ABSTRACT
The monopoly of political power and the SUbjugation of Prussian autonomy and that of the remaining Lander could not, of course, deliver an authoritarian, totalitarian Nazi state overnight. To wipe out one's competitors for power was one thing, but to dismantle all the elements and vestiges of a pluralist republic, a federal republic at that, was further away. The Civil Service was purged of Jews and political unreliables under an Act of April 1933, but steps had at the same time to be taken to preserve the Civil Service from over-zealous Nazi infiltration for fear of general administrative impotence. The working classes remained a potential threat to Nazism, particularly through their trade union organisations. Thus Hitler was driven again into clever propaganda frays which led to the banning of free unions on 2 May 1933 and the enrolment of all employees in the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront - DAF), a kind of single national union. Any ideas that the DAF would have real independent bargaining power quickly proved illusory, however; Hitler, in alliance with the leaders of big business, ensured against this. In most cases of this kind, it was largely a matter of political will and expediency, and time, before the bulk of the substructures of Weimar and Wilhelmine Germany had been swept away. Much more problematic, however, were the conflicts which were emerging within the National Socialist camp itself, in large part deriving from the Fiihrerprinzip. The most serious came to a head in 1934. It concerned the position of the SA and Rahm in the new National Socialist state.
