ABSTRACT
Writing in his Memoirs, Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, commented that Hitler had always been a Party man and he remained one as a statesman: “By the time of his investiture as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 he was the absolute autocrat of the NSDAP.” According to Frank, the state apparatus with its formal lines of jurisdiction and hierarchies of authority was unfamiliar and strange to him. He felt inhibited and insecure towards it. Moreover the traditional form of legally ordered, formally independent, juridically controlled state executive represented constraints on his personal style of leadership. As the organizational form of the NSDAP had helped him secure victory and established his will as law within the Movement, he simply transferred the independent position he held within the Party and its inner structure to the state. The gradual erosion of collective government was to be replaced by the absolute power of the charismatic leader. The “Party of the Führer” would now be extended to become the “Führer state”. This was to have profound implications for the government of the Third Reich.
