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The Bureaucracy and the Nazi Party

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

E. N. Peterson
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Extract

THE individual in the twentieth century finds himself dwarfed by two giant institutions which decide his political destiny: the state, with its efficient bureaucrat methodically signing papers that may mean success or failure, life or death, for everyman and his world; the other is the political party, which aspires to control the state by mobilizing the masses. Nineteenth-century bureaucracy tended to be rigid and authoritarian, yet unrelated to popular support and limited in its impact on daily life. The nineteenth- century liberal, suspicious of the state, attempted to protect the individual by further limiting the bureaucrat; the twentiethcentury liberal hopes to use the bureaucrat to limit the privately powerful, whereas the totalitarian party hopes to dominate the state and therewith to dominate everyman. When a monopolistic party controls a monolithic state, the individual seems to have no choice but to flee, to obey or to disappear into a concentration camp. Overt individual resistance appears senseless; overt group resistance extremely dangerous and almost certainly doomed to failure.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 1966 , pp. 172 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1966

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References

1 von Borch, Herbert, Obrigkeit und Widerstand (Tubingen, 1954), p. viGoogle Scholar.

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3 Ibid., p. 40.

4 Ibid.See also Neesse, Gottfried, Staatsdienst und Staatschicksal (Hamburg, 1955), p. 47Google Scholar. This veteran student of the bureaucracy affirmed that the Party never reached the first stage, Party commanding the state, much less the announced second stage, “Party and state are one.”

5 Captured German Documents, T81, Roll 185, frame 335537.

6 Burin, Frederic, “Bureaucracy and National Socialism,” in Merton, Robert, Reader in Bureaucracy (Glencoe, 1952), p. 42Google Scholar, lists 10 devices used by the Party to dominate the bureaucracy: 1. Transfer of state functions to “the living organization,” the Party; 2. Personal union of offices; 3. Parallelism, creating a parallel Party organization; 4. Nazification at the top; 5. Permeation; 6. Conversion to N.S.; 7. Dismissal; 8. Transfer; 9. Enforced compliance; 10. Replacement of law by discretion.

7 Bundes Archiv, Document R43 II/494. Sauckel is speaking for an Gauleiter dissatisfied with their powerlessness. See “Epp file” on Capt. Ger. Doc. T580, Roll 339.

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27 Bundes Archiv R43 II/707a.

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35 Ibid., 14529ff.

36 Ibid., 14533.

37 Ibid., 14579.

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40 Ibid., 14737.

41 Bundes Archiv, NS/vorl 1181a.

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62 Bundes Archiv, Reichkanzlei Document 421.

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64 Ibid., April 3, 1940.

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