NEUMANN. Franz Behemoth

Prévia do material em texto

B E H E M O T H
TH E STRUCTURE AND PRACTICE OF 
NATIONAL SOCIALISM 
1 9 3 3 - 1 9 4 4
FRANZ NEUM A NN
W ith an Introduction by Peter- Hayes
Ivan R. Dee ■ Chicago • 2009
P U B L I S H E D I N A S S O C I A T I O N W I T H T H E 
U N I T E D S T A T E S H O L O C A U S T M E M O R I A L M U S E U M
INTRODUCTION 
by Peter H ayes
F r a n z N e u m a n n ’s Behemoth is one of the classics of m odem political 
analysis. Recognized upon publication during World W ar II as the first 
thoroughly researched unmasking of what the subtitle promised— the 
structure and practice o f Nazism— the book has remained a stimulus to 
inquiry and debate to this day. T h e provocative and controversial cen-
tral argument, telegraphed by the choice of title, is that the T hird Reich 
neither expressed a consistent ideology nor possessed a coherent struc-
ture. Like the Behemoth in Jewish mythology and the writings of 
Thom as Hobbes, H itle r’s regime was a chaotic, lawless, and amorphous 
monster. Its policies expressed the sometimes overlapping and some-
times contending drives o f the four symbiotic but separate power cen-
ters (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 N eu-
mann, from its very nature as a conspiracy among these four self- 
interested groups, each o f 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 
o f evidence culled from Germ an newspapers, periodicals, and official 
publications, quickly made Behemoth into a book that had consequences. 
In 1943-1945, while Neum ann was serving in Washington, D.C., in the 
Office o f Strategic Services, the forerunner o f the Central Intelligence 
Agency, his work strongly influenced the formulation o f 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), demilitariza-
tion, and decartelization. Immediately after the war, when Neumann 
was a member of the prosecution staff preparing the Nurem berg Trials 
o f 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 o f the American charges against not only the 22 principal
v ii
Vlll IN T R O D U C T IO N BY PETER HAYES
war criminals brought before the International M ilitary 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 N urem berg Mili-
tary Tribunals of 1947-1949. Although this approach had multiple ori-
gins, not least in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the prosecution of 
mobsters in the United States, the conspiracy charge also reflected the 
impact o f N eum ann’s depiction of H itle r’s regime. So did the way the 
U nited States categorized captured Germ an 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 N eum ann’s quadrumvirate o f power structures (N O 
= N azi organization, that is, the party; N G = Nazi government; 
N O K W = Nazi M ilitary H igh Command; and N I = Nazi industry).
Significant as these responses to Behemoth were, they proved fleeting. 
As the Cold W ar froze on a line through Germany, the United States 
steadily backed away from the “ four D s,” turning denazification over 
to the Germans, abandoning attempts at civil service reform, urging 
the creation of a new W est G erm an army, and accepting the reconsol-
idation o f the country’s largest banks and industrial enterprises. By 
19 5 5 , when the Federal Republic o f Germ any recovered full sover-
eignty from the W estern occupying powers, the U nited States had 
completed a “ retreat to victory” that forsook the specific objectives for 
which Behemoth had pleaded in order to obtain Germ an cooperation in 
the larger purpose o f building a nonaggressive and nonauthoritarian 
governm ent and society. Along the way, the legal notion o f “conspir-
acy,” along with the interpretation of Nazi rule that it summarized, had 
won little acceptance as a tool o f international law. Indeed, the charge 
was the least successful o f the counts against the defendants at both 
sets o f N urem berg trials: the International Tribunal found only eight 
defendants guilty o f conspiracy to commit crimes against peace or hu-
manity, all o f them high-ranking people closely associated with H itler 
in making national policy; upon final review o f all cases, the Nurem berg 
Tribunals did not convict a single individual so charged.
If the rulings at N urem berg offered an early and shrewd indication 
o f where and how Behemoth came to seem unpersuasive, a nearly simul-
taneous and far less dramatic development elsewhere provided an ironic 
harbinger o f the book’s lasting value. In 1948, Franz N eum ann joined 
the faculty at Columbia University in New York and encountered a
IN T R O D U C T IO N 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 e u -
m ann’s direction on the role of the German bureaucracy in the murder 
o f the European Jews, H ilberg approached N eum ann about supervising 
a doctoral dissertation that would extend the story to cover the involve-
m ent o f the Nazi party, business, and the military as well. T h e professor 
assented, but added the warning that tackling this topic would amount 
to com m itting professional suicide since few people were interested. 
N eum ann died in an automobile accident in 1954, a year before H il-
berg completed the dissertation, and thus never knew that Behemoth 
had inspired what became The Destruction o f the European Jews, the m on-
umental work, first published in 1961, that ultimately emerged as the 
foundational text for the study o f the Holocaust. N either did Neum ann 
live to see the o ther enduring intellectual spin-offs of his work, such as 
T im M ason’s demonstration of “ the primacy o f politics” in Nazism (a 
phrase that N eum ann was among the first to highlight), William Sheri-
dan Allen’s deployment o f N eum ann’s concept o f “atomization” to ex-
plain the Nazification of Germ an society, M artin Broszat’s elaboration 
of the incoherence of Nazi ideology, Hans M om m sen’s development 
o f the “ functionalist” explanation of Nazi policymaking, Peter H uet- 
tenberger’s emphasis on the “polycratic” nature of Nazi governance, 
and countless other examples.
Both the fertility of Behemoth, its capacity to generate new explora-
tion and perception, and the book’s inclination to ideological over-
reach, which the N urem berg trial judgments highlighted, had their 
origins in Franz N eum ann’s intellectual biography. Bom in 1900 to a 
lower-middle-class Jewish family in Kattowitz, near Germ any’s eastern 
border, N eum ann became an active Social D em ocrat 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 H itler came to power in 
January 1933. A m o n th ’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. T here he completed a second 
doctorate in 1936 under the direction of Professor Harold Laski, a cele-
brated figure on the British intellectual left, with a dissertation on the
X IN T RO D U C TIO N BY PETER HAYES
rise and fall of the rule o f law. Laski thereupon recommended N eu-
mann to the Institute for Social Research, a collection of heterodox 
Marxist thinkers that Max H orkheim er presciently had moved from 
Frankfurt to New York on the eve of the Nazi takeover in Germany. 
This was N eum ann’s intellectual home until 1942, during the period in 
which he wrote the first edition o f Behemoth.
In short, N eum ann was shaped by his Germ an upbringing, his train-
ing as a lawyer and political scientist, not a historian, and his virtually 
uninterrupted immersion in the political imagination of European so-
cialism. From these sprang the distinguishing formal characteristics of 
Behemoth, for both good and ill— its nearly exclusive reliance on con-
temporary G erm an source material; its preoccupation with legal philos-
ophy 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 N eum ann organized the book: Nazi poli-
tics, economics, and society.
T he greatest o f N eum ann’s insights into the political side of Nazi 
rule concerned how policy was effected and popular compliance ob-
tained, and his take on these issues was unmistakably that of a German 
lawyer and leftist. H is 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 Germ any (p. 227). N eum ann recognized 
that the Nazi regime, unlike most m odem governing systems, became 
from its outset ever less vertically and hierarchically organized, with 
competencies apportioned among agencies and degrees o f control over 
policy indicated by rank. Instead the T h 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 o f organization charts and gave rise to constant 
tu rf battles, usually won by the officeholder with the strongest will and 
web of allies, not necessarily the highest title. A sort o f institutional 
Darwinism was created on purpose, both because H itler and his chief 
lieutenants relished the rhetoric o f “leadership” over that o f “admini-
stration” and because in the Nazi drive for expansion, time always was 
of the essence, shortcuts always in demand. T hus plenipotentiaries pro-
liferated and became more im portant than cabinet members, special
IN T R O D U C T IO N 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 pa-
tience to parse the regim e’s countless decrees and formal regulations 
could perceive, from afar and before the postwar testimony and m em -
oirs o f num erous Nazi insiders along with tons o f captured documents 
confirmed the point, the essentially haphazard and impulsive nature of 
m uch o f Nazi government.
Similarly, N eum ann’s leftism fostered his attentiveness to the range 
o f techniques by which the Nazi regime maintained the loyalty o f the 
G erm an populace. H is attachment to the Germ an working class and to 
the positive aspects of G erm an culture, backed by his awareness that 
H itler never received a majority o f the vote in Germany before the 
abolition o f all o ther political parties, barred N eum ann from seeing 
Nazism as a manifestation of Germ ans’ deepest longings. H itler came 
to power, N eum ann believed, because o f the machinations of elites and 
the feckless leadership o f the Nazi Führer's chief political rivals (pp. 
31-34). Germans did his bidding thereafter for a combination o f rea-
sons o ther 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 o f idealism” (p. 379) and 
adroit use o f “magical ceremonies” (p. 439). Above all, H itler’s party 
was diabolically adept at stealing the ideological clothes o f Marxism (p. 
193), especially as Nazi propaganda draped Germ an expansionism in 
the language of class warfare by depicting the Allies as plutocrats deter-
mined to suppress the proletarian Axis powers (p. 187). O ther forces 
inducing subordination o f the people included corruption and terror. 
O n the one hand, the acceptance o f property and jobs despoiled from 
Jews and the involvement in their persecution, along with that of occu-
pied nations, created a sense of complicity that produced obedience. 
O n the other hand, the destruction of social groupings not permeated 
by Nazism (atomization) and the omnipresent fear o f provoking a polit-
ical system characterized “by the absence of any institutional limita-
tions upon . . . arbitrary power” generated conformism (p. 524; see also 
pp. 365, 400, and 552). Nowadays, when a “voluntarist tu rn” in the 
historiography of Nazi G erm any is in vogue, underlining G erm ans’ 
widespread and “willing” participation in Nazi tyranny, N eum ann’s de-
X ll IN T R O D U C T IO N 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 re-
spects from his legal and leftist cast o f mind. Marxist interpretations of 
fascism and Nazism treated them , above all, as “ im perialist” move-
ments, seeing their expansionism as an expression o f large-scale capital-
ism’s needs for markets and resources. If, as discussed below, the latter 
part of this formula led N eum ann 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 o f economic life in the T h ird Reich (p. 228). This 
single-mindedness is what underlay the regim e’s pursuit o f autarky, that 
is, maximum feasible econom ic self-sufficiency, which N eum ann 
rightly recognized (without having access to H itle 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 o f Nazi econom ic policy and that increasingly “ regi-
m ented” private enterprises (p. 261), impelling them to seek greater 
influence in Berlin, not least by satisfying its demands (pp. 314-315). 
Conversely, the regim e’s endless appetite for output made the Reich 
increasingly dependent on the largest, usually most efficient manufac-
turers, which led to increasing concentration o f production in their 
hands as contracts flowed their way and dispensablecompetitors were 
shut down (pp. 267, 633). In this fashion, N eum ann made clear, a proc-
ess o f mutual cooptation characterized relations between big business 
and the state in Nazi Germany, as each adapted to the o ther wherever 
a common interest in maximizing output was present. In perceiving all 
o f this, N eum ann anticipated two generations o f research and debate 
about the economy o f Nazi G erm any and laid bare many o f the reasons 
why it has proved so resistant to clear-cut categorization as either capi-
talist or state controlled.
N eum ann’s treatm ent of G erm an society under Nazism carefully ex-
amines assorted strata, institutions, and practices, but the level o f de-
scriptive detail should no t obscure the unconventional central 
contentions on which his discussion rests, contentions that also reflect 
his intellectual heritage. As a G erm an Marxist, he simply would not and 
could no t believe that Nazism had cultural, ra ther than structural, 
causes and impact. Unlike most British and French, and some Ameri-
can, observers in the 1940s, he saw the T h ird Reich as imposed on
IN T R O D U C T IO N BY PETER HAYES xiii
Germ ans by powerful social structures (his conspiratorial quadrumvi
rate), no t as a manifestation o f deeper historical or cultural patterns. In 
consequence he thought the elaborate apparatus o f Nazi social policy 
had not penetrated G erm an society very deeply; certainly it had not 
overcome class distinctions. Thus, as he confidently stated in the pref-
ace to the first edition o f Behemoth, “a complete military defeat will 
uproot National Socialism from the mind o f the Germ an people” (p. 
xiii). So quick a change would occur, N eum ann insisted, because “there 
is no specific G erm an trait responsible for aggression and imperialism 
but that imperialism is inherent in the structure o f the Germ an m onop-
olist economy, the one-party system, the army, and the bureaucracy” 
(pp. 475-476). It followed logically that the reform of these retrograde 
institutions th rough decartelization, denazification, demilitarization, 
and democratization would transform Europe’s most restless nation-
state into a normal and progressive one. Arguably, N eum ann’s progno-
sis was remarkably astute, even though the degree of structural change 
required turned out to be less than he thought necessary.
Productive o f insight as N eum ann’s formative influences were, they 
also had downsides. Behemoth abounds with unquestioned and doctri-
naire Marxist cliches about matters such as the history of Imperial G er-
many (pp. 4 -11), the origins o f its naval building program (pp. 
203-106), and especially the forces that drove G erm an imperialism 
(“m onopoly capitalism,” p. 14; “ the policies of [Germany’s] industrial 
leadership,” p. 202) and brought on W orld W ar II (“the internal antag-
onisms o f the G erm an econom y,” p. 202), and readers should be wary 
o f these. Among the notable accomplishments o f intense academic re-
search and debate since 1945 on G erm any’s role in the onset o f both 
world wars has been the thorough discrediting of the notion that G er-
man industry and finance played major parts in pushing their nation 
toward conflict, however instrumental they were in fitting Germany to 
fight. In this connection, as in others, both N eum ann’s Marxism and 
his training as a political scientist blinded him, since together they 
urged him to see history as made not by diverse individuals or contin-
gent events but by the rather mechanical interaction of m onolithic 
blocs of actors— in a word, by "structures.” Abstraction, reification, and 
oversimplification were the frequent results, particularly when N eu -
mann purported to be providing historical explanations.
Even more serious were the effects of his angle of vision as a German, 
a lawyer cum political scientist, and a leftist in skewing his account
XIV IN T RO D U C TIO N BY PETER HAYES
of three significant aspects of the “structure and practice of National 
Socialism”: the existence and importance of Nazi ideology, the impulse 
behind Nazi anti-Semitism, and the role of big business in the Nazi 
economic system. In all three instances N eum ann contributed some-
thing indispensable, and then overreached. T he m atter o f Nazi ideol-
ogy is emblematic. Surely N eum ann was correct and instructive in 
stressing the opportunism of Nazi doctrine (p. 37), its “versatility” on 
specific points o f policy (p. 438), and the blurry contours of its central 
racist concepts (German, Nordic, Aryan); but his claims that Nazism 
lacked a “basic” (p. 39) “political or social” (p. 437) theory and thus 
consisted of nothing but shifting aims and goals seems highly dubious. 
H itler had a theory of society, namely that it followed the law of the 
jungle, and his biological materialism— the view that all history pivots 
around the contest among races for space, on the basis o f which they 
can feed and breed their way to new rounds of growth— may have been 
an imitation of M arx’s dialectical materialism, but that did not make it 
any less theoretically fundamental. L enin’s policies to stabilize the Rus-
sian Revolution in the 1920s show that bolshevism, contrary to what 
N eum ann implies, was no less willing than Nazism to adapt its social 
and economic policies to short-term considerations or to prioritize 
ideological principles. T he egocentrism of class and the egocentrism of 
nation or race were different in the key respect that the former had a 
broader audience, but otherwise they had much in common, not least a 
claim that anything done in their name was morally right. N eum ann’s 
labored insistence that Nazi ideology did not measure up to that label 
attests to both his unease with the similarity and the illusions of many 
leftist intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. So does his specious and— 
even at the time, after the Ukrainian famine and the G reat Purges— 
scandalous claim that only Nazism, and not bolshevism, engaged in 
“ the extermination of helpless individuals” (p. 112).
In treating the Nazi regim e’s anti-Semitism, N eum ann got far more 
right than wrong, as measured by the present state of research, but 
he mixed sage observation with convenient surmising nonetheless. H e 
understood that popular anti-Semitism in Germany owed more to re-
lentless Nazi propaganda after 1933 than to deep-seated hatred (pp. 
h i , 121), and he cautioned that “anti-Semitism . . . is . . . more than a 
mere device” (p. 123) for manipulating the G erm an public; but he 
could not bring himself to treat persecution as the product o f an obses-
sion, rather than of opportunism. T hus Aryanization, that is, the take-
IN T R O D U C T IO N b y PETER HAYES XV
over of Jews’ jobs and their property, was launched to please non-Jewish 
capitalists and largely redounded to the benefit of big business (p. 117); 
thus the pogrom of Novem ber 1938 was instigated as a “diversion” 
from Nazi economic actions that amounted to a betrayal o f promises to 
help the middle class (p. 116). In both these examples, detailed histori-
cal research has shown, N eum ann mistook effect for cause, in the proc-
ess ignoring more powerful motivations that fit less conveniently with 
his overall interpretation of Nazi policymaking. T h e driving impulse 
behind both Aryanization and the timing o f the pogrom, historians now 
largely agree, was H itler's conviction that Jews had represented a sub-
versive elem ent during W orld W ar I and would do so again during its 
sequel, which he regarded as increasingly imminent. T herefore Jews 
had to be subjected to ever more intense pressureto leave the country. 
To be sure, N eum ann lacked access to the documentation that since 
1945 has made this clear. T h e point is not that he erred but rather that 
he provided a certain sort o f explanation that fit comfortably into his 
overall interpretation, and readers should be attentive to the difference 
between what N eum ann could know and what he could only guess at 
when Behemoth was written.
O ne field in which knowledge has advanced particularly far and fast 
in recent years is the study of the place of big business in the Nazi 
regime. T h e results suggest that on this topic Neum ann was inclined 
not only to conflate outcomes and causes but also on occasion to mis-
represent even the evidence he had. Historians now generally concur 
that G erm an corporate leaders played little part in bringing H itler to 
power except insofar as they helped create and prolong the economic 
catastrophe from which he profited politically. Specialists also agree 
that G erm an industry and finance adapted their business strategies to 
the goals o f H itle r’s foreign policy, rather than vice versa; the pursuit 
o f living space was his, not their, idea. Thus, though N eum ann was no 
doubt right to emphasize that the productive power o f G erm an indus-
try became one of the pillars o f the T h ird Reich, and that the im por-
tance of that power gave business a strong bargaining position on some 
matters of policy, he goes too far when he depicts business as an equal 
partner o f the Nazi state and party. Corporations in fact became en-
meshed in a tight web of controls that severely circumscribed their ac-
tions and channeled their investments and energies in particular, state- 
serving directions. Neum ann acknowledged this with the remark that 
“ the state has indeed absolute supremacy” over the allocation of credit
XVI IN TRO D U C TIO N BY PETER HAYES
(p. 325) bur blurred the point by erroneously claming on the following 
page that “self-financing [that is, the deployment of a firm’s own earn-
ings and reserves] is completely free from regimentation.” On the con-
trary7, elaborate allocation arrangements governing access to building 
materials and labor assured that firms were barred from following their 
own production strategies rather than the regime’s.
A telling example of N eum ann’s eagerness to exaggerate corporate 
parity in Nazi Germany is provided by his discussion of the Continental 
Oil Corporation. This was a holding company formed in March 1941 
to control the stock in fuel-producing firms in occupied Europe, shares 
that had been or were about to be bought or seized from owners in 
enemy or occupied states. In N eum ann’s telling, the distribution of 
multiple-vote shares in Continental was “an absolute guarantee of the 
power of the capitalistic prom oters” (p. 277). In reality, as N eum ann’s 
source made clear but he omits from his account, the state-owned 
Borussia G m bH held 60 percent of the shares that carried fiftyfold vot-
ing rights and thus a commanding and virtually perm anent majority 
over the seven private enterprises that bought the remaining preferred 
and common stock. Continental was, in accord with N eum ann’s overall 
conception of Nazi rule, a “bargain” in which the state offered private 
firms a share of the spoils of conquest in return for their financial and 
technical help in exploiting those spoils. But it was not an equal bargain; 
the initiative for the project, as well as the preponderance of the profits 
and voting rights and a plurality of the seats (nine of nineteen) on Con-
tinental’s board all lay with the Germ an state. N eum ann compounds 
this distortion some pages later by selectively quoting an article about 
Continental in a G erm an journal to the effect that the government’s 
role in the firm represented no threat to private enterprise (pp. 356— 
358). H e leaves out, however, the passages that described Continental 
as a means of preventing excessive corporate influence over politics and 
of giving private business an opportunity to provide “proof o f its justi-
fication for existence.”
Despite such lapses, the remarkable point about Behemoth is how well 
the book stands up to scrutiny today, even though the first edition, 
containing four-fifths of the total text, was completed only two weeks 
after the United States entered W orld W ar II, and the second edition, 
which added the final fifth as an appendix, was finished nine months 
before Germany surrendered. Even now, more than sixty years after 
that second edition, substantial new studies continue to appear of topics
IN T R O D U C T IO N BY PETER HAYES xvii
N eum ann was among the first to consider, such as racial proletarianism 
as a Nazi propaganda theme (p. 188), the incoherence o f Nazi planning 
for occupied Europe (p. 178), how the regime financed its war (pp. 
349-35°), and even sexuality and reproductive policy in Nazi Germ any 
(p. 401).
M uch else could be said about the originality that ornam ents this 
book and the dogmatism that mars it. T h e former quality makes Behe-
moth essential reading for anyone interested in grasping the nature of 
H itle r’s regime, and the latter quality makes the book a significant his-
torical source in itself, a window onto a particular phase o f European 
intellectual history. In 1943 the American Historical Review included a 
review of Behemoth that began with the words, “T his is not just another 
book about Nazi Germ any.” Indeed.
Evanston, Illinois 
February 2009