From Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany - Elites, Polyocracy, and the Decline of Civil Service from 1920 to 1944

Since the 1920s, in the so-called Weimar Republic, the bureaucracy on the national level developed from some single departments to into a complex executive system that maintained the republic. With 20 cabinets in 14 years the bureaucratic system became the anchor of stability and continuity. Adolf Hitler and his followers told their voters to purge the bureaucracy and break its power, which is an example of the hostility by the extremist right- and left-wing parties, that became stronger over times. This animosity had to be dealt with by the bureaucracy. After the National Socialists took over the government in January 1933 they started to convert the republic into a totalitarian state. In the beginning they tried to get rid of the bureaucracy, but Hitler and his followers soon realized, that they needed the civil servants’ competencies and experience. So instead of abolishing the officials, the National Socialists built up a second bureaucracy inside of the National Socialistic Workers’ Party. Every department of the administration got mirrored by a party organization, which rivaled with the ministries on competencies. Historians call this phenomenon polycracy, which means the coexist of concurrent authorities with the same or similar responsibilities. We want to illustrate how this polycratic system infiltrated the departments with party officials and working units over time. We expect that the composition of personnel in the departments shifted from professionals to ideologists, as the bureaucracy did shift from a normative into a prerogative state, as Fraenkel wrote in “The Dual State”. To show these effects we use data which focuses on the biographies of the top officials (ministers, state secretaries and directors general) in the national ministries at five points of time: First in the relatively early stage of the developing republic (1920), second in the stable democratic system (1927), then in the beginning of the Nazi-era (1934), at the peak of Nazi-power (1939) and at last in a phase of collapse (1944). With this data we can show the complex nature and the dynamics of recruitments to elite positions in the Nazi-system over time that made possible the strengthening of totalitarianism within a democratic system.