Introduction

The Nazi Germany state reached its final, murderous and destructive form during Adolf Hitler war. Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means is certainly true of the history of Nazi Germany between the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich in 1945. The Nazis rejected legal norms, despised the rule of law, flouted administrative regulations and guidelines, mocked the lifeless bureaucratic institutions, and hated the stuffy, unimaginative, conservative paper-pushers in the civil service. That Hitler was not able fully to realise his negative Utopian dreams was due to the fact that he lost his war, not to any dysfunction-alism within the Nazi state. Hitler’s power was in no sense diminished by confusing polycratic diffusion of power. Hitler’s war was not simply a war of conquest, a bid for world power or an attempt to redress the balance of power in Europe.