The Reich Government

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Translated from Third Reich originals. Covers economics, social welfare, law and legislation plus several short profiles of political leaders.

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SC. 111pp.

Germany’s Leaders

MOST of the men who have held the leading positions in German public life since 1933 were previously unknown or very little known, outside a limited circle of friends and colleagues. In the case of those few whose names figured prominently in the daily press the idea which the public had of them was often quite a distorted one, owing to the fierce spirit of controversy that dominated domestic politics during the years immediately preceding the National Socialist Revolution. The astonishing recovery that has taken place since 1933 is an historical phenomenon which has attracted the attention of the world. And hence it is that the outside world now takes such a lively interest in the personality of Adolf Hitler and his immediate collaborators. In this little pamphlet an attempt will he made to sketch in broad outline the profiles of some of those political leaders who have taken a prominent part in the work of national reconstruction which has been accomplished since 1933 and is still being accomplished.

Outsiders may be struck by the diversities of age, origin and professional career, which characterise the men around Hitler. During the years of political, social, economic and spiritual distress which followed the War and the Inflation adversity brought together some of the best men from all grades and classes of the nation. In the beginning most of them were urged forward individually and independently by a passionate feeling of abhorrence for the decomposition and decay into which the Nation and State were falling. What brought those men together and welded them into a unit was a profound faith in a restored and reinvigorated German Reich under the inspiration of the idea which Adolf Hitler had promulgated.

The internal political struggle which was carried on during the post-War period forged into an indissoluble community all those men who had to bear together the stress and peril of the strife. The distracted conditions of the time called for men of character and passionate devotion to ideals and developed these characteristics in them during that long and difficult period of trial. And so it happened that on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed supreme control of Germany, he did not have to go around looking for ministers, after the parliamentarian fashion. He knew who were the men around him and he knew the special talents that were respectively suited to the various tasks that had to he carried out in the work of building up the broken nation.

In Germany today Party and State are welded together in an indissoluble unity. The same idea finds various forms of expression in the various branches of organization. It is not that the Party serves the State or that the State serves the Party. Both serve the German nation as a whole, each in its own way. And so it comes about that National Socialism is the modern expression of the idea which was originally the inspiration of the democratic movement also but which the democratic movement departed from and even sometimes openly contradicted. This idea meant that the life of the State springs from the life of the people as a fountain from its source. All political and administrative organization, the constitution and even the State itself, are man’s handiwork and will pass away and give place to others, as does the individual man himself. But the people is everlasting. To its welfare and its future all must be subordinated, the individual as well as the State. It is from this belief that the phenomenon has grown which is the hallmark of the New Germany, namely the absolute unity of ideas and opinions on all vital questions affecting the nation. Thus it was that from Hamburg to Vienna a united chorus of Ja’s was registered on the Sunday of the plebiscite, April 10, 1938, when the Führer asked the electorate to sanction the re-union of Austria with Germany and therewith the creation of a common Reich which had been the dream of the German people through many centuries of their history.

The Party is the organized expression of the will of the people and functions through a series of offices at the head of each of which is a Reich Director(Reichsleiter). Though a Reich Director of the Party may also be a Cabinet Minister, the two functions do not overlap, as their respective aims are quite distinct. A Reich Director is responsible for the affairs of a certain special branch within the Party organization; whereas the duties of a Cabinet Minister are concerned with those general legal and administrative measures which give outer embodiment to the inner essence of the State and its relations towards other bodies and towards the citizens. The German form of government is distinguished by the fact that all power is concentrated in the hands of a supreme leader. And this is so not only in regard to the political forces of the nation but also in regard to the military and economic forces.