Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944

677 Pages·2009·8.285 MB·English

by  Franze Neumann, Peter Hayes

B E H E M O T H
THE STRUCTURE AND PRACTICE OF
NATIONAL SOCIALISM
1933-1944
FRANZ NEUMANN
With an Introduction by Peter- Hayes
Ivan R. Dee ■ Chicago • 2009
PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
BEHEMOTH. Copyright © 1942,1944 by Oxford University Press. Copyright renewed
1970, 1972 by Mrs. Inge S. Marcuse. Introduction copyright © 2009 by Peter Hayes.
Behemoth was first published in 1942 and is here reprinted by arrangement with Michael
Neumann. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form. For information, address: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1332 North
Halsted Street, Chicago 60642, a member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Group. Manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-frte paper.
www.ivanrdee .com
PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
The assertions, arguments, and conclusions contained herein are those of the author or
other contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009923466
ISBN: 1-56663-819-7 (pbk : alk. paper)
TO MY WIFE

INTRODUCTION
by Peter Hayes
Franz N eumann ’s Behemoth is one of the classics of modem political
analysis. Recognized upon publication during World War II as the first
thoroughly researched unmasking of what the subtitle promised—the
structure and practice of Nazism—the book has remained a stimulus to
inquiry and debate to this day. The provocative and controversial cen­
tral argument, telegraphed by the choice of title, is that the Third Reich
neither expressed a consistent ideology nor possessed a coherent struc­
ture. Like the Behemoth in Jewish mythology and the writings of
Thomas Hobbes, Hitler’s regime was a chaotic, lawless, and amorphous
monster. Its policies expressed the sometimes overlapping and some­
times contending drives of the four symbiotic but separate power cen­
ters (the Nazi party, the German state bureaucracy, the armed forces,
and big business) that composed it. Both the enormous might and the
inherent vulnerability of Nazi Germany stemmed, according to Neu­
mann, from its very nature as a conspiracy among these four self-
interested groups, each of which sought to expand German power and
territory without ceding authority or status to any of the other parties.
This thesis, backed by the author’s at the time unrivaled command
of evidence culled from German newspapers, periodicals, and official
publications, quickly made Behemoth into a book that had consequences.
In 1943-1945, while Neumann was serving in Washington, D.C., in the
Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence
Agency, his work strongly influenced the formulation of America’s
goals for postwar Germany as the “four Ds,” each directed at one of the
colluding groups he had highlighted: denazification, democratization
(including the recruitment and training of civil servants), demilitariza­
tion, and decartelization. Immediately after the war, when Neumann
was a member of the prosecution staff preparing the Nuremberg Trials
of major war criminals, Behemoth stamped both the conception of the
American case and the organization of its supporting documents.
“Conspiracy” to commit crimes against peace and humanity was the
centerpiece of the American charges against not only the 22 principal
vii
Vlll INTRODUCTION BY PETER HAYES
war criminals brought before the International Military Tribunal in
1945-1946 but also against the 185 lesser figures from the Nazi party,
the state bureaucracy, the armed forces, and industry and banking who
were arraigned before American judges in the twelve Nuremberg Mili­
tary Tribunals of 1947-1949. Although this approach had multiple ori­
gins, not least in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the prosecution of
mobsters in the United States, the conspiracy charge also reflected the
impact of Neumann’s depiction of Hitler’s regime. So did the way the
United States categorized captured German records for use as evidence
in both sets of proceedings. Before being assigned numbers, relevant
papers were sorted among four groups, each with a distinct prefix that
referred to one of Neumann’s quadrumvirate of power structures (NO
= Nazi organization, that is, the party; NG = Nazi government;
NOKW = Nazi Military High Command; and NI = Nazi industry).
Significant as these responses to Behemoth were, they proved fleeting.
As the Cold War froze on a line through Germany, the United States
steadily backed away from the “four Ds,” turning denazification over
to the Germans, abandoning attempts at civil service reform, urging
the creation of a new West German army, and accepting the reconsol­
idation of the country’s largest banks and industrial enterprises. By
1955, when the Federal Republic of Germany recovered full sover­
eignty from the Western occupying powers, the United States had
completed a “retreat to victory” that forsook the specific objectives for
which Behemoth had pleaded in order to obtain German cooperation in
the larger purpose of building a nonaggressive and nonauthoritarian
government and society. Along the way, the legal notion of “conspir­
acy,” along with the interpretation of Nazi rule that it summarized, had
won little acceptance as a tool of international law. Indeed, the charge
was the least successful of the counts against the defendants at both
sets of Nuremberg trials: the International Tribunal found only eight
defendants guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace or hu­
manity, all of them high-ranking people closely associated with Hitler
in making national policy; upon final review of all cases, the Nuremberg
Tribunals did not convict a single individual so charged.
If the rulings at Nuremberg offered an early and shrewd indication
of where and how Behemoth came to seem unpersuasive, a nearly simul­
taneous and far less dramatic development elsewhere provided an ironic
harbinger of the book’s lasting value. In 1948, Franz Neumann joined
the faculty at Columbia University in New York and encountered a
INTRODUCTION BY PETER HAYES ix
young graduate student named Raul Hilberg, who had been impressed
by Behemoth's focus on the machinery of Nazi rule and the ways in
which preexisting structures had put their talent and experience to the
service of criminality. After he completed a master’s thesis under Neu­
mann’s direction on the role of the German bureaucracy in the murder
of the European Jews, Hilberg approached Neumann about supervising
a doctoral dissertation that would extend the story to cover the involve­
ment of the Nazi party, business, and the military as well. The professor
assented, but added the warning that tackling this topic would amount
to committing professional suicide since few people were interested.
Neumann died in an automobile accident in 1954, a year before Hil­
berg completed the dissertation, and thus never knew that Behemoth
had inspired what became The Destruction of the European Jews, the mon­
umental work, first published in 1961, that ultimately emerged as the
foundational text for the study of the Holocaust. Neither did Neumann
live to see the other enduring intellectual spin-offs of his work, such as
Tim Mason’s demonstration of “the primacy of politics” in Nazism (a
phrase that Neumann was among the first to highlight), William Sheri­
dan Allen’s deployment of Neumann’s concept of “atomization” to ex­
plain the Nazification of German society, Martin Broszat’s elaboration
of the incoherence of Nazi ideology, Hans Mommsen’s development
of the “functionalist” explanation of Nazi policymaking, Peter Huet-
tenberger’s emphasis on the “polycratic” nature of Nazi governance,
and countless other examples.
Both the fertility of Behemoth, its capacity to generate new explora­
tion and perception, and the book’s inclination to ideological over­
reach, which the Nuremberg trial judgments highlighted, had their
origins in Franz Neumann’s intellectual biography. Bom in 1900 to a
lower-middle-class Jewish family in Kattowitz, near Germany’s eastern
border, Neumann became an active Social Democrat as a teenager,
earned a doctorate in law in 1923, and embarked on a career as a labor
attorney, primarily representing unions, first in Frankfurt and then in
Berlin. As a supporter of the Weimar Republic and a Marxist, he was a
target of persecution almost from the moment Hitler came to power in
January 1933. A month’s imprisonment was enough to persuade him to
flee to England, where he took up graduate studies in political science
at the London School of Economics. There he completed a second
doctorate in 1936 under the direction of Professor Harold Laski, a cele­
brated figure on the British intellectual left, with a dissertation on the
X INTRODUCTION BY PETER HAYES
rise and fall of the rule of law. Laski thereupon recommended Neu­
mann to the Institute for Social Research, a collection of heterodox
Marxist thinkers that Max Horkheimer presciently had moved from
Frankfurt to New York on the eve of the Nazi takeover in Germany.
This was Neumann’s intellectual home until 1942, during the period in
which he wrote the first edition of Behemoth.
In short, Neumann was shaped by his German upbringing, his train­
ing as a lawyer and political scientist, not a historian, and his virtually
uninterrupted immersion in the political imagination of European so­
cialism. From these sprang the distinguishing formal characteristics of
Behemoth, for both good and ill—its nearly exclusive reliance on con­
temporary German source material; its preoccupation with legal philos­
ophy and with regulations, institutions, and lines of authority; its
inclination to fit empirical data into the framework of Marxist theory;
and its sometimes dauntingly dry and discursive prose style—as well as
the principal interpretive assertions, both sound and otherwise, in each
of the three parts into which Neumann organized the book: Nazi poli­
tics, economics, and society.
The greatest of Neumann’s insights into the political side of Nazi
rule concerned how policy was effected and popular compliance ob­
tained, and his take on these issues was unmistakably that of a German
lawyer and leftist. His legal training was indispensable to his capacity
to see through the Nazi facade of dictatorial unity and to perceive that
“the legal and administrative forms tell us very little” about the real
distribution of power in Nazi Germany (p. 227). Neumann recognized
that the Nazi regime, unlike most modem governing systems, became
from its outset ever less vertically and hierarchically organized, with
competencies apportioned among agencies and degrees of control over
policy indicated by rank. Instead the Third Reich developed into a
“task state,” in which specific goals were entrusted to prized individuals
outfitted with special authority in a fashion that cut across bureaucratic
domains and the lines of organization charts and gave rise to constant
turf battles, usually won by the officeholder with the strongest will and
web of allies, not necessarily the highest title. A sort of institutional
Darwinism was created on purpose, both because Hitler and his chief
lieutenants relished the rhetoric of “leadership” over that of “admini­
stration” and because in the Nazi drive for expansion, time always was
of the essence, shortcuts always in demand. Thus plenipotentiaries pro­
liferated and became more important than cabinet members, special
INTRODUCTION BY PETER HAYES xi
offices multiplied and overrode ministries. And, thought Neumann, this
constant improvisation and infighting worked, at least in the short run,
because the energies unleashed more than offset the confusion caused
(p. 524). Only someone with a taste for institutional study and the pa­
tience to parse the regime’s countless decrees and formal regulations
could perceive, from afar and before the postwar testimony and mem­
oirs of numerous Nazi insiders along with tons of captured documents
confirmed the point, the essentially haphazard and impulsive nature of
much of Nazi government.
Similarly, Neumann’s leftism fostered his attentiveness to the range
of techniques by which the Nazi regime maintained the loyalty of the
German populace. His attachment to the German working class and to
the positive aspects of German culture, backed by his awareness that
Hitler never received a majority of the vote in Germany before the
abolition of all other political parties, barred Neumann from seeing
Nazism as a manifestation of Germans’ deepest longings. Hitler came
to power, Neumann believed, because of the machinations of elites and
the feckless leadership of the Nazi Führer's chief political rivals (pp.
31-34). Germans did his bidding thereafter for a combination of rea­
sons other than straightforward enthusiasm for his ideas. Some of these
reasons fall under the heading of seduction, for example, Nazism’s skill
at “surrounding every perfidy with the halo of idealism” (p. 379) and
adroit use of “magical ceremonies” (p. 439). Above all, Hitler’s party
was diabolically adept at stealing the ideological clothes of Marxism (p.
193), especially as Nazi propaganda draped German expansionism in
the language of class warfare by depicting the Allies as plutocrats deter­
mined to suppress the proletarian Axis powers (p. 187). Other forces
inducing subordination of the people included corruption and terror.
On the one hand, the acceptance of property and jobs despoiled from
Jews and the involvement in their persecution, along with that of occu­
pied nations, created a sense of complicity that produced obedience.
On the other hand, the destruction of social groupings not permeated
by Nazism (atomization) and the omnipresent fear of provoking a polit­
ical system characterized “by the absence of any institutional limita­
tions upon . . . arbitrary power” generated conformism (p. 524; see also
pp. 365, 400, and 552). Nowadays, when a “voluntarist turn” in the
historiography of Nazi Germany is in vogue, underlining Germans’
widespread and “willing” participation in Nazi tyranny, Neumann’s de-
Xll INTRODUCTION BY PETER HAYES
piction of the role of violence in the relationship between regime and
populace remains a useful corrective.
Behemoth's analysis of the Nazi economy also benefited in key re­
spects from his legal and leftist cast of mind. Marxist interpretations of
fascism and Nazism treated them, above all, as “imperialist” move­
ments, seeing their expansionism as an expression of large-scale capital­
ism’s needs for markets and resources. If, as discussed below, the latter
part of this formula led Neumann astray, the former assuredly did not.
It concentrated his attention on war, conquest, and the demand for the
wherewithal to make them possible as not only the driving but also the
organizing principle of economic life in the Third Reich (p. 228). This
single-mindedness is what underlay the regime’s pursuit of autarky, that
is, maximum feasible economic self-sufficiency, which Neumann
rightly recognized (without having access to Hitler’s secret remarks to
this effect) as a “transitory” measure (pp. 329-331). And that pursuit is
what set off the unplanned but inexorable interventionist spiral that was
the hallmark of Nazi economic policy and that increasingly “regi­
mented” private enterprises (p. 261), impelling them to seek greater
influence in Berlin, not least by satisfying its demands (pp. 314-315).
Conversely, the regime’s endless appetite for output made the Reich
increasingly dependent on the largest, usually most efficient manufac­
turers, which led to increasing concentration of production in their
hands as contracts flowed their way and dispensable competitors were
shut down (pp. 267, 633). In this fashion, Neumann made clear, a proc­
ess of mutual cooptation characterized relations between big business
and the state in Nazi Germany, as each adapted to the other wherever
a common interest in maximizing output was present. In perceiving all
of this, Neumann anticipated two generations of research and debate
about the economy of Nazi Germany and laid bare many of the reasons
why it has proved so resistant to clear-cut categorization as either capi­
talist or state controlled.
Neumann’s treatment of German society under Nazism carefully ex­
amines assorted strata, institutions, and practices, but the level of de­
scriptive detail should not obscure the unconventional central
contentions on which his discussion rests, contentions that also reflect
his intellectual heritage. As a German Marxist, he simply would not and
could not believe that Nazism had cultural, rather than structural,
causes and impact. Unlike most British and French, and some Ameri­
can, observers in the 1940s, he saw the Third Reich as imposed on