiction of the Hitler regime, where bonds of personal loyalty were from the beginning the crucial determinants of power, wholly overriding functional position and status.

• Personalities apart, Hitler’s leadership position appears to have been structurally more secure than Stalin’s. If I have followed the debates properly, it would seem that there was some rational basis for Stalin’s purges even if the dictator’s paranoia took them into the realms of fantasy.²¹ As the exponent of one party line among several, one set of policies among a number of alternatives, one interpretation of the Marx-Lenin arcanum among others, Stalin remained a dictator open to challenge from within. Kirov, it appears, had the potential to become a genuine rival leader ...