Franz L. Neumann - Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944

The Structure and Practice of
National Socialism

THE STRUCTURE AND PRACTICE OF

NATIONAL SOCIALISM

19331944

FRANZ NEUMANN

With an Introduction by Peter Hayes

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-free 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 978-1-56663-819-7

TO MY WIFE

by Peter Hayes

FRANZ NEUMANNS Behemoth is one of the classics of modern political analysis. Recognized upon publication during World War II as the first thoroughly researched unmasking of what the subtitle promisedthe structure and practice of Nazismthe book has remained a stimulus to inquiry and debate to this day. The provocative and controversial central argument, telegraphed by the choice of title, is that the Third Reich neither expressed a consistent ideology nor possessed a coherent structure. Like the Behemoth in Jewish mythology and the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Hitlers regime was a chaotic, lawless, and amorphous monster. Its policies expressed the sometimes overlapping and sometimes contending drives of the four symbiotic but separate power centers (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 Neumann, 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 authors 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 19431945, 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 Americas 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), demilitarization, 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 war criminals brought before the International Military Tribunal in 19451946 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 Military Tribunals of 19471949. Although this approach had multiple origins, 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 Neumanns depiction of Hitlers 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 Neumanns 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 reconsolidation of the countrys largest banks and industrial enterprises. By 1955, when the Federal Republic of Germany recovered full sovereignty 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 conspiracy, 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 humanity, 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 simultaneous and far less dramatic development elsewhere provided an ironic harbinger of the books lasting value. In 1948, Franz Neumann joined the faculty at Columbia University in New York and encountered a young graduate student named Raul Hilberg, who had been impressed by Behemoths 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 masters thesis under Neumanns 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 involvement 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 Hilberg completed the dissertation, and thus never knew that Behemoth had inspired what became The Destruction of the European Jews, the monumental 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 Masons demonstration of the primacy of politics in Nazism (a phrase that Neumann was among the first to highlight), William Sheridan Allens deployment of Neumanns concept of atomization to explain the Nazification of German society, Martin Broszats elaboration of the incoherence of Nazi ideology, Hans Mommsens development of the functionalist explanation of Nazi policymaking, Peter Huettenbergers emphasis on the polycratic nature of Nazi governance, and countless other examples.