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of the Hitlerian empire, however, reveals that it was not nearly as efficient as is usually thought by admirers of Teutonic thoroughness. It was unwieldy, with the necessity for constant control militating against the factors that would make for a ready response to crisis. It was also full of junior empires, all seeking to enlarge themselves at the expense of competitors, all in the long run working against each other. Not only were there the personal problems and rivalries inherent in any human organization, but at bottom some of the guiding principles of the system blatantly contradicted other guiding principles. Ultimately, the whole creation was a huge inverted pyramid, resting on a tiny point named Adolf Hitler.

The omnipotent Fuehrer divided his world into segments, territorially and topically. Topically, all of his underlings competed with each other to enlarge their own spheres of influence. Joachim von Ribbentrop, for example, was Minister of Foreign Affairs. A man completely bereft of talent, his one purpose was the serving of his master; as ambassador to Great Britain before the war, in one ludicrous instance, he had greeted a startled King George VI with an outstretched arm and a loud cry of “Heil Hitler!” Fortunately for Germany, under Hitler there was little for the Foreign Ministry to do. Von Ribbentrop’s greatest days ran from 1935, when he negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, to 1939, when he was instrumental in gaining the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact. He was never anything more than the mouthpiece of Hitler, however, and in a war situation the Foreign Office gradually lost whatever usefulness it ever had. None of that prevented von Ribbentrop from building up his office, from fewer than 2,500 to more than 10,000 personnel, and from parroting the party line and pushing the claims of his own little bailiwick whenever possible.

Far more important was Hermann Goering, not so much in his capacity of head of the Luftwaffe as in his role of economic director of the Reich. Goering amassed titles and responsibilities the way he collected medals and uniforms. A fascinating mixture of characteristics, a war hero from the First World War, Goering was the second-highest man in Germany. A man of considerable intelligence, he faded badly through the war, partly perhaps because of drug addiction, which seems to have been acquired by taking pain-killers, partly because he was one of the few in Hitler’s immediate entourage to recognize where they were all going. As the war progressed, he adopted an “Après moi le deluge” attitude, and more or less retired to enjoy the good life as long as it lasted. Yet he had still gained a great deal of power under Hitler, and he remained a formidable member of what would later be called the Nazi Leadership Corps right to the end. He was a total failure as an economic director, however; he knew little of economics and cared less. It was left to others, eventually, to put the German economy on a war footing.

Another competitor was Alfred Rosenberg, who was regarded as the Party Theorist, in capital letters. Anti-Christian, anti-Slav, violently anti-Semitic, he was slated in the days of peace to lead the educational renaissance of Germany in the paths of righteousness. After war began he was eventually given the title Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. His administration never really got anywhere, as he and his followers were constantly outpaced by Goering’s people, by the army, by the SS, and by everyone else who was in on the pickings east of the Vistula. Yet it was Rosenberg who approved the plan to bring pre-teenagers west from Slavdom with the double aim of making them work for Germany and reducing the reproductive potential of Russia. Rosenberg was really a pseudo-intellectual nonentity, lost among the bully-boys of nazism, but he owed his position to the fact that his volumes of turgid writings gave a veneer of class to Hitler’s philosophy.

The propagandist of the movement, as opposed to its philosopher, was Josef Goebbels. In terms of running the