‘Totalitarian’ state in Germany. By the end of 1934 Germany was a one party Nazi state.
However, the old state machinery remained largely in tact. The bureaucracy had suffered a purge
of ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Aryan’ personnel under The Law for the restoration of the Professional Civil
Service (April 1933). But this and the subsequent Law to Ensure the Unity of Party and State
(December 1933) failed to make the party and state into one entity.
The party was forged as an instrument to gain political power and was never united about the
means to a Nazi state. The huge influx of Party members after 1933 also diluted its radicalism
and ideological purity.
The decision making mechanism of the state has been the subject of considerable disagreement.
Initially it was argued that Hitler was an all powerful leader, the ‘master of the Third Reich -
making all the big decisions himself. Hitler’s aversion to petty administration and disinclination to
coordinate government departments, and his propensity to be drawn into foreign policy or
grandiose plans for rebuilding Berlin, are well documented. (for example see Karl Deitrich
Bracher’s works).
Later revisionism depicted him as essentially a ‘weak dictator’ – unwilling to take decisions, open
to influence by those around him, and often uninvolved in the day to day decision making
process. (Hans Mommsen’s position).
Ian Kershaw has combined the two positions – with Hitler refraining from instigating policy, and
acting rather as a mobiliser and legitimator of policies dreamed up by competing subordinates.
This also allowed Hitler to appear above the factional struggles of his leading associates and to
evade responsibility for failed and inhuman decisions.
The more junior functionaries of the nazi state were able to claim policy making authority simply
by claiming to be ‘working towards the Fuhrer’. The nazi state also contained powerful elite
factions – the old military, the Nazi party, the business elites, the SS and SA. Martin Brozat
termed this a ‘polycratic power structure’ - overlaid by Hitler’s unrestrained personal charismatic
power. (Cf. I. Kershaw and M. Lewin: Stalinism and Nazism, 1997, Ch. 4 by Kershaw.)
The dissolution of the government into a multiplicity of competing and non-coordinated
ministries, party offices, hybrid agencies all claiming to interpret the Fuhrer’s will. Hand in
hand with the development went the growing autonomy of the Fuhrer authority itself,
detaching itself and isolating itself from any framework of corporate government and
correspondingly subject to increasing delusions of grandeur and diminishing sense of
reality. The overall structure of government was reduced to a shambles of constantly
shifting power bases or warring factions. (Kershaw: The Nazi Dictatorship, 1993, p. 74.)
Only during the years of total war mobilisation, first under Rudolf Hess and later Martin Bormann,
was the party apparatus able to begin to absorb the state. Thus, the Nazi party never conquered
the state in peacetime as the Stalinists did in the Soviet Union.
A Police State?
Some historians refer to the Nazi state as the SS State by 1945. The SS were formed in 1925 as
the elite Fuhrer body-guard section of the SA. The arrival of Heinrich Himmler as their leader in
1929 transformed their fortunes. By 1933 - over 50,000 with a reputation for the utmost brutality
and blind obedience. In 1931 Himmler created the SD (Sicherheisdienst) as an internal Party
police force and in 1933 he became head of the Prussian Gestapo internal security police. It was
the SS which purged the SA in June 1934.
In 1936 Himmler, as Reichsfuhrer SS became head of all sections of the police state, arguably
the second most powerful man in the Nazi state. The so-called Deaths Head units of the SS ran
the concentration and slave labour camps and was responsible for creating the ‘New Order’ in
Eastern Europe, while the Waffen SS became the elite fighting unit of the German Army, with 35
divisions by 1945. By the end of the war the SS had created a huge industrial combine employing
slave labour in over 150 firms.
But recent evidence has shown that even the SS and Gestapo were unable to operate as a
completely totalitarian police state - it was their propaganda which was really successful in
creating the illusion that ‘Big Brother’ was watching everything and everyone, leading to mass
denunciations and wrongful arrests, some of which actually damaged the Nazi state.
The Army and the Nazi State.
In 1934 the Army (Wehmacht) high Command congratulated itself on having defeated its chief
rival the SA in the Night of the Long Knives. The rearmourment programme and compulsory
conscription in 1935 appeared to confirm their status at the heart of the Nazi state.
But appearances were deceptive. Hitler had simply replaced the SA with the more sinister SS,
while increasingly taking over as Commander in Chief of the Army (new oath of loyalty to Hitler).
In November Hitler revealed his expansionist plans to the High Command and sensing their
hesitation dismissed his two senior commanders (Blomberg and Fritch) after the Gestapo had
revealed lurid sexual details of their private lives.
Henceforth the Fuhrer was Chief of Staff through his personal high command Oberkommando
der Wehmacht (OKW) headed by the loyal General Keitel. From this point on the army was
subordinate to the Nazi state - but not actually a part of it - hence a number of plots against
Hitler’s life from Wehmacht officers, culminating with the attempt by Colonel von Stauffenberg in
July 1944.
The Nazi Economy?
The nazis claimed to have affected an economic miracle by 1936. But it is clear that the worst
effects of the world depression were over before Hitler was appointed as Chancellor. The regime
merely extended the existing schemes for public works – in particular the building of homes and
motorways. Unemployment fell sharply after 1935 – mainly because all males from 18 - 25 were
conscripted into the military.
Workers in the Third Reich.
The German Labour Front was created on 6th May 1933. Headed by Robert Ley – and was the
largest single organisation in the Third Reich – 22 million members by 1939. Also unemployment
fell to an official figure of 35,000.
Wages were frozen at 1933 levels – but employers paid Christmas bonuses and insurance
schemes to compensate. (Free motorbikes etc) Also lots of overtime in many industries. The
small rise in the general living standards and having everyone in work meant a general sense of
well being. By 1936 the average wage for a worker was 35 marks a week – ten times higher than
the dole money of 1932.
Workers lost their freedom in return for a slight improvement in living standards.
In the early years of the regime, the economy was under the control of Hjalmar Schacht
(President of the Reichbank -1933-39 and Economics Minister 1934-37) His appointment was
intended to reassure big business interests.
His macro economic policy was largely pragmatic and reactive. Inflation was kept at bay by low
wages and longer working hours as the unions had been destroyed as independent actors.
Government deficits were run up to allow public works - motorways, afforestation, the rebuilding
central Berlin etc. - which brought unemployment down to 1.7 million by 1936. There was also a
huge programme of rearmourment – at the expense of consumer and export industries, leading to
the sucking in of imports.
These growing balance of payments deficits were masked by bilateral trade agreements with the
Balkan states and South America - often barter agreements.
The Deutchmark had over 200 different values across the world by 1937. By 1936 – there was a
trade surplus, and industrial production up by 53% since 1933. Unemployment had fallen to 1.6
million from 6 million in 1933. The very real threat of a balance of payments crisis caused
Schacht to call for cuts in the programme of rearmourment in 1936. From now on Schacht was
sidelined. The Army and Nazi leadership disagreed and in 1936 Goring was put in charge of a
‘Four Year Plan’ based on autarky, which would make Germany self-sufficient in oil, rubber and
metals by 1940.
Under the plan industry was brought under state supervision. All firms became members of the
Reichgruppe for Industry – under the Reich Economic Chamber. From now on the state
controlled most resources but industry remained largely privately owned. Large firms were forced
to join cartels and to meet government production targets. In this period over 300,000 small
businesses were driven into bankruptcy in this period – in spite of nazi promised to favour the
Mittelstand.
The Four Year Plan did not achieve all its aims and when Hitler went to war over Poland in 1939
the Nazi state had not achieved anything like central control of the Economy prior to 1942 when
Albert Speer began to run the total war economy. And even then individual industrialists were left
a considerable degree of freedom to operate their businesses.
Relations between the nazi elite and big business were generally good. They benefited greatly
from the smashing of the independent unions in 1933. They also benefited from the destruction of
Jewish owned firms and the redistribution of the their plant and property.
The state sponsored and rearmourment and expansion of the economy particularly benefited the
primary producers – and in return they tolerated increasing state intervention in setting targets for
production.
‘Profits went above all to the industrialists who were prepared to collaborate actively with
the regime. (Hinden, Republican and Fascist Germany, 1996, p. 129)
Daimler Benz’s new aeroplane factories were actually built by the state and its production levels
rose by over 800 per cent from 1932-1941.
The chemical company IG Farben and the Krupp steel company gained huge dividends by this
course of action. IG Farben received over 50 per cent of government investment after 1936 to
produce synthetic oil and rubber substitutes. By 1943 it owned 334 plants and was a major part of
the war planning effort.
But there was a price to pay. Farben produced the gas for the extermination camps and by 1943
had half its labour force in forced labour camps in the eastern territories.
Under the 1936 Four Year Plan, Goering forced the reluctant steel barons to invest 130 million
marks in the 400 million mark project to build the Reichwerk Hermann Goering (RWHG) – in
effect creating a rival. In response to their criticisms Goering threatened to charge them with
sabotage. By 1939 the RWHG was the largest industrial firm in Europe – producing coal,
synthetic fuels, heavy machinery as well as steel.
Some became disenchanted by the state intervention. Fritz Thyssen, the iron and steel magnate,
fled to Switzerland in 1939 arguing that ‘Soon Germany will not be any different from Bolshevik
Russia.’ Export orientated companies fared much less well – and coal exporters were particularly
hostile to the nazi regime.
But most stuck with the regime until the bitter end in 1945. No one from business joined the anti-
Hitler plot of July 1944. Richard Grunberger aptly described the attitude of German big business
as that of:
A conductor of a runaway bus who has no control over the actions of the driver but keeps
collecting the passengers’ fares right up until the final crash.’ (A Social History of the Third
Reich, 1974, pp. 258-9)
Hitler’s transport programme saw over 2000 miles of new roads completed by 1938. Agriculture
was encouraged to produce with guaranteed prices for production. But later the nazis allowed the
price of food to fall to encourage workers to work harder and livestock farmers were hard hit by
the rising price of imported winter fodder. Many left the land in the late 30s either conscripted into
the armed forces or attracted by the pull of the big cities. Major landowners did benefit from the
growing demand for food and the rise in land values, but their political influence was destroyed.
CONCLUSIONS.
On the surface Hitler’s economic policy was highly successful – he restored full employment and
built up the economy into the most powerful in Europe, enabling the early military successes of
1939-42. But autarky was never achieved and rearmourment distorted the economy.
Nor did the Third Reich achieve a growth rate above the average for inter-war Europe. Ultimately
Nazi Germany never achieved the monolithic centralised command economy. The Third Reich
remained an uneasy compromise between state centralisation and independent power blocs -
with the Army, big business, and the Nazi Party all jockeying for position. Only under the pressure
of war did Hitler’s racial Imperialist agenda and the SS police state come to dominate this power
struggle. Nazism was never a movement reared and controlled from the outset by capitalist
interests, (Cf. The structural model - D. Eichholtz & K Gossweller ‘The primacy of Industry, in Das
Argument, 10, 1968, modified into the more sophisticated concept of relative autonomy by N.
Poulantzas Fascism and Dictatorship, 1974). Nor was it a movement completely autonomous
from capitalism and big business. (See Tim Mason ‘The Primacy of Politics’ in H A. Turner (ed)
Nazism and the Third Reich, 1972. K. D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship, K. Hilderbrand, The
Greater Reich, E. Nolte etc.)
Kershaw argues that due to the extremely complex interrelationships between politics and
economics in Nazi Germany it is impossible to establish any ‘primacy’ model. A ‘mutual
dependence’ existed between the needs of industry and commerce and the political agenda of
the Nazis. and a consequent blurring of the boundaries between state and the private economy.
(Kershaw: The Nazi Dictatorship, pp 48-49)
Following Brozat, Kershaw sees power as essentially ‘polycratic’ - distributed between various
powerful and autocratic elites (Hitler and the SS/SD police faction, the army, big business, etc.)
Thus, Kershaw also rejects the ‘totalitarian’ epithet as an explanation for the Nazi state. War did
tip the balance in favour of the Hitler/SS/SD political agenda giving an ultimately self-destructive
and irrational momentum to the total war economy and genocidal programme. But this total war
economy and autarkic state was not in any meaningful sense a sustainable model for a future
Nazi state.
As middle class individuals and anti-Communists many teachers were already sympathetic to the
nazis, and by 1936, 32 per cent of teachers had joined the nazi party and by 1937 97 per cent
had been pressurised or persuaded to join the National Socialist Teachers League (NSLB) Local
nazi officials kept records on teachers to assess their commitment to NS ideals.
The curriculum was closely controlled with 15% of school time allocated for physical education –
over 2 hours per day in some schools. For 1935 all textbooks had to be approved and had to
carry nazi values, including anti-Semitism and racism.
Co-education schools were closed and boys and girls kept rigidly apart. Girls took needlework
and home economics. Core curriculum German Language and Literature, History and Biology.
The first two intended to inculcate pride in the nation and its achievements. Biology was the
intended instrument of Nazi racial theory and propaganda. Religious education was gradually
phased out. By 1939 all denominational schools had closed. Special schools were opened to train
the next generation of the nazi elite. – the National Political Institutes for Education (NAPOLAS)
for boys between 10-18. They provided a military style boarding school education. In 1936 taken
over by the SS. There were 21 by 1938.
In 1938 DAF leader Robert Ley set up eleven Adolf Hitler Schools – intended to rival the SS’s
NAPOLAs. For 12-18 year olds, selected for physical appearance and leadership potential.
Rapidly became little more than military boot camps for the nasty but dim. No Nazi leader sent
their children to an AH school.
The nazis also created three levels of Ordensburgen school – modeled on medieval chivalric
orders, housed in huge castles for 1000 students (Ordensjunkers) aged between 25 and 30, with
500 staff. Hitler told Rauschning: ‘My Ordensburgen will mould a youth from which the world will
shrink in terror.’
There is increasing evidence of resistance amongst teachers to the anti-intellectualism of Nazi
education by 1939. In higher education there was a considerable contraction from 115,000 in
1933 to 57,000 in 1939 as the nazis downgraded academic education. The 1933 racial laws For
the restoration of the Civil Service, saw around 1200 university lecturers (10 per cent) dismissed
for racial or political reasons. Some of the most original thinkers in Germany were dismissed in
the process.
In November 1933 all lecturers were forced to sign the ‘Declaration in Support of Hitler and the
NS State.’ And join the nazi lecturers association.
Students were also forced to join the German Student’s League and attend twice weekly fitness
and ideological training sessions. The net result of all these changes was to induce a sharp fall in
general educational standards. Albert Speer was arguing from 1939 onwards that the antiintellectual
stress should be reversed and many more scientists should be trained.
The Youth Movement.
By 1938 over 7 million out of 9 million between 10 and 18 belonged to Nazi Youth Movements.
The DJ Deutsche Jungvolk (German Young People’s Movement) alone had over 2 million boys
aged 10-14); the Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend HJ) had over 1.6 million 14 to 18 year olds.
In these movements boys were prepared for military discipline and girls for domestic and
maternal tasks.
In 1933 all youth organisations (except Catholic ones) were taken over by the Hitler youth and
after 1936 all Catholic youth movements were banned.
But again recent evidence suggests that many young Germans resented some of the harsh
military discipline of the youth movements as the war approached and they were increasingly
used to train soldiers for war.
There was also a loose collection of subversive youth groups called collectively The Edelweiss
Pirates – mainly groups of boys aged between 14-17.
The wore edelweiss (skull and crossbones) badges check shirts and short trousers. They had
nicknames for their groups – for instance the Roving Dudes, the Kittlebach Pirates, the Navajos,
They were mainly working class and had several thousand members by 1939. By 1945 there
were 20 groups with around 100 members each in Cologne.
Some groups were simply rebellious youths out for fun and adventure – singing banned songs
etc. Some were highly politicized – linked to the KPD and beating up Hitler youth patrols – their
slogan ‘Eternal War on the Hitler Youth.’ Some helped escaped prisoners of war to hide.
In December 1942 the Gestapo arrested 739 suspected Edelweiss Pirates in Dusseldorf. Many
were sent to Labour camps. In November 1944 the leaders of the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates
were executed.
Swing Groups.
Mainly middle and upper class many also belonging to the Hitler Youth – developed in large cities
Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden etc. Generally anti-political. Centred on playing forbidden music. Met in
bars and nightclubs and played black American jazz swing and blues music. Nazi authorities felt
threatened – faced imprisonment for being discovered playing such music – closed bars and
arrested a few.
Women in Nazi Germany.
Nazism was totally opposed to the emancipation of women. As early as 1921 the party had
banned women from active political participation or seniority in the movement. The infamous Nazi
slogan for women was ‘devotion to the three Ks’ - ‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche’ (children, kitchen,
church). Another famous slogan during the war years was: ‘I have donated a child to the Fuhrer’
When one Nazi women’s organisation, the NSF (National Sozalistische Frauenschaft - National
Socialist Womanhood) attempted to campaign for a greater role for women its leaders were
discredited.
Womens’ role was to breed and rear the next generation of genetically pure Aryan super-heroes.
Divorce for unproductive marriages was actively encouraged. Contraception was banned. In 1933
interest free loans were offered to women who gave up their jobs to breed. Labour exchanges
were told to discriminate against women for jobs. Free food and children’s clothes were provided
for mothers. Harvest kindergartens were built to allow women with children to work in the fields.
Prolific mother were awarded medals like the Honour Cross of German Motherhood. Bronze for
four or five children, silver to six or seven, and gold for eight or more. But only if both partners
were considered racially pure.
Between 1933-36 married women were debarred from jobs in medicine, Law, and the higher civil
service. Women were also excluded from universities and teaching posts. By 1945 49% of
university students were women.
The quest for genetically pure Germans also led to the forced sterilization of those considered to
be unworthy of German breeding.
Perhaps the most bizarre of all the Nazi attitudes towards women came in the form of the
Labensborn (spring of life) policy during the war. This was an institution which appeared to be
caring for unmarried mothers of Aryan stock - but was in fact an organisation arranging for their
impregnation by members of the SS.
Attempts to drive women back into the home were highly unsuccessful. The nazi regime was
unable to prevent women working in industry and commerce after 1937 due to labour shortages.
Some like Tim Mason have argued that the nazi regime was more popular with women than men.
Middle class and educated women who were restricted in their opportunities outside the home
were generally least enthusiastic. Catholic women were also generally less enthusiastic.
The early stress by feminist writers on the unmitigatedly evil impact of nazi policies on women,
was challenged by those who argued that there were advantages for some women, in spite of the
evil ends sought. Family social services improved. Nazi women’s organisations and youth groups
also widened the experiences of some working class women.
Nazi Culture.
A contradiction in terms. Unlike Italian Fascism Nazism untouched by any artistic modernism. In a
play by Hanns Johst written in 1934 a line appears which asserts: ‘whenever I hear the word
culture, I reach for my gun’.
One of the most telling images of the Third Reich occurred right at its inception on 10th May 1933
in a Berlin square, where thousands of books were burnt by a mob of chanting Nazis.
Under Nazism culture was only acceptable in the service of the nation and the state, giving rise to
a second rate and mindless classicism which has left virtually no trace outside the films of Leni
Riefenstahl. The Reich Chamber of Culture was charged with upholding Nazi racial prejudice and
the glorification of hard work and war. The music of Mahler, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky and
Schoenberg was banned as degenerate art, modern music like jazz and dance band music was
labelled ‘Negroid’ and decadent. 2,500 of Germany’s literary community fled abroad.There is little
evidence that this second and third rate culturalism created a strong Nazi cultural identity in
Germany.
A Police State?
Some historians refer to the Nazi state as the SS State by 1945. The SS were formed in 1925 as
the elite Fuhrer body-guard section of the SA. The arrival of Heinrich Himmler as their leader in
1929 transformed their fortunes.
By 1933 - over 50,000 with a reputation for the utmost brutality and blind obedience. In 1931
Himmler created the SD (Sicherheisdienst) as an internal Party police force and in 1933 he
became head of the Prussian Gestapo internal security police.
It was the SS which purged the SA in June 1934. In 1936 Himmler, as Reichsfuhrer SS became
head of all sections of the police state, arguably the second most powerful man in the Nazi state.
The so-called Deaths Head units of the SS ran the concentration and slave labour camps and
was responsible for creating the ‘New Order’ in Eastern Europe, while the Waffen SS became the
elite fighting unit of the German Army, with 35 divisions by 1945.
By the end of the war the SS had created a huge industrial combine employing slave labour in
over 150 firms.
But recent evidence has shown that even the SS and Gestapo were unable to operate as a
completely totalitarian police state - it was their propaganda which was really successful in
creating the illusion that ‘Big Brother’ was watching everything and everyone, leading to mass
denunciations and wrongful arrests, some of which actually damaged the Nazi state.
The Nazi Propaganda Machine.
Goebbels was made Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in March 1933.
He took all Broadcasting under his control, sacked some staff on racial and political grounds, and
sent in his own people.
He subsidised the People’s receiver (Volksempfanger) and by 1939 70% of households had such
a radio receiver. Loudspeakers were located in public places - and places of work and ‘radio
wardens’ appointed to make sure that only the proper programmes were listened to.
He also nationalised most of the German press and amalgamated all the news agencies into the
state run DNB. finally he introduced the daily press conference at the ministry to give ‘guidance’
to editors about how to deal with the news.
Just how effective this was to become is revealed in the campaign towards the end of the war to
fight on to the end (Total War Campaign) which was orchestrated by Goebbels and led to the
German people sacrificing their economy and society in the name of Nazism.
CONCLUSIONS.
Social Reaction or Social revolution?
Difficult to construct a balance sheet of social change in Nazi Germany (Kershaw, p132.) Nazism
certainly destroyed working class organizations and reshaped class relations in favour of
employers. It made inroads in many aspects of German society in a radical ‘modernising’ manner
(Kershaw, p 135)
For Ralph Darrendorf Nazism completed the retarded social revolution in Germany which both
the Kaiser Reich and Weimar Republic had failed to do. (Society and Democracy in Germany,
1968). A view supported by D. Shoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution, 1968) It did so by
destroying the old social patterns and norms of peasant and family life and the innate
Conservatism of German society. Tradition links between class and status in Germany were
destroyed by Nazism. This was an unintentional outcome of the Nazi state.
Kershaw states that the Nazi state did not produce a ‘social revolution either objectively or
subjectively in the minds of its citizens. Nazism attempted to alter people’s values and belief
systems and this was a long term goal thwarted by war and the regimes destruction.
Nazism did not fundamentally alter class relationships but it did pave the way for the post-war
Modernisation of German society. Nazism was ‘a parasitic growth on the old social order’
(Kershaw, p149) It never achieved a totalitarian Nazification of the German economy and society.