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Principle of political authority in the Third Reich

In the political history of Germany, the Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) was the basis of executive authority in the Government of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), which meant that the word of the Führer is above all written law, and that government policies, decisions, and offices all work towards the realisation of the will of the Führer. In practise, the Führerprinzip was the dictatorship of the leader to dictate the ideology and policies of a political party; therefore, such a personal dictatorship is a basic characteristic of fascism. The Nazi Government implemented the Führerprinzip throughout the civil society of Germany, thus business organisations and civil institutions were led by an appointed leader, rather than managed by an elected committee of professional experts, especially the schools (public and private), the sports associations, and the factories. As a common theme of Nazi propaganda, the Leader Principle demanded personal obedience to the supreme leader who — by personal fiat and force of will — decisively flouts the rule of law inherent to legitimate government, as exercised by appointed committees, bureaucracies, and elected parliaments. In the History of Germany, the cultural interpretation of the leaders of the German nation — from king Frederick the Great (r. 1740–1786) to chancellor Otto von Bismarck (r. 1871–1890) — and the national culture of the Nordic saga, emphasised the ultranationalist value of the Führerprinzip, the political authority of a visionary supreme leader deified by the people.

The political science term Führerprinzip was coined by Hermann von Keyserling, an Estonian philosopher of German descent. Ideologically, the Führerprinzip considers each organisation to be a hierarchy of leaders, wherein each leader (Führer) has absolute responsibility in and for his own area of authority; is owed absolute obedience from subordinates; and answers only to his superior officers; whereas the subordinate's obedience included personal loyalty to the leader concerning the ethical matters of legality and illegality. Conceptually, the Führerprinzip presented Adolf Hitler as the supreme leader who answered only to the German people, whom he represented as the supreme leader of the German people.

By mis representing Hitler as the incarnation of auctoritas — as the saviour politician whose charismatic authority makes law of his dictates — the Führerprinzip functioned as a colour of law legalism that allowed conferring the executive, the judicial, and the legislative powers of German government upon the person of Hitler, as Führer und Reichskanzler, as the combined leader and chancellor of Germany. In the political aftermath of the intramural assassinations of the Night of the Long Knives (30 June–2 July 1934), the supreme leader Hitler justified the violent political purge of Ernst Rohm and the Strasserite faction from the Nazi Party as a matter of the national security of Germany: “In this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was therefore the supreme judge of the German people!”

As an ideological proponent of the Führerprinzip, the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt defended the political purges and the felony crimes of the Nazis individually and the Nazi Party collectively, because the Führerprinzip stipulated that the word of the Führer supersedes any contradictory law.</blockquote>

For the Nazi Party, the Leader Principle was ideologically integral to the political cohesion of the Party under the authority of the supreme leader. In July 1921, for personal control of the Nazi Party, Hitler confronted Anton Drexler, the founder and original leader of the Nazi Party, to thwart Drexler's proposed political union of the Nazi Party with the larger German Socialist Party. Aware that large party politics would exclude Nazis from power, Hitler quit the Nazi Party, however, understanding that the absence of the charismatic front man Hitler would void the political credibility of the Nazi Party, Drexler capitulated to Hitler's ultimatum that he (Hitler) would be the only Führer of the Nazi Party, the supreme leader with dictatorial powers prescribed in the Führerprinzip. The increased number of members in the Nazi Party developed two ideologic factions; the northern faction of the Nazi Party featured the Third position politics of Strasserism (revolutionary nationalism and economic antisemitism), and was led by Otto Strasser and Gregor Strasser; the southern faction of the Nazi Party featured Hitlerite Nazism, and was led by Hitler; each faction greatly disagreed for and against that the Führerprinzip was ideologically integral to Nazism. On 14 February 1926, at a Party conference, Hitler defeated all factional and intramural opposition and established the Führerprinzip to manage the Nazi Party.

In 1934, Hitler legalistically imposed der Führerprinzip upon the government and the civil society of Weimar Germany in order to create Nazi Germany. Moreover, the Nazi Government did not require that the German business community adopt Nazi techniques of business administration, but did require that the business community of the Greater German Reich rename their management hierarchies using the politically correct language of the Führerprinzip ideology of Nazism.

Nazi propaganda films promoted the Führerprinzip as a basis for the organization of the civil society of Germany. In the film Flüchtlinge, the hero rescues refugee Volga Germans from Communist persecution by a leader who requires unquestioning obedience. Der Herrscher altered the source material to depict the hero, Clausen, as the stalwart leader of his munitions company, who, when faced with the machinations of his children, decides to disown them and bestows the company to the state, confident that there will arise a factory worker who is a true leader of men capable of continuing Clausen's work without instruction. In the film Carl Peters (0000) the protagonist is a decisive man of action who fights and defeats the African natives to establish German colonies in Africa, but Peters is thwarted by a parliament who do not understand that German society needs the Führerprinzip. At school, adolescent boys were taught Nordic sagas as the literary illustration of the Führerprinzip possessed by the German heroes Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. This was combined with the glorification of the one, central Führer, Adolf Hitler. During the Night of the Long Knives, it was claimed that his decisive action saved Germany, though it meant (in Goebbels's description) suffering "tragic loneliness" from being a Siegfried forced to shed blood to preserve Germany. In one speech Robert Ley explicitly proclaimed "The Führer is always right." Booklets given out for the Winter Relief donations included The Führer Makes History, a collection of Hitler photographs, and The Führer’s Battle in the East Films such as Der Marsch zum Führer and Triumph of the Will glorified him.

In the aftermath of the Second World War (1937–1945), at the Allied war crime Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946) of captured Nazi leaders in Germany, and at the Eichmann Trial (1961) in Israel, the criminal defence arguments presented the Führerprinzip as a concept of jurisprudence that voided the military command responsibility of the accused war criminals, because they were military officers following superior orders. In the book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt said that, aside from a personal desire to improve his career as an administrator, Eichmann did not manifest antisemitism or any psychological abnormality. That Eichmann personified the banality of evil given the commonplace personality Eichmann displayed at trial, which communicated neither feelings of guilt nor feelings of hatred whilst he denied personal responsibility for his war crimes. In his defense, Eichmann said he was "doing his job", and that he always tried to act in accordance with the categorical imperative proposed in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.