3 - The Führer State

Summary

The Nazis’ seizure of power abruptly ended Germany’s first democracy. However, the Nazis could rely upon authoritarian practices of governance that characterized the final period of the Weimar Republic. The shift toward a presidential system in the period from September 14, 1930 to January 30, 1933, proved normatively fateful. Hitler’s first measures as Chancellor simply continued the practice of ruling through presidential emergency decrees, thus creating the impression of political and legal continuity. In fact, he used those decrees under $ 48 to secure dictatorial power. The writings of legal theorists who endorsed the National Socialist takeover in 1933 paved the way for the acceptance of an authoritarian and eventually totalitarian state. The chapter examines how these legal thinkers (many of whom taught at universities and thus influenced the intellectual development of future jurists) justified Hitler’s accumulation of power, as when he, as Reich Chancellor, assumed the office of Reich President after Hindenburg’s death in August 1934. The nimbus enjoyed by Hindenburg as a former military general was co-opted by the Führer to bolster his image as a guardian of the state. We will also examine how Nazi legal theorists described the constitutional foundations of the Third Reich.