by Peter Hayes, quoted from the 1942 edition

I wonder whether this sounds familiar these days….., Franc

INTRODUCTION
by Peter Hayes
F r a n z N e u m a n n ’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. T h e 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, Hitler’s 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 selfinterested
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), 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
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 Military
Tribunals of 1947-1949. 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 N eumann’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;
N O KW = 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 country’s largest banks and industrial enterprises. By
19 5 5 , when the Federal Republic o f 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 N uremberg 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 o f all cases, the Nuremberg
Tribunals did not convict a single individual so charged.
I f 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 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 o f criminality. After he completed a master’s thesis under N eu 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 involvement
of the Nazi party, business, and the military as well. T he 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 o f 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 Mason’s demonstration of “the primacy of politics” in Nazism (a
phrase that Neumann was among the first to highlight), William Sheridan
Allen’s deployment of Neumann’s concept of “atomization” to explain
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 Huettenberger’s
emphasis on the “polycratic” nature of Nazi governance,
and countless other examples.
Both the fertility of Behemoth, its capacity to generate new exploration
and perception, and the book’s inclination to ideological overreach,
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 celebrated
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 Neumann
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 o f Behemoth.
In short, Neumann was shaped by his German upbringing, his training
as a lawyer and political scientist, not a historian, and his virtually
uninterrupted immersion in the political imagination of European socialism.
From these sprang the distinguishing formal characteristics of
Behemoth, for both good and ill—its nearly exclusive reliance on contemporary
G erman source material; its preoccupation with legal philosophy
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 politics,
economics, and society.
The greatest of Neumann’s insights into the political side of Nazi
rule concerned how policy was effected and popular compliance obtained,
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 Th ird 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 o f “leadership” over that of “administration”
and because in the Nazi drive for expansion, time always was
of the essence, shortcuts always in demand. Thus plenipotentiaries proliferated
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 patience
to parse the regime’s countless decrees and formal regulations
could perceive, from afar and before the postwar testimony and memoirs
of numerous Nazi insiders along with tons of captured documents
confirmed the point, the essentially haphazard and impulsive nature of
much o f Nazi government.
Similarly, Neumann’s leftism fostered his attentiveness to the range
o f 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 reasons
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 determined
to suppress the proletarian Axis powers (p. 187). Other forces
inducing subordination o f 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 occupied
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 o f provoking a political
system characterized “by the absence of any institutional limitations
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 deXll
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 respects
from his legal and leftist cast of mind. Marxist interpretations of
fascism and Nazism treated them, above all, as “ imperialist” movements,
seeing their expansionism as an expression of large-scale capitalism’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 Hitle r ’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 “ regimented”
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 manufacturers,
which led to increasing concentration o f 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 process
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 o f research and debate
about the economy o f Nazi Germany and laid bare many o f the reasons
why it has proved so resistant to clear-cut categorization as either capitalist
or state controlled.
Neumann’s treatment of German society under Nazism carefully examines
assorted strata, institutions, and practices, but the level of descriptive
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 American,
observers in the 1940s, he saw the Third Reich as imposed on
INTRODUCTION BY PETER HAYES xiii
Germans by powerful social structures (his conspiratorial quadrumvi
rate), not as a manifestation of deeper historical or cultural patterns. In
consequence he thought the elaborate apparatus of Nazi social policy
had not penetrated German society very deeply; certainly it had not
overcome class distinctions. Thus, as he confidently stated in the preface
to the first edition o f Behemoth, “a complete military defeat will
uproot National Socialism from the mind of the German people” (p.
xiii). So quick a change would occur, Neumann insisted, because “there
is no specific German trait responsible for aggression and imperialism
but that imperialism is inherent in the structure of the German monopolist
economy, the one-party system, the army, and the bureaucracy”
(pp. 475-476). It followed logically that the reform of these retrograde
institutions through decartelization, denazification, demilitarization,
and democratization would transform Europe’s most restless nationstate
into a normal and progressive one. Arguably, Neumann’s prognosis
was remarkably astute, even though the degree of structural change
required turned out to be less than he thought necessary.
….