Hitler

a type of Politburo; Gauleiter conferences only took place at Hitler’s own behest, to hear a speech from the Führer, not to discuss policy; while a party senate was never called into existence. The party acquired, therefore, neither a coherent structure nor a systematic policy which it could enforce upon the state administration. Its essential nature – that of a ‘Führer party’ tied to emotively powerful but loosely-defined general aims embodied in the person of the Führer and held together by the Führer cult – ruled out both. Even so, once Heß was given in 1934 what amounted to veto rights over draft legislation by government ministers and, the following year, over the appointment of higher civil servants, the party had indeed made significant inroads into the purely governmental arena. The possibilities of intervention, however unsystematic, did now increase the party’s influence, above all in what it saw as crucial ideological spheres. Race policy and the ‘Church struggle’ were among the most important of these. In both areas, the party had no difficulty in mobilizing its activists, whose radicalism in turn forced the government into legislative action. In fact, the party leadership often found itself compelled to respond to pressures from below, stirred up by Gauleiter playing their own game, or emanating sometimes from radical activists at local level. Whatever the derivation, in this way, the continuum of radicalization in issues associated with the Führer’s aims was sustained.
    By the mid-1930s, Hitler paid little attention to the workings of the party. The dualism of party and state was never resolved – and was not resolvable. Hitler himself welcomed the overlaps in competence and lack of clarity. Sensitive as always to any organizational framework which might have constrained his own power, he undermined all attempts at‘Reich reform’ by Frick, aimed at producing a more rational authoritarian state structure.
    Hitler’s approach to the state, as to all power-relations, was purely exploitative and opportunistic. It was for him, as he had expressly stated in
Mein Kampf
, simply a means to an end – the vague notion of ‘upholding and advancing a community of physically and mentally similar beings’, the ‘sustaining of those racial basic elements which, as bestowers of culture, create the beauty and dignity of a higher type of human being’. It followed that he gave no consideration to forms and structures, only to effect. His crude notion was that if a specific sphere of policy could not be best served by a government ministry, weighed down by bureaucracy, then another organization, run as unbureaucratically as possible, should manage it. The new bodies were usually set up as directly responsible to Hitler himself, and straddled party and state without belonging to either. In reality, of course, this process merely erected new, competing, sometimes overlapping bureaucracies and led to unending demarcation disputes. These did not trouble Hitler. But their effect was at one and the same time to undermine still further any coherence of government and administration, and to promote the growing autonomy within the regime of Hitler’s own position as Führer.
    The most important, and ideologically radical, new plenipotentiary institution, directly dependent on Hitler, was the combined SS-police apparatus which had fully emerged by mid-1936. Already before the ‘Röhm-Putsch’, Himmler had extended his initial power-base in Bavaria to gain control over the police in one state after another. After the SS had played such a key part in breaking the power of the SA leadership at the end of June, Himmler had been able to push home his advantage until Göring conceded full control over the security police in the largest of the states, Prussia. Attempts by Reich Minister of the Interior Frick and Justice Minister Gürtner to curb autonomous police power, expanding through the unrestricted use of ‘protective custody’ and control of the growing domain of the concentration camps, also ended in predictable failure. Where legal restrictions on the power of the police were mooted, Himmler could invariably reckon with Hitler’s backing. On 17 June, Hitler’s decree created a unified Reich police under Himmler’s command. The most powerful agency of repression thus merged with the most dynamic ideological force in the Nazi Movement. Himmler’s subordination to Frick through the office