Working Toward the Führer

I was inspired by a tweet by @nycsouthpaw to read Ian Kershaw’s well-known essay “Working Toward the Führer”: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship. I was not disappointed; Kershaw gives a compelling analysis of the internal workings of a particular kind of authoritarian regime. In the interests of space, I will not quote the whole thing, so you will need to read the original for Kershaw’s observations on Stalin, Max Weber, succession planning, and other peripheral topics. But a number of passages about Hitler and how he ruled struck me as quite illuminating.

Kershaw opens by observing how detached Hitler was from the work of running a government:

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. 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. … 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 preferred to act by personal fiat, relying on individuals rather than on institutions:

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, 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.

The almost inevitable result of this management style was that his administration existed in a perpetual and increasing state of chaos:

I have just used the word 'system’ of Nazism. But where Soviet communism in the Stalin era, despite the dictator’s brutal detabilisation, remained recognisable as a system of rule, the Hitler regime was inimical to a rational order of government and administration. Its hallmark was systemlessness, administrative and governmental disorder, the erosion of clear patterns of government, however despotic.

This was already plain within Germany in the pre-war years as institutions and structures of government and administration atrophied, were eroded or merely bypassed, and faded into oblivion. It was not simply a matter of the unresolved Party-State dualism. The proliferation of 'special authorities’ and plenipotentiaries for specific tasks, delegated by the Führer and responsible directly to him, reflected the predatory character and improvised techniques immanent in Nazi domination. Lack of coherent planning related to attainable middle-range goals; absence of any forum for collective decision-making; the arbitrary exercise of power embedded in the 'leadership principle’ at all levels; the Darwinian principle of unchecked struggle and competition until the winner emerged; and the simplistic belief in the 'triumph of the will’, whatever the complexities to be overcome: all these reinforced each other and interacted to guarantee a jungle of competing and overlapping agencies of rule.

He was able to be a such a weak head of government because his base of support wasn’t dependent on the quality of his administration:

Since the mid-1920s, ideological orthodoxy was synonymous with adherence to Hitler. 'For us the Idea is the Führer, and each Party member has only to obey the Führer,’ Hitler allegedly told Otto Strasser in 1930. The build-up of a 'Führer party’ squeezed heterodox positions onto the sidelines, then out of the party. By the time the regime was established and consolidated, there was no tenable position within Nazism compatible with a fundamental challenge to Hitler. His leadership position, as the font of ideological orthodoxy, the very epitome of Nazism itself, was beyond question within the movement. Opposition to Hitler on fundamentals ruled itself out, even among the highest and mightiest in the party.