ABSTRACT
In the course of the Second World War the ‘warlord’ nature of the Nazi regime reached its apogee. This was not simply because Germany was now at war – and on the eastern front in a war of almost unprecedented barbarity – but also because in the newly occupied territories, especially Poland and the Soviet Union, government in the usual sense was replaced by the naked domination of Nazi warlords, who competed for the spoils of victory and controlled massive fiefdoms. Most notable of these was the SS empire erected by Heinrich Himmler. By 1944 there were 40,000 concentration camp guards, 100,000 police informers, 2.8 million policemen and 45,000 officers of the Gestapo. This expansion was a consequence both of increased repression within Germany during the war and of the extension of concentration camps and their role not only as prisons or institutions of slaughter but also as sources of slave labour. The armed units of the SS (the Waffen SS), which played a disproportionate part in the implementation of the politics of genocide, recruited a further 310,000 men from ethnic Germans outside the boundaries of the Reich. Other Nazi warlords included Fritz Sauckel, whose fiefdom dealt with the deployment of manpower, Robert Ley, who was in charge of housing, the chief of the German Labour Front, Fritz Todt and his successor Albert Speer, who had control of armaments and munitions, and Hermann Göring, whose Office of the Four Year Plan spread its empire over transport, mining, chemical production and price controls, and plundered occupied Poland. The proliferation and fragmentation of offices, which effectively prevented any coordinated economic and military strategy until the very last days of the
war, was further compounded by the increased authority of the Gauleiter, whose direct links to Hitler subverted the influence of the state bureaucracy. In fact, as the war progressed, it was agencies of the party and the Führer’s ‘special authorities’ which increased their power at the expense of career bureaucrats. The Gauleiter were entrusted with many new tasks relating to the war effort at home but also often put in charge of the newly occupied territories.
