The yearning for "strong government," particularly common among the bourgeois middle classes, meant that violent repression was only considered legitimate insofar as it promised to increase law and order. The implications of contrary interpretations of Hitler's power within the Third Reich for the evaluation of the National Socialist policy of repression are obvious. A jungle of intertwined and contradictory responsibilities existed at all levels of the National Socialist government, making it difficult for historians to determine Hitler's role in the control of the state. The "functionalists," hold that the consequence of this unique concentration of power was by no means a consolidation of the government machine as Hitler's conservative allies had hoped. The expansion of Nationalist Socialist terror over vast parts of the continent was possible only because of the control and progressive perfecting of the repression machine of the Third Reich during the years before the unleashing of the war.