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Führerprinzip

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Official poster from the Wochenspruch der NSDAP series, 16 February 1941. The inscription reads: “The Führer is always right"

The Führerprinzip (German pronunciation: [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp] ⓘ, Leader Principle) was the basis of executive authority in the government of Nazi Germany. It placed the Führer's word above all written law, and meant that government policies, decisions, and officials all served to realize his will. In practice, the Führerprinzip gave Adolf Hitler supreme power to dictate the ideology and policies of his political party; this form of personal dictatorship is considered a basic characteristic of Nazism.[1] According to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, the Nazi German political system meant "unconditional authority downwards, and responsibility upwards."[2] At each level of the pyramidal power structure the sub-leader, or Unterführer, is subordinate to the superior leader, and responsible to him for all successes and failures.[3] At the Bamberg Conference on 14 February 1926, Hitler invoked the Führerprinzip to bolster his power,[4] and affirmed his total authority over Nazi administrators at a party membership meeting in Munich on 2 August 1928, several years before the party seized power in 1933.[3]

The Nazi government implemented the Führerprinzip throughout German civil society. Business organizations and civil institutions were thus led by an appointed leader, rather than managed by an elected committee of professional experts. This included the schools, both public and private,[5] the sports associations,[6] and the factories.[7] As a common theme of Nazi propaganda, the "Leader Principle" demanded personal obedience to the supreme leader who—by personal fiat and force of will—could override the rule of law as exercised by elected parliaments, appointed committees, and bureaucracies.[8]

The German cultural interpretation of national leaders—from king Frederick the Great (r. 1740–1786) to chancellor Otto von Bismarck (r. 1871–1890)—and the historic example of the Nordic saga, were used to support an ultranationalist idea of the Führerprinzip, the political authority of a visionary supreme leader deified by the people.[9]

Ideology

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The political science term Führerprinzip was coined by Hermann von Keyserling, an Estonian philosopher of German descent.[10] Ideologically, the Führerprinzip considers each organisation to be a hierarchy of leaders, wherein each leader (Führer) has absolute responsibility in and for his own area of authority, is owed absolute obedience from subordinates, and answers only to his superior officers; the subordinate's obedience, on the other hand, includes personal loyalty to the leader.[11] Conceptually, the Führerprinzip made Adolf Hitler supreme leader of the German nation.[12]

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The total state

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By presenting Hitler as the incarnation of auctoritas—a saviour-politician who personally dictates the law—the Führerprinzip functioned as a color of law legalism that conferred executive, judicial, and legislative powers of government on the person of Hitler, as Führer und Reichskanzler, the combined leader and chancellor of Germany. In the political aftermath of the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, Hitler justified the violent political purge of Ernst Röhm and the Strasserite faction of the Nazi Party as a matter of German national security: “In this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was therefore the supreme judge of the German people!”[13]

As a proponent of the Führerprinzip, the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt defended the political purges and the felony crimes of the Nazis individually, and the Nazi Party collectively, because the Führerprinzip stipulated that the Führer's word supersedes any contradictory law.[14][15] In the book The Legal Basis of the Total State (1933), Schmitt said the Führerprinzip was the ideological and political foundation of the Nazi German total state, writing:

The strength of the National Socialist State lies in the fact that it is [ruled] from top to bottom and in every atom of its existence ruled and permeated with the concept of leadership [Führertum]. This principle [of leadership], which made the movement strong, must be carried through systematically, both in the administration of the State and in the various spheres of self-government, naturally taking into account the [ideologic] modifications required by the particular area in question. But it would not be permissible for any important area of public life to operate independently from the Führer concept.[15]

Political cohesion

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For the Nazi Party, the "Leader Principle" was considered integral to political cohesion. In July 1921, to affirm personal control of the Nazi Party, Hitler confronted Anton Drexler—the original founder of the Nazi Party—to thwart Drexler's proposal to unite the Nazi Party with the larger German Socialist Party. Fervently opposed to this idea, Hitler angrily left the Nazi Party on 11 July 1921. However, understanding that the absence of Hitler would destroy the party's credibility, party committee members accepted Hitler's demand to replace Drexler as party chairman, and Hitler rejoined.[16][17]

The increased number of party members split into two ideological factions; the northern faction of the Nazi Party championed the Third position politics of Strasserism (revolutionary nationalism and economic antisemitism), and was led by Otto Strasser and Gregor Strasser; the southern faction of the party followed Hitler's brand of Nazism, and was led by Hitler himself. The two factions greatly disagreed about the Führerprinzip, and whether or not it was an essential principle for the party. On 14 February 1926, at the Bamberg Conference, Hitler defeated all factional opposition and established the Führerprinzip as the managing principle of the Nazi Party.[18]

Leader Principle in action

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The Führerprinzip allowed Hitler, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Rudolf Hess to politically purge the Nazi Party on the Night of the Long Knives in summer of 1934.

In 1934, Hitler imposed the Führerprinzip on the government and civil society of Weimar Germany in order to create the Nazi state.[19] While the fascist government did not require the German business community to adopt Nazi techniques of administration, it did mandate that businesses rename their management hierarchies using the politically correct language of the Führerprinzip ideology.[6]

Hermann Göring said to British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson that, “When a decision has to be taken, none of us counts more than the stones on which we are standing. It is the Führer, alone, who decides”.[20]

Propaganda

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Nazi propaganda films promoted the Führerprinzip as a basis for the organization of the civil society of Germany. In the 1933 film Flüchtlinge, the hero rescues refugee Volga Germans from Communist persecution by a leader who requires unquestioning obedience.[21] Der Herrscher altered the source material to depict the hero, Clausen, as the stalwart leader of his munitions company, who, when faced with the machinations of his children, decides to disown them and bestows the company to the state, confident that there will arise a factory worker who is a true leader of men capable of continuing Clausen's work.[22] In the 1941 film Carl Peters the protagonist is a decisive man of action who fights and defeats the African natives to establish German colonies in Africa, but Peters is thwarted by a parliament who does not understand that German society needs the Führerprinzip.[23]

At school, adolescent boys were taught Nordic sagas as the literary illustration of the Führerprinzip possessed by the German heroes Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck.[24]

This was combined with the glorification of the one, central Führer, Adolf Hitler. During the Night of the Long Knives, it was claimed that his decisive action saved Germany,[25] though it meant (in Goebbels's description) suffering "tragic loneliness" from being a Siegfried forced to shed blood to preserve Germany.[26] In one speech Robert Ley explicitly proclaimed "The Führer is always right."[27] Booklets given out for the Winter Relief donations included The Führer Makes History,[28][29] a collection of Hitler photographs,[30] and The Führer’s Battle in the East[31] Films such as Der Marsch zum Führer and Triumph of the Will glorified him.

War crime defense

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At trial in Israel in 1961, the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann said that the Führerprinzip excused his actions because he was obeying superior orders.

In the aftermath of the Second World War (1937–1945), at the Allied war-crime Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946) of captured Nazi leaders in Germany, and at the Eichmann Trial (1961) in Israel, the criminal defence arguments presented the Führerprinzip as a concept of jurisprudence that voided the military command responsibility of the accused war criminals, because they were military officers following superior orders.

In the book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt said that, aside from a personal desire to improve his career as an administrator, Eichmann did not manifest antisemitism or any psychological abnormality. That Eichmann personified the banality of evil given the commonplace personality Eichmann displayed at trial, which communicated neither feelings of guilt nor feelings of hatred whilst he denied personal responsibility for his war crimes. In his defense, Eichmann said he was "doing his job", and that he always tried to act in accordance with the categorical imperative proposed in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.[32]

See also

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References

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Notes

  1. ^ "Chapter VII". Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Vol. I. The Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, U.S. Government Printing Office. 1947. p. 191. Archived from the original on 27 December 2024.
  2. ^ Kershaw, Ian (1999). Hitler: 1889–1936, Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton. p. 294. ISBN 978-0-393-04671-7.
  3. ^ a b Orlow, Dietrich (1969). The History of the Nazi Party: 1919–1933. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 134–136. ISBN 978-0-8229-3183-6.
  4. ^ Williamson, David G. (2013). The Third Reich (4th ed.). London and New York: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-317-86246-8.
  5. ^ Nicholas (2006), p. 74
  6. ^ a b Krüger, Arnd (1985). "'Heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen ...?' Das Ringen um den Sinn der Gleichschaltung im Sport in der ersten Jahreshälfte 1933". In Buss, Wolfgang; Krüger, Arnd (eds.). Sportgeschichte: Traditionspflege und Wertewandel. Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Henze (in German). Duderstadt: Mecke. pp. 175–196. ISBN 3-923453-03-5.
  7. ^ Grunberger, Richard (1971). The 12-Year Reich. New York: Henry Holt. p. 193. ISBN 0-03-076435-1.
  8. ^ Leiser (1975), pp. 29–30, 104–105.
  9. ^ Nicholas (2006), p. 78.
  10. ^ Keyserling, Hermann (1921). Deutschlands wahre politische Mission. University of California Libraries. Darmstadt : O. Reichl. pp. 28–32.
  11. ^ "Befehlsnotstand & the Führerprinzip". Shoah Education. Archived from the original on 5 January 2018.
  12. ^ Agamben, Giorgio (2008). State of Exception (Nachdr. ed.). Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. pp. 2, 84 et al. ISBN 978-0-226-00925-4.
  13. ^ Sager, Alexander; Winkler, Heinrich August (2007). Germany: The Long Road West: 1933–1990. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-926598-5.|page=37
  14. ^ Griffin, Roger (2000). "11: Revolution from the Right: Fascism". In Parker, David (ed.). Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition: In the West 1560–1991. London: Routledge. p. 193. ISBN 0-415-17294-2.
  15. ^ a b Griffin, Roger (1995). Fascism. Oxford University Press. pp. 138, 139. ISBN 978-0-19-289249-2.
  16. ^ Mitcham (1996), pp. 78–79.
  17. ^ Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 100–103. ISBN 978-0-393-06757-6.
  18. ^ Mitcham (1996), pp. 120–121
  19. ^ Nicholas (2006), p. 74
  20. ^ Gunther, John (1940). Inside Europe. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 19.
  21. ^ Leiser (1975), pp. 29–30
  22. ^ Leiser (1975), p. 49
  23. ^ Leiser (1975), pp. 104–105
  24. ^ Nicholas (2006), p. 78
  25. ^ Koonz (2003), p. 96
  26. ^ Rhodes, Anthony (1976) Propaganda: The art of persuasion: World War II, New York: Chelsea House. p. 16 ISBN 0877540292
  27. ^ Ley, Robert (3 November 1937). "Fate – I Believe!". German Propaganda Archive. Calvin University.
  28. ^ "Winterhilfswerk Booklet for 1933". German Propaganda Archive. Calvin University.
  29. ^ "Winterhilfswerk Booklet for 1938". German Propaganda Archive. Calvin University.
  30. ^ "Hitler in the Mountains". German Propaganda Archive. Calvin University. Retrieved 13 January 2024.
  31. ^ "Hitler in the East". German Propaganda Archive. Calvin University.
  32. ^ Laustsen, Carsten Bagge; Ugilt, Rasmus (1 January 2007). "Eichmann's Kant". The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 21 (3): 166–180. doi:10.2307/jspecphil.21.3.0166. ISSN 0891-625X.

Bibliography

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