Joachim Lilla with Martin DÖ¶ring, Andreas Schulz, eds. Statisten in Uniform: Die Mitglieder des Reichstages 1933-1945. sseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2004. 996 pp. EUR 120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-7700-5254-7.

Reviewed by Stefan Vogt (Center for German Studies, Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev)
Published on H-German (June, 2006)

Hitler's Willing Legislators

For several years, research on National Socialism has turned increasingly towards the topic of officials at the middle and lower levels of the party hierarchy. This move reflects a growing interest in the role played by broader parts of German society in establishing and maintaining National Socialist rule, stimulated to no small extent by Daniel Goldhagen's controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). Such research has focused on the members and officials of the National Socialist Party. Although a social history of the NSDAP has yet to be written, at least at the regional levels some important works have been published.[1] In this context, research has also been done on the National Socialist members of the Reichstag. Largely neglected before, this group of Nazi officials is the subject of two recent and groundbreaking books that investigate the social structure and the political role of the National Socialist faction in the Reichstag before 1933 and of the National Socialist Reichstag after 1933, respectively.[2]

The long-standing indifference towards the National Socialists in the German parliament is somehow understandable, particularly for the period that followed the Nazi assumption of power. Degraded to an institution of pure acclamation, the Reichstag met only nineteen times after March 23, 1933 (the date of the Enabling Act) until 1945. In this period, it passed no more than seven laws, while the government issued more than 900.[3] However, it would be mistaken, as Wolfgang Hubert has shown, to consider the Reichstag a quantité négligeable in terms of historiography--not least because the Reichstag, as opposed to other institutions of the Weimar constitution, was not abolished by the Nazis, but served to represent the Volksgemeinschaft by means of a uniform body of "representation." Moreover, the members of the Reichstag in the National Socialist years were a most revealing cross-section of the various levels of National Socialist officials, including members who had defected from other parties and remained members of the Reichstag, either as affiliated (Hospitanten) or, after they had joined the NSDAP, as full members of the National Socialist faction. Studying the members of the Reichstag lends particular insights into the amount of allegiance showed by the bourgeois elite. Despite some outstanding examples of opposition, the upper segment of German society was easily incorporated into the new regime.

For the National Socialist members of the Reichstag, we now have a comprehensive and outstanding biographical encyclopedia. Joachim Lilla, who has published a number of studies in this field, compiled this edition, commissioned by the Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien. He has done so, together with Martin Döring (the author of the authoritative study on the National Socialist faction in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic) and Andreas Schulz, in an exemplary manner. Almost 1,300 entries supply all major information on the National Socialist members of the Reichstag, including the affiliated members, and complemented by the National Socialist and völkisch representatives of the Weimar Republic. All entries follow a similar structure: they first give the person's name, academic degrees, years of birth and death, religious denomination and periods of membership of the Reichstag, as well as parliaments of the German Länder, Reichsrat and non-German and postwar parliaments. This data is followed by the actual biography, which focuses on professional careers and political activities. The entries close with a note on sources and, for some better-known individuals, a list of their publications. The apparatus of the volume leaves hardly anything to be desired. Nine different indices account for names, places and organizations, but also for detentions, suicides and executions. The geographical index has two parts: an index for places of birth and death and another one for places of residence and work. This organization allows for quick and effective research along lines of local and regional activity. All this material is completed helpful documentation on the development of the election laws or an index to the lists of candidates, allowing to link a person to an individual election.

The effort necessary to compile this volume must have been enormous. Important records of the National Socialist faction of the Reichstag were destroyed during the war, most importantly the registry of the faction's office. The structure of National Socialist organizations and institutions, being strongly hierarchic but by no means consistent or transparent, made it particularly difficult to investigate biographical data. The editors had to gather this information from numerous national, regional and local archives.

The few reservations I have to mention about the volume result from this situation. Two of them are particularly significant. First, the volume generally lacks specific information regarding the Reichstag members' actual participation in the politics of persecution and destruction of the Jews. For many of those men, being a member of the Reichstag was a step in their career on their way to some higher position in the Nazi hierarchy. Hanns Ludin, for example, a local SA leader in southwest Germany, became ambassador to Slovakia in 1940. In this position, he was responsible for the deportation of Slovak Jews to the ghettos and death camps. Listing merely the formal positions held by these men gives little insight into their involvement in the politics of mass murder. To be sure, it is difficult to find more detailed information on Nazi officials' actual activities that is sufficiently reliable and comprehensive, particularly on those officials who did not end up in as senior a position as Ludin did. However, in order to assess the role of these men in the "racial state" and to discuss the participation of "ordinary men" in the mass murder, such information is indispensable.[4]

Similar things can be said about the lives of the National Socialist members of the Reichstag after 1945. In a few entries we find short statements, and all memberships in postwar parliaments are noted: seven National Socialist members of the Reichstag became members of the FRG Bundestag and Länder parliaments,. However, a more detailed account would have been desirable. With such information included, the volume would have contributed much to evaluating the extent to which middle- and lower-level Nazi officials became successful in postwar Germany's government, industry and associations. Both shortcomings are due to the necessary difficulties of a systematic survey of this kind and scope. However, even an incomplete collection of such information would have further improved the encyclopedia. For the sake of consistency, the editors unfortunately refrained from including existing knowledge in the volume.

In addition, a general introduction into the encyclopedia's subject would have been helpful, and no difficult task for the three editors, all of them experts in this field. They must have analyzed and evaluated their material during the extensive research that was necessary to compile this encyclopedia. For any background information, readers will need to refer to the recently published books cited above. By reducing the volume to a reference book, the editors sell short the immense amount of work that has been invested in it.

However, these are only minor reservations. With this biographical encyclopedia we have a historiographical tool that sets new standards. It will be an indispensable help for all further work on the officials of National Socialism. Even more, the encyclopedia is capable of pushing forward historical research in this field. It makes perfectly clear that a historiography of the Nazi era that is limited to the history of the leading men or to the history of impersonal structures itself is a matter of history. National Socialism, and its unprecedented project to base a new European order on the destruction of the Jews and of allegedly inferior races, was only possible because large parts of the society collaborated at all levels of the regime. The National Socialist members of the Reichstag were only one, albeit significant, example of this collaboration.

Notes

[1]. Among others: Claudia Roth, Parteikreis und Kreisleiter der NSDAP unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Bayerns (Munich: Beck, 1997); Christine Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der württembergischen NSDAP. Funktion, Sozialprofil und Lebenswege einer regionalen Nationalsozialismus-Elite 1920-1960 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998); Wolfgang Stelbrink, Die Kreisleiter der NSDAP in Westfalen und Lippe. Versuch einer Kollektivbiographie mit biographischem Anhang (Münster: Nordrhein-Westfälisches Staatsarchiv, 2003).

[2]. Martin Döring, "Parlamentarischer Arm der Bewegung". Die Nationalsozialisten im Reichstag der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2001); Peter Hubert, Uniformierter Reichstag. Die Geschichte der Pseudo-Volksvertretung 1933-1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1992).

[3]. Hubert, Uniformierter Reichstag, p. 16.

[4]. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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Citation: Stefan Vogt. Review of DÖ¶ring, Joachim Lilla with Martin; Schulz, Andreas, eds., Statisten in Uniform: Die Mitglieder des Reichstages 1933-1945. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11912

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