Nazi Germany at War

Martin Kitchen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138425194
• eBook ISBN: 9781317897613
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A powerful and absorbing study of the German home front from the outbreak of hostilities to the collapse of the Third Reich. It explores the impact of Nazi domestic policies on the German people, and the effects of the extreme radicalization of the regime under the pressures of total war. It examines the economy, social policy, and the realities of daily life; the part played by the law and the Churches; the changing role of women; the fate of foreign workers, prisoners of war and the Jews; and the extent of resistance to the regime. At its heart is the crucial relationship of the party, the state and public opinion in the Hitler Years.

CHAPTER ONE

Hitler’s State at War

The Nazi state with its vast and endlessly complex bureaucratic structures, competing party organisations and private interest groups was not constrained by a constitution or by legal norms: its essential function was to act as the executive organ of the will of the Führer. The process whereby the Weimar Republic, which had become increasingly authoritarian in its final years, was converted into an absolute dictatorship was lengthy and, for those who stood in the way, exceedingly painful. The ‘Führer state’ was to reach its final, grotesque and revolting form during the war.

The nature of the Nazi state and its evolution is the subject of a lengthy, many-sided and often bitter debate which results from the complexity of the problem and which is further compounded by burning political and moral issues which can never be abstracted from a discussion of National Socialism. The anarchic aspects of Nazism, its emphasis on such amorphous ideas as ‘struggle’ and ‘movement’, its contempt for bourgeois order and established norms, its yearning for revolutionary change without any clear idea of what this involved beyond the destruction of existing society and the creation of a Utopian racial community, makes any analysis of its true aims and nature well-nigh impossible. The Nazi movement was driven by an endless struggle for power, both against the state apparatus which it was determined to usurp and within the party itself. Just as Mussolini claimed that the object of fascism was faith, obedience and the will to fight, regardless of the content of that faith, the nature of the orders which were obeyed or the aims of the struggle, so many prominent Nazis saw Germany as a mindless, obedient, cohesive body of dedicated men and women endlessly on the move at the behest of big and little Hitlers. It was a world view summed up by Hitler at the great party rally of 1934, filmed by Leni Riefensthal as ‘Triumph of the Will’, when he compared Nazi Germany to a column of troops on the march led by the drum-thumping, flag-waving NSDAP. The column marched on, crushing underfoot the established structures of the state, pushing aside all legal norms, scoffing at the need for order and stability. Nazi Germany never reached the point of rest where it was possible to establish a regularised system of government. It was an ever-changing pattern of power relationships which never became frozen into a predictable and rational structure of government which could lay careful plans for clearly defined goals. It is singularly difficult to attach a meaningful label to a structure that was constantly changing.

The characterisation of Nazi Germany as a monolithic system of terror and repression, as the ‘SS state’, has long been widely accepted, thanks to its immediate plausibility and its attractive simplicity, but the colossal accumulation of empirical evidence that has taken place since it was first articulated has made this position untenable. Hitler’s satraps were able to carve out their own empires, resulting in a system which one of the most powerful of them, Hans Frank, characterised as ‘plenipotentiary anarchy’.

Government agencies were able to block the favourite schemes even of Heinrich Himmler, whose determination to take over the mineral water industry – an important part of his crusade against alcohol, which he believed was undermining the German race – was frustrated by the legal and economic objections from the civil service and even from within the SS. Some historians see in this polycratic system a severe limitation on Hitler’s power even to the point of suggesting that Hitler was in a certain sense a ‘weak dictator’. In fact the delegation of power and the abolition of the coordinating functions of the government greatly strengthened Hitler’s power as the final arbiter. The greater Hitler’s monocratic power, the greater was the tendency towards a polycratic division of power among the countless little Hitlers.

This characteristic of Nazi Germany was not the result of a conscious decision by Hitler to divide and rule, but rather of an ideological predilection for an endless struggle for power within the party and the state out of which the strongest and fittest would emerge without Hitler risking an intervention which, if it was not wholly satisfactory, might result in a weakening of his reputation and authority. This situation was further complicated by the undefined areas of competence of the state bureaucracy and the Nazi Party, a additional element of confusion being added by the increasing number of organisations which were placed directly under Hitler’s command.

Hitler had nothing but contempt for the ordered, systematic and cautious methods of a bureaucracy hedged in by regulations and legal norms. The traditional bureaucracy was not imbued with the same devotion to the National Socialist ideals of blind obedience and swift and unthinking execution of orders as was the party. Indeed Hitler saw the civil service and the judiciary as supports of ‘Jewish Marxism’ and the parliamentary democracy which he believed was closely associated with it, to say nothing of the ‘reactionary bourgeoisie’ and political Catholics. At the Nuremberg party rally in 1936 he warned that this situation could not be allowed to continue and threatened to use the party if the state apparatus failed adequately to perform its allotted task. Administration was gradually to be replaced by leadership and man management (Menschenführung); civil servants, most of whom had law degrees, would make way for graduates from the National Socialist Academies (Ordensburgen).

Hitler denounced civil servants as ‘aesthetes’ who lacked common sense and who would never be able to make a career in the real world. He preferred men with strong wills and a ‘healthy brutality’ who acted spontaneously and were not bound by sterile rules and regulations. He also detested the civil servants for their legal backgrounds, for in his eyes lawyers were among the lowest forms of life. He told his cronies at headquarters during the war that members of the legal profession defended the guilty, were mentally deformed and defective, and were imbued with the spirit of Jewish legalistic hair-splitting pedantry. ‘Mechanistic’ administration had to be replaced by ‘organic’ leadership, dead paragraphs by vital personalities. He knew that administration was a regrettable necessity in the modern state but was determined to resist the tendency towards bureaucratisation in the party and to politicise the state apparatus.

By the time the war began Hitler had dispensed with his cabinet. Its last formal meeting was on 9 December 1937 although it met on 5 February 1938 informally for a ‘ministerial discussion’ which consisted entirely of a diatribe from Hitler on the dismissal of Fritsch from his position of Chief of the General Staff. The faithful and conscientious Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellory, tried repeatedly from June 193 8 to get Hitler to call a cabinet meeting to discuss the new penal code, but the meeting was constantly postponed. Further attempts by Lammers to call a cabinet meeting were equally fruitless. It was never possible to bring any order into this chaotic situation because to do so would necessarily bind Hitler to a certain extent. He argued that some sort of fundamental law was necessary because his successor, who would necessarily be a lesser man, would never be able to rule as he had done; but he immediately dropped the idea when he realised it would involve some restriction of his absolute powers. The dictatorship of the Führer could not be reconciled with any written constitution, however vague and brief.

Hitler’s refusal to call cabinet meetings and his reliance on personal contacts with individual ministers resulted in endless duplication of effort and a chronic lack of coordination at the highest levels of government. Whereas the state apparatus was losing power and influence, the party was becoming increasingly powerful. Hitler regularly called meetings of the Gauleiters and Reichleiters, all of whom had direct access to him, and thus became virtual viceroys able to ignore the instructions of the ministries. Bormann, as head of the Party Chancellory, became increasingly powerful. In an attempt to redress the balance in favour of the traditional government departments, Lammers suggested that ministers should hold informal meetings over a glass of beer, but Hitler put an instant stop to this suggestion and insisted that it would amount to little more than a ‘defeatists’ club’.

In 1934 Hitler combined the offices of President and Chancellor to become ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’. In 1938 he took over supreme command of the armed forces; the Reichstag was reduced to the role of a compliant audience for his speeches; the cabinet ceased to meet and he had absolutely no interest in day-to-day administration. In May 1939 it was ordered that Hitler should henceforth be referred to simply as ‘Der Führer’. This centralisation of power in Hitler’s hands greatly increased the importance of the Reich Chancellory, both as a coordinating centre and for routine governmental work. This made Hans Heinrich Lammers one of the most important men in Nazi Germany. As head of the Chancellory he appeared to most government officers to speak for Hitler and thus on behalf of the ultimate authority. It was exceedingly difficult for most officials to gain access to Hitler and they had to hang around his private apartment for hours on end in the hope that they might be admitted to the presence. When a job had to be done it was better to consult Lammers. Hitler willingly delegated these tedious tasks to Lammers and the two men met increasingly less frequently as the years went by. At their trials after the war the officials of the Reich Chancellory insisted that they had no executive power, no political ambitions and were unable to give orders to any of the ministries. They were, in short, powerless clerks who did little but dot the i’s and cross the t’s on the papers that landed on their desks. Although this is formally correct, Lammers’ office was immensely powerful as it controlled much of the flow of information between Hitler and the ministries, adjudicated the struggles between the ministries, and brought some order into the administrative and legislative anarchy of Nazi Germany.

Parallel to the state apparatus was the Nazi Party, and the party Chancellory, founded in 1941, was to become an increasingly important locus of power in the Third Reich. On 21 April 1933 Hitler gave Rudolf Hess, who had been his private secretary, the title ‘Deputy to the Führer’. Hess was shy, modest and retiring with no political ambitions other than to serve Hitler. His responsibilities included attempting to adjudicate internal party quarrels and to ensure the smooth cooperation between the party and the civil bureaucracy. In order to facilitate this latter function. Hess was given a ministerial position and attended cabinet meetings and ministerial discussions from 30 June 1933 onwards. In Hitler’s view the party and the state should remain separate. The secure position of the state apparatus was a guarantee that the radical hot-heads within the party would be unable to realise their madcap schemes, but the continued existence of the party would save the state officials from bureaucratic sclerosis. Hitler reserved for himself the right to adjudicate between the party and the state.

Hess hoped to strengthen his position by demanding the right to examine all proposed legislation to see whether it was ideologically sound and a true reflection of the National Socialist world view. Hitler granted him this right, but ministers did everything possible to avoid having to subject their drafts, which were often of a highly technical nature, to the scrutiny of the party. Civil servants became expert at finding ways to avoid submitting their drafts to the Deputy Führer, and Hess was constantly complaining that he was being denied his constitutional right and duty to scrutinise all legislative proposals.

Within the party apparatus Hess was challenged by Robert Ley, whose position was greatly enhanced by the creation of the German Work Front (DAF) in May 1933 when the trades unions were abolished. In 1938 Hitler reaffirmed Hess’ position as Deputy Führer, but made it clear that if Hess wished to maintain his position against the ambitious Ley he would have to remain unquestionably loyal and effective.

Hess appointed Martin Bormann to be his chief of staff in July 1933 in order to strengthen his hand against the drunken and obstreperous Ley. Bormann was a brutal, ruthless and tireless bureaucrat of Stalinist dimensions. He was to become Hitler’s personal private secretary and was one of the most powerful figures in Hitler’s entourage in the final ghastly stages of the Third Reich. Bormann left discussions with ministers and secretaries of state to the chief of the legal department, Walther Sommer, a foul-mouthed roustabout who openly expressed his total contempt for the civil service. He set out to dominate the state apparatus by making sure the the civil service was infiltrated by National Socialist activists. By no means all National Socialists shared these views. The Minister of the Interior, Frick, among others, preferred efficient administrators to blustering pseudo-revolutionaries and resisted Sommer’s vicious attacks. Hess also held the view that the task of the party was political education and that the civil service should be left alone to administer. Even Bormann was angered by Sommer’s lack of tact and judgment and managed to get him pushed aside to become head of a new Reich Administrative Court (Reichsverwaltungsgericht). The appointments was made six weeks before Hess flew to England in 1941 so it was a hollow victory for Hitler’s deputy. Sommer remained a controversial and tiresome figure, and was finally obliged to resign in 1942 to avoid an investigation into allegations of mismanagement of his new office.

Hess was thus under attack, not only from Frick and the civil service who had the support of Göring, but also from within the party by Ley and also the Gauleiters Koch and Forster who refused to take any orders from anyone less than Hitler. He faced opposition within his own department from the Political Division, led by Helmuth Friedrichs, a Nazi ideologue who was close to Bormann and the Legal Division under Walther Sommer, both of whom felt that their minister was weak and sought to compromise with the detestable bureaucracy. Friedrichs shared Hitler’s view that the civil service was full of stuffy and reactionary men whose minds had been warped by the study of law, who were only capable of dull and unimaginative paper-shuffling, and who had no understanding of the political imperatives of National Socialism. They should give way to men who were fired by political zeal and capable of decisive action. In short, the Führer principle should replace the established norms of the traditional bureaucracy. The civil service, however, was well entrenched and had powerful supporters. It could thus ward off the attacks by Nazi fanatics and convince all but the most incorrigible and blinkered of the faithful that ideological fervour was no substitute for professional competence and experience.

The war saw a marked increase in the tendency for the Third Reich to become a monocratic ‘Führer State’. This can be seen in the discussions over the precise nature of the role of the ‘Deputy Führer’. Was he, as Bormann insisted, Hitler’s deputy in all his roles: as President, as Chancellor and as head of the party? Or was he, as the more conservatively minded, such as Lammers, argued merely a party leader with ministerial rank?

This intertwining of party and state is most dramatically evident in the development of the SS. The police had been centralised under Heinrich Himmler in 1936, and Himmler was given the rank of a secretary of state. But he was also head of the SS, a party organisation. In theory Himmler the policeman was subordinate to the Minister of the Interior and only had a right to attend cabinet meetings when matters which directly affected his area of responsibility were discussed. Since the cabinet never met this was an academic problem and, as Reichsführer SS, Himmler had direct access to Hitler and could thus make himself completely independent from the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick. The minister frequently complained to Hitler about Himmler’s encroachments, but Hitler turned a deaf ear to his entreaties and Frick was a helpless bystander as Himmler removed the police from his jurisdiction.

Frick had to stand by as other sections of his ministry slipped from his hands. Dr Leonardo Conti, who was appointed ‘Reich Health Leader’ (Reichsgesundheitsführer) in 1939, was responsible for the medical and veterinary departments of the Ministry of the Interior. Since medicine involved all manner of racial and eugenic concerns dear to the Nazis, Conti was also given direct access to Hitler and was thus free from the control of his minister. Similarly the cultural and media responsibilities of the Ministry of the Interior were taken over by Goebbels, and the creation of a Ministry for Science and Education (Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung) in 1934 further reduced its responsibilities. When the war began Himmler, Conti and the ‘Reich Labour Leader’ (Reichsarbeitsführer) Konstantin Hierl, were state secretaries under the Minister of the Interior, but they all functioned as independent ministers.

Such developments were not simply a reflection of Frick’s lack of energy and determination, they were the direct result of the process whereby a traditional administrative structure gave way to the ideological dictatorship of the ‘Führer State’. Frick, who had lost the Führer’s favour, was gradually pushed aside. During the war he retired to his estate on the Starnberger See in Bavaria and conducted most of his business by telephone and telex. The running of the ministry was left the state secretaries Hans Pfundtner and Wilhelm Stuckart. Whereas much of the important work of the Ministry of the Interior became increasingly doctrinaire and split off into separate empires, the more routine work was conducted by experts, many of whom were not even Nazi Party members: Indeed party veterans were seldom able to find comfortable positions within the administration as a reward for their efforts on behalf of the movement.

On 30 August 1939 Hitler created the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich (Ministerrat für Reichsverteidigung) so that he could devote all his energies to the war while the new body took care of economic and administrative affairs. The council was chaired by Göring and its permanent members were Hess, Lammers, Frick, Funk, the Minister of Economics and General Keitel, chief of the Armed Forces High Command (OKW). The council was empowered to make new laws to override existing ones so that some constitutional experts suggested that it was the true centre of government.

The council was in effect a permanent committee of the earlier Council for the Defence of the Reich (Reichsverteidigungsrat). This had also seldom met as one body; its constituent members got on with their own business and there was a general uncertainty, even at the highest level, as to whether it had been abolished or whether the new Ministerial Council was in fact the same as the old Council.

There were some who hoped that the Ministerial Council could become a sort of alternative government that would put an end to the excesses of Hitler’s racial policies and moderate his war aims. Göring wanted to use his position as chairman of the Council to strengthen his position as number two in the Reich, and there were a number of influential people in his circle who felt that Hitler had lost all sense of proportion and even that he had become deranged. Hitler was fearful that the Council might become too powerful and reduce his absolute dictatorial powers. He therefore made certain that the Council did not meet again as one body after the middle of November 1939 and drastically reduced its powers in February of the following year. He ordered that all important decrees should be issued by the Reich government and should bear his signature. He also frustrated the efforts of Göring and Lammers to extend the powers of the Council to cov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Hitler's State at War
• 2. The Economics of Warfare: From Blitzkrieg to Total War
• 3. Daily Life and Daily Worries
• 4. Wartime Social Policy
• 5. Women in Wartime Germany
• 6. Foreign Workers and Prisoners of War
• 7. The Law
• 8. The Fate of the German Jews in Wartime
• 9. The Churches and the War
• 10. Resistance
• 11. The Arts and Entertainment in Wartime Germany
• 12. The Dönitz Government
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Map
• Index