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Nazi ideology’s historical roots predate the founding of the Party in 1920, but contemporary contributions to its thought also developed outside its ranks in the interwar years, notably among Germany’s upper-middle classes. One such grouping was high-ranking managers within German business and industry. This article is an edited version of a talk given to the Open History Society in April 2022.
Much of Nazi ideology was defined by what it opposed. The list is long. National Socialism was anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentarian, anti-democratic, anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Versailles Treaty, anti-intellectual and anti-Christian; it was hostile to freemasons, homosexuals, Gypsies, the mentally ill and the physically handicapped. After March 1933, freedom of speech, association and expression in print and film were abolished. Furthermore, the very concepts of equality before the law and impartiality of due process were undermined. The SS, the Gestapo and the Nazi Party had their own court systems, while use of ‘preventive custody’ allowed Nazi functionaries to incarcerate people indefinitely without trial in concentration camps. At a deeper level, National Socialism distrusted the judicial system itself, viewing it as an inflexible bureaucratic structure potentially impeding the execution of political and ideological policies.
Nazism had an atavistic Blood-and-Soil wing, exemplified by Walther Darré and Alfred Rosenberg who propounded an agrarian romanticism. This faction lauded the peasantry as intrinsically worthier than city-dwellers, as the truest bearers of the German spirit, and the purest examples of Aryan superiority. However, although figuring prominently in Nazi propaganda and in cultural representations such as vast annual swastika-bedecked harvest festivals and innumerable films depicting noble German peasants, in real political terms this conservative strand played second fiddle to the modernisers, technocrats and radicalisers in the Party. While opposed to Modernism as an artistic and intellectual movement, Nazism embraced the modernity of technology and economic organisation. Additionally, it did not just embody negative features, but promised the German people a rebirth, a regaining of national pride, a comradeship and sense of community, and tangible material benefits.
There is an important difference between the expressedideology of National Socialism seeking electoral support prior to 1933, and its ideology once in power. Very few people would have voted for a repressive police state, the mass murder of Jews and a European-wide war. However after 1933, greater emphasis was placed upon ideological precepts such as anti-Semitism which, although rife in the Party, had not been employed as a principal plank of Nazi electioneering, but gradually intensified from the unofficial boycott of 1933, through the Nuremberg Laws, Crystal Night in 1938, the ghettoisation of the Jews once the war had started, and the eventual implementation of the Final Solution
Although Nazism underwent changes between 1920 and 1945, it is still possible to recognise consistency in its ideology. The ideal of a Volksgemeinschaft or ‘people’s ethnic community’ portrayed Germany as a racially-exclusive nation where ‘equality of race’ was deemed the key to creating social harmony in a society that was profoundly unequal in economic and political terms. This Aryan Volksgemeinschaft had to guard against racial impurity while also maintaining racial health. The mentally ill, physically disabled, senile, and anyone else designated as a burden on society were treated as dispensable. Along with Gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, alcoholics and recidivist criminals, their fate was sterilisation, ‘euthanasia’, and the gas chambers.
National Socialism’s organisational structure was the Führerprinzip,or leadership principle, involving multiple competing hierarchies where unquestioning obedience to superiors was the rule. Such a polycratic, neo-feudal regime relied on a charismatic, purportedly omniscient supreme leader, Adolf Hitler, to preside over it, arbitrate internecine disputes and have the final incontestable say on everything. Leistung, or achievement, served as the measure of individual worth and reward. Essentially a form of meritocracy, although hedged around with racial impediments and subverted by rampant corruption, it illustrates how meritocracy per se is not necessarily a virtue. It depends upon what is valued, who sets those standards, and what the collateral costs are. The most efficient managers of slave labour were seen as meritorious in the Third Reich, but Fritz Sauckel, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer are nowadays viewed as monsters. Leistung within Nazi ideology operated upon the principle of the ends justifying the means, a dangerous tenet draining action of moral evaluation and restraint.
Nazi foreign policy grew directly out of the belief that Germans were racially superior, and that this gave them the right to treat non-Germans in any way they chose that would advance Germany’s interests. Projecting upon others their own Social-Darwinist dog-eat-dog Weltanschauung (worldview), National Socialism assumed that other races inevitably wanted to displace, destroy, debilitate or dominate the intrinsically superior Germans. This meant that periodic war was unavoidable, and that maintaining German superiority required a larger living space (Lebensraum) at the expense of racially-inferior neighbours.
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The Long-term Roots of National Socialism
A German culture of nationalist, racially-prejudiced, anti-democratic thinking predated the Nazis. It can be traced to the Wilhelmine era where academic illiberalism was rife, socially-exclusive sub-cultures proliferated, belief in a ‘national mission’ developed, and a deep-seated elitism and sense of entitlement informed the thinking of Germany’s ruling class and its collaborative bourgeoisie. A school of thought known as cultural elitism emerged, its best-known advocates being Heinrich von Treitschke, Jakob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche and Stefan George. They believed it was impossible to elevate the masses, that only a small minority of men could create or appreciate so-called ‘higher’ culture, and that elites should be shielded from popular pressures or else civilisation would crumble.
Von Treitschke, an influential historian and National Liberal Reichstag member, said, “Millions must till the soil and forge and plane, that a few thousand can research, paint and rule.” He argued that the bourgeoisie did not constitute a new social basis from which a more egalitarian society would flow, but was instead an elite which must be shielded from an inevitably inferior majority. Cultural elitism and a strand of liberal thinking both claimed that a small minority were exclusively endowed with genius, greatness, spirituality and leadership, and only that specially-equipped minority could understand what was best for society. What differentiated these right-wing views from more traditional conservative elitism was a belief in a more open elite – while genius might be heritable, it was equally likely to emerge at any level of society and should be encouraged and rewarded. While cultural elitism is not identical to racial elitism, nevertheless in elevating one national culture above other national cultures it encourages xenophobia, which is only a step away from notions of racial superiority. Although Nietzsche despised bombastic nationalism and was not an advocate of racial superiority, nevertheless his concept of the Übermensch or superior man ran through Nazism.
While von Treitschke talked in political terms, simultaneously a more ethereal strand of thinking emerged. This was the völkisch movement, völkischbeing a slippery term embracing populism, nationalism, racial exclusivity and a spirituality unique to Germans. In the later nineteenth century writers such as Arthur de Gobineau asserted there were distinct national characteristics which made some nations inherently culturally superior to others. When Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution emerged, it was distorted by the likes of Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Schallmeyer. They applied his theories to human biological development and claimed that cultural superiority derived from the abilities and achievements of more evolved racial types. This demonstrates cultural exceptionalism blending with race theories in a pseudo-scientific manner.
Equally important were currents of anti-Enlightenment, Romantic thinking which rejected rationalism and sought a revolution of character – the making of a ‘new man’ through tapping into a supposed authentic German-ness. When combined with metaphysical claims about the power of the will to bend reality, this encouraged dangerous conceits about the destiny of Germany. The publisher Eugen Diederichs coined the term New Romanticism to describe what he saw as a need for a “higher transcendent reality”. He believed there were mystical fluids that united the individual with the community (the Volksgemeinschaft), and asserted that society must be guided and ruled by a specially-endowed elite possessed of the purest German essence. He believed that German soil and the German people were uniquely connected to the cosmos. The outlandishness of his beliefs is typical of a lot of the pseudo-spiritual babble that washed around at the turn of the 20th century, and which would be absorbed into much right-wing thinking in the 1920s. Diederichs lived on until 1930 publishing the revolutionary-conservative magazine, Die Tat (The Deed) which advocated extreme nationalism, sympathised with the Nazis, and had a substantial, predominantly middle-class readership.
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Social Location of Nazi Support & Senior Business Management
For many years after WWII, historians described Nazism’s membership, its voters, and the source of its ideas as emanating from the lower-middle class – from small-business people, artisans, shopkeepers and lower-level white-collar workers. The term ‘petit bourgeois’ used to describe these social sectors was spoken of contemptuously by writers from both right and left. Seen as poorly educated and lacking in culture, commentators from the right dismissed them as a gullible, bigoted herd easily led by demagogues. From the left they were branded as class traitors and a reactionary grouping fearful of the inevitability of their decline and loss of status. This image was challenged in the 1980s with studies showing that the section of the petit bourgeois comprising lower-level white-collar workers was far more likely to vote for the Social Democrats than the Nazis. Equally significant were detailed studies of professional groups such as doctors, lawyers, university teachers and engineers which demonstrated that these well-educated upper-middle class sectors were early and enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi Party, joining their ranks before the popular electoral swell of 1930. In 1982, Richard Hamilton published a study of the crucial election of July 1932 when the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. Concentrating upon the major cities, he found the highest proportion of votes for the Nazis occurred almost invariably in the wealthiest districts, reaching 60% in some places.
Among the upper-middle class of post-WWI Germany was a relatively new sector which had emerged from the expansion in size of companies from the late nineteenth century, and from the increasing complexity of industrialised capitalist economies. These were the senior managers of businesses such as manufacturing, engineering, finance, insurance, transport and service industries – modern businesses which were so large and elaborate that traditional family control had either been diluted by external investors or had no option but to put substantial executive power in the hands of specialist managers.
This new senior-management level comprised plant managers, department managers, company lawyers, salaried engineers and other directly-employed professionals, sales chiefs, advertising managers, personnel directors, accountants and so on. Between 1925 and 1933 there were roughly 350,000 such senior managers in Germany. Within this sector arose an association called VELA, Vereinigung der leitenden Angestellten, or the Organisation of Leading Salaried Employees. Founded in December 1918 it endured until December 1934, peaking at roughly 34,000 adherents. Among its aims was the elevation of its members to the status of doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Previously, collective representation of this new sector had been practically non-existent, but now senior managersgravitated towards each other, recognising the similar positions which they occupied between owners and lower-level employees.
VELA’s managerial membership went to great lengths to emphasise their dissimilarity from lower-level white-collar workers, rejecting any petit-bourgeois taint. The editor of its bi-monthly journal, Der Leitende Angestellte or The Leading Salaried Employee, said specifically that “Senior salaried employees are distinguished from ordinary white-collar workers because the latter carry out administrative work, while the job of the former is intellectually creative.” VELA was open only to salaried employees and not to the owners of businesses or boards of directors. Both the association and contemporary sociologists identified senior management as a distinct social group, defining them as “employees with the power and responsibilities of employers”.
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VELA’s Ideological Development 1919-1933
Senior management perceived their prospects to be linked inextricably with capitalism and economic liberalism – but not with political or democratic liberalism. These were modern, forward-looking people in all but a political sense. To many at the time, Germany appeared to be divided between two forces – capital and labour – whose weights were roughly balanced and whose mutual hostility was entrenched. If a sector of society could interpose itself between these antagonistic blocs and act as a bridge between them, it would be a third force, small but powerful, and being neither worker nor employer, it could claim to be devoid of their narrow self-interests which hampered the nation as a whole.
VELA’s ideological position rested upon claims of a self-identity which possessed a special characteristic, described by the term geistig, which combines a sense of the spiritual and the intellectual, and which VELA came to understand as transcendent superiority. In 1921 in their periodical, a statement of upper management’s unique position in society was laid out: “The setting apart of the upper stratum of employees rests upon the recognition of the special economic value, special social importance, and special social and economic living requirements of such intellectually independent professional work.” In 1922, a leader article said that lack of leadership was the problem of the age. It was VELA’s task to foster the emergence of effective leaders within its own field, while also encouraging a wider development of leadership personalities among all the professions so that they might come together with VELA to create a pinnacle organisation, a united front of achievers and leaders – examples of Leistung and the Führerprinzip developing outside the Nazi Party.
An article in 1923 in the midst of the Great Inflation crisis said those engaged in geistig work should be recognised and given more power. It was in the interests of Germany that senior managers should have substantial pay differentials so that such creative men did not have to waste energy finding ways to satisfy their material needs. It was a great monstrosity that highly-educated, skilled managers spent their free time dealing in the markets for cigars, antiques and paintings to maintain the standard of life to which they had previously been accustomed. The very quality of their work and performance would inevitably decline if they did not enjoy an elevated standard of living. No matter how substantial the means of production or how great the size of the workforce, these factors were of no value without the independent geistig personality of leaders in the workplace. Like Nazi ideology, VELA’s worldview was based upon an appeal to both self-interest and selfless idealism – a reconciling of privilege and power with patriotism.
A further development in the periodical was the promotion of the concepts of will and willpower as the creative forces in human nature. These qualities, it claimed, were inherent characteristics of men capable of engaging in geistig activities. Originating with Arthur Schopenhauer in the early 19th century, the theory of the power of the will informed Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch who can create and impose his own laws. This was also a favourite theme of National Socialism, and particularly dear to Hitler.
Engineers comprised a sizeable presence among VELA members, many working in electrical and engineering firms, notably Siemens, AEG, Bosch and Zeiss. Jeffrey Herf and Kees Gispen have studied the strong connections between the engineering profession and the Nazi Party in the late 1920s. The apparent gulf between spirituality and technology was bridged by the assertion that technology contributed to a spiritualising of labour through its identification with creativity. The heroic cult of the artist-genius became attached to the realm of technology, and was a recurring theme in early twentieth-century German literature where the inventor was portrayed as an embattled genius struggling against conformity, standardisation, and both capitalist and socialist collectivisation.
While VELA’s writers were constructing a worldview marrying the concepts of spirituality (especially their own unique spirituality) with technology and economic vibrancy, the Nazis were doing the same. Gottfried Feder, an engineer, economist and Nazi-Party founder, promoted the spurious nonsense that Jewish financial capital was evil and parasitic, while the Aryan-German variety was productive and creative. More pragmatic in his approach was Fritz Todt, Hitler’s favourite engineer, who concentrated upon convincing engineers that it was their technical rationality rather than their souls which the Nazis sought to mobilise in the national interest. Opening the 1939 Berlin Automobile Exhibition, Joseph Goebbels said, “National Socialism [has always] approved technology while providing safeguards through disciplining it and imbuing it with soul in order to put it to the use of our people and our culture.”
A vast tapestry of upper-middle-class Vereine (organisations) permeated Germany throughout the Weimar years. From the late 19th century, the German bourgeoisie founded a wide range of social organisations encompassing charitable associations, museum clubs, art societies, choral and concert societies, sporting and leisure clubs, and a host of others. In the 1920s and early 1930s, participation in these associations provided a crucible where political awareness and opinion-forming were forged under a cloak of supposed ‘apoliticism’. This apoliticism was actually an ideology in its own right, hostile to mass parties and democracy, strongly nationalist and virulently anti-socialist. It was less a rejection of politics than a rejection of existing political parties. At a time when the established bourgeois parties were proving ineffectual, this nexus of Vereine provided an arena where political awareness was heightened.
Between 1924 and 1929, a period of relative calm and stability in the Weimar Republic, Nazi ideas and influence spread into many bourgeois organisations. The subsequent economic and social crisis of the Depression heightened the ‘apoliticism’ of bourgeois society which now, paradoxically, required organised political representation to make any impact. Thus a surge of support from this sector of society flowed towards the Nazis as the only party which had not participated in any Weimar administration and whose advocacy of a Volksgemeinschaft chimed well with the supposed apolitical belief in a system which transcended individual interests and class conflict. The diffusion of Nazi thought within civic society was as important as propaganda or the cult of Hitler. However, not only were ideas imported into the Vereine by members who had joined the Nazi Party, but they were also fashioned independently withinthe Vereine, and convergedwith many aspects of National Socialism. VELA was a typical example of this phenomenon.
Peter Fritzsche has interpreted this emerging worldview as an expression of a desire for both social inclusion and political exclusion – a Volksgemeinschaft which defined who the “real” people, the authentic Germans were and spoke for them. This is essentially a populist interpretation of Nazism and has much merit. The vocabulary of decay, which is commonly used to describe the Weimar Republic, could easily and misleadingly be elided into a description of a lack of political activism among the bourgeoisie. This gives a false impression of the vitality of the bourgeois community and its members’ political awareness and involvement in the interwar years. The breakthrough by the Nazis actually required that prior political mobilisation which uccurred within the social organisations. Middle-class politics were much more purposive and rational, and far less fraught with the anxieties of ‘pre-modern tendency theories’ than was once believed.
In 1925, an article argued that equality as a positive good was drawn from misconceived ideas of natural rights. The course of human progress was produced by a productive inequality of economic and social functions among individuals and groups. Evaluation of the individual’s worth should ideally be based on personal Leistung. Inequality had nothing to do with individualistic egotism or social injustice, but was a deep and intrinsic social and cultural necessity. A follow-up article then suggested that Germany was being held back by the self-interest and sluggish conservatism of the owners of the country’s large industrial concerns. This was VELA’s first overt critique of capitalism, or rather of Weimar Germany’s capitalist leadership. In 1926, it targeted laissez-faire capitalism itself, arguing it created anonymous share-capitalism, cartels and monopolies, and placed concentrated power in the hands of big-business owners enslaved by the demands of profit. It was time for a new social order to emerge, for rational men with insight into the true requirements of a Volksgemeinschaft in this modern industrialised age to take control of Germany’s political direction. A different sort of leadership from party-political interest-merchants representing grasping financiers and stock-exchange speculators was essential.
Although VELA increasingly critiqued capitalist leadership, it reserved its greatest contempt for trade unions and their political representation. Articles scorned the fact that manual workers and people who only carried out menial tasks should be allowed to participate in Works Councils or be consulted by government. Those without education and deficient in culture, should not be permitted to influence matters about which they knew nothing. Like the Nazis, VELA believed in differential worth among individuals. When a Reich Economic Advisory Board was established in 1927, writers in the journal were apoplectic that senior managers were not given separate representation, but were lumped together with lower-level employees, undifferentiated from clerks and office-boys.
In 1927, the journal carried a glowing review of Volk ohne Raum (People without Space) a book by Hans Grimm. Grimm was an extreme right-wing völkisch nationalist who popularised the idea of Germany’s need for Lebensraum, claiming that the nation was doomed to breed itself into starvation and extinction if it were not allowed to expand territorially. He argued that the old upper classes no longer had the ability or vitality to bring about a thorough reform of German conditions, an analysis very similar to the one being applied by VELA to the owners of big business. Grimm was an unabashed advocate of elitism, imperialism and a purified German race, with an intense fear of, and hostility towards, Bolshevism and socialism. He supported the Nazis and greeted enthusiastically their coming to power. These sentiments were reciprocated by Hitler, who adopted Volk ohne Raum as a slogan to promote his doctrine of imperialist expansionism.
From 1929, articles focused increasingly upon personality and leadership. Leaders, it said, had different mentalities from the masses, being innovative, selfless and culturally/spiritually superior. By this time VELA was a long way down the road of the Führerprinzip. Phrases appeared mirroring Nazi slogans – Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz (community benefit before self-interest) and the sinister term Volksgenosse (racial comrade). As the Weimar Republic entered its final phase, the journal featured overtly political articles, accusing Chancellor Heinrich Brüning of incompetence, but reserving its most virulent spleen for his successor, Franz von Papen. He was accused of running a dictatorship on behalf of a feudal class, his cabinet of barons described as ‘Männer ohne Volk’ (men without [the] people); his government, it said, was representative of only a small circle of industrial capitalists and large landowners. VELA had gone full-on radical, its right-wing politics shorn of any traditional conservatism it once held.
Soon it was supporting policies proposed by the Nazis. In 1930, it approved excluding foreign seasonal workers and expelling all non-Germans. In 1931 it discussed banning the wives of government officials from paid employment, later extending this to all married women. In 1932 it supported compulsory labour service to instil discipline and duty into young Germans. Articles in Der leitende Angestellte appeared which carried the critique of current capitalism even further, claiming that financial interests and banking power were turning the country into one mammoth economic concern with unnerving similarities to the Russian communist system. For the Nazi Party, ‘finance capital’ was code for ‘Jews’ and they repeatedly talked of Judeo-Bolshevism, claiming that the Russian Revolution was a Jewish plot to rule the world.
By the end of 1932, VELA’s political analysis had caught up with its ideologicalworldview. It had been praising the virtues of strong, personality-infused business leadership for years and now wanted that reflected in the political world. Following the March 1933 election, it declared that the Nazi Party’s attitudes and aims were the same as those which VELA had been espousing since 1919. Subsequent articles in 1933 were lifted almost verbatim from ones printed up to ten years earlier to demonstrate the dovetailing of VELA’s historical thinking with that of National Socialism. At its 1933 AGM, a new virtue was added to the model of the ideal senior manager – faith, which naturally meant faith in the Nazi worldview. In the Third Reich faith elided easily into loyalty, and loyalty became a demand for unquestioning obedience. Within ten years, many senior managers in Nazi Germany’s larger firms would be applying their ‘special skills’ to negotiating the hire of slave labour from the SS and working these people to death for the greater good of the Fatherland – a sinister application of their vaunted bridge between capital and labour.
