Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

By 1939, of 1.5 million civil servants 28.2 percent were party members, 7.2 percent belonged to the SA, and 1.1 percent belonged to the SS. The act of 1933, which expelled non-Ayrans and political unreliables, affected only 1.1 percent (or 25 out of 2,339) of the top civil servants. But new recruits were overwhelmingly party members so that, in time, the bureaucracy would have become almost completely Nazi. The Civil Service Act of 1937 did not require party membership, but the candidate had to be loyal to the Nazi idea. In practice, 99 percent of those appointed to the grade of assessor (the lowest academic rank) were party members from 1933 to 1936. However, a law of December 28, 1939 stated, what had always been understood, that in his civil service work a party member was not subject to party orders but only to the orders of the civil service superior. Here again the lower ranks were more subject to party control by means of the office “party cell” which permitted party members to accomplish their ends by terror. This opens up an important, if nonofficial, aspect of this subject.

A chief change was that where formerly the bureaucracy governed by rational, known rules, under the Nazis it increasingly governed by irrational and even unknown rules. Neither earlier nor later were these rules made by the bureaucracy itself, and to some extent the later rules, because of the bureaucracy’s well-known antidemocratic proclivities, may have been more acceptable to the bureaucracy. More important was the influence of party terrorism, through the SA, the SS, and the secret police (Gestapo). Even more important was the growth, outside of the bureaucracy, of a party organization which countermanded and evaded the decisions and actions of the regular bureaucracy. The regular police were circumvented by the party police; the regular avenues of justice were bypassed by the party courts; the regular prisons were eclipsed by the party’s concentration camps. As a result, Torgler, acquitted by the regular courts of the charge that he conspired to burn the Reichstag, was immediately thrown into a concentration camp by the secret police; and Niemoller, having served a brief term for violation of the religious regulations, was taken from a regular prison to a concentration camp.

The Reichswehr Officers’ Corps was not coordinated, but found itself more subject to the Nazis than it ever was to the Weimar Republic. The republic could never have murdered generals as Hitler did in 1934. This weakening of the power of the army, however, was not in relationship to the party as much as it was in relationship to the state. Previously, the army very largely controlled the State; under the Third Reich the state controlled the army; but the party did not control the army and, for failure to do so, built up its own army (SS). There was a statutory provision which made it illegal for members of the armed services to be simultaneously members of the party. This incompatibility was revoked in the autumn of 1944. However, the army was quite completely subjected to Hitler as chief of the state although not as Führer of the Nazi Party. The army had always been subordinated to the chief of the state. When Hitler obtained this position (with army consent) at the death of Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, he strengthened his position by requiring army officers to take their oath of loyalty to himself personally, and not merely to the German Fatherland as had been done previously. All this was possible because the army, although not coordinated, generally approved of what the Nazis were doing and, where they occasionally disagreed, did so only for tactical reasons. The relations between the two were well stated by Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Reich minister of war and commander in chief of the armed forces until February, 1939:

“Before 1938-1939, the German generals were not opposed to Hitler. There was no reason to oppose Hitler since he produced the results which they desired. After this time some generals began to condemn his methods and lost confidence in the power of his judgment. However, they failed as a group to take any definite stand against him, although a few of them tried to do so and, as a result, had to pay for this with their lives or their positions.” To this statement it is necessary only to add that the German Officers’ Corps maintained its autonomous condition and its control of the army by the destruction of its chief rival, the SA, on June 30, 1934. For this it paid on August 2, 1934. After that, it was too late for it to oppose the movement, even if it had wished to do so.

The position of the industrialists in Nazi society was complex and very important. In general, business had an extraordinary position. In the first place, it was the only one of the Quartet which drastically improved its position in the Third Reich. In the second place, it was the only one of the Quartet which was not coordinated significantly and in which the “leadership principle” was not applied. Instead, industry was left free of government and party control except in the widest terms and except for the exigencies of war, and was subjected instead to a pattern of self-regulation built up, not on the “leadership principle,” but on a system where power was proportional to the size of the enterprise.

In these strange exceptions we can find one of the central principles of the Nazi system. It is a principle which is often missed. We have been told that Germany had a corporate state or a totalitarian state. Neither was true. There was no real corporate organization (even fraudulent, as in Italy and Austria), and such an organization, much discussed before and after 1933, was quickly dropped by 1935. The term “totalitarian” cannot be applied to the German system of self-regulation, although it could be applied to the Soviet system.

The Nazi system was dictatorial capitalism—that is, a society organized so that everything was subject to the benefit of capitalism; everything, that is, compatible with two limiting factors: (a) that the Nazi Party, which was not capitalist, was in control of the state, and (b) that war, which is not capitalist, could force curtailment of capitalist benefits (in the short run at least). In this judgment we must define our terms accurately. We define capitalism as “a system of economics in which production is based on profit for those who control the capital.” In this definition one point must be noted: the expression “for those who control the capital” does not necessarily mean the owners. In modern economic conditions large-scale enterprise with widely dispersed stockownership has made management more important than ownership. Accordingly, profits are not the same as dividends, and, in fact, dividends become objectionable to management, since they take profits out of its control.

The traditional capitalist system was a profit system. In its pursuit of profits it was not primarily concerned with production, consumption, prosperity, high employment, national welfare, or anything else. As a result, its concentration on profits eventually served to injure profits. This development got the whole society into such a mess that enemies of the profit system began to rise up on all sides. Fascism was the counterattack of the profit system against these enemies. This counterattack was conducted in such a violent fashion that the whole appearance of society was changed, although, in the short run, the real structure was not greatly modified. In the long run Fascism threatened even the profit system, because the defenders of that system, businessmen rather than politicians, turned over the control of the state to a party of gangsters and lunatics who in the long run might turn to attack businessmen themselves.

In the short run the Nazi movement achieved the aim of its creators. In order to secure profits it sought to avert six possible dangers to the profit system. These dangers were (1) from the state itself; (2) from organized labor; (3) from competition; (4) from depression; (5) from business losses; and (6) from alternative forms of economic production organized on nonprofit bases. These six all merged into one great danger, the danger from any social system in which production was organized on any basis other than profit. The fear of the owners and managers of the profit system for any system organized on any other basis became almost psychopathic.