Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich

Author:Volker Ullrich [Ullrich, Volker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History: WW2, History, to read, Biography & Autobiography, Politics & Political Science, on kindle
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

17

Dictatorship by Division, Architecture of Intimidation

“What does it feel like, Herr Reichskanzler, being a Reichskanzler?” Sefton Delmer asked Hitler in February 1933, shortly after he was named German chancellor. “Do you know, Mr. Delmer,” Hitler answered. “I’ve made a great discovery. There’s nothing to this business of governing. Absolutely nothing. It is all done for you…you just simply sign your name to what is put before you, and that is that.”1 If Hitler did in fact say what the British journalist wrote in his memoirs, it was one of his typical poses. The truth is that in the early months of his government, the new man in charge was very diligent about performing his duties as chancellor.

He would arrive in his office punctually at 10 a.m., consult with his most important aides and force himself to read documents.2 He carefully prepared himself for cabinet meetings in an attempt to impress his conservative coalition partners with his knowledge of details.3 Hitler had no experience whatsoever in administration, so especially at the start he depended on ministerial civil servants. On the evening of 29 January 1933, in the Hotel Kaiserhof, he allegedly offered the ministerial counsel of the Interior Ministry, Hans Heinrich Lammers, the post of state secretary in the Chancellery with the words that he himself “was no politician and did not know anything of this administration business.” Hitler did not intend to change, but he also did not want to embarrass himself, so he felt he needed “a civil servant who knows his way around.”4

The more invulnerable Hitler thought his power was, however, and the less heed he had to pay Hindenburg and his conservative coalition partners, the more he tried to duck the routine duties of his office. With visible pleasure he told those around him again and again how people had “tried to get him used to how civil servants worked” and how he had been “so occupied reading through files and going through current issues” that he had no time “to take a calm look at larger problems.”5 Albert Speer quoted Hitler once saying over lunch: “In the first few weeks, every minute detail was laid before me to decide. I found piles of files on my desk every day, and no matter how hard I worked, they never got any fewer. Until I radically put an end to such senselessness.”6

When the ailing Hindenburg retreated to his East Prussian estate in the spring of 1934, Hitler’s self-imposed discipline concerning work dissipated noticeably, and he no longer bothered to maintain regular office routines. When he hired his assistant Fritz Wiedemann a few days before Christmas in 1933, he told him that he initially had had “great respect” for ministerial civil servants, but had since come to see that “they only put on their pants one leg at a time.”7

In a remarkably brief time, Hitler had learned how to use the bureaucratic apparatus for his own ends so that he no longer had to be constantly present in the Chancellery.

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