NAZI GERMANY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 1933–42: THE MOST IMPORTANT LABORATORY FOR DEPRESSION AMERICA?
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
| Author | PAUL PETZSCHMANN |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12047 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12047
NAZI GERMANY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
1933–42: THE MOST IMPORTANT LABORATORY
FOR DEPRESSION AMERICA?
PAUL PETZSCHMANN
The inter-war period saw a flowering of comparative research on emergency administration
in response to the Great Depression. This article argues that Weimar and Nazi Germany was
an important point of reference for scholars comparing different policy responses to the Great
Depression. Centralization and administrative discretion were considered pivotal for effective crisis
governance, irrespective of the political context. The resulting administrative ideology was ignorant
of the polycratic realities of the Nazi state and frequently lauded its hierarchical features while
condemning the Weimar Republic as anarchic. Faced with the challenge presented by Nazism,
of squaring efficiency and accountability in the context of New Deal America, scholars of public
administration developed ideas for training a new type of civil servant who was capable of acting
beyond the control of legislative institutions. By exploring the ambiguous relationship between
public administration and Nazism, this article highlights the complex issues confronting scholars
of public administration in times of crisis.
INTRODUCTION
In the current economic recession, comparisons with the Great Depression have become
commonplace. During the 2008 American presidential elections, comparisons with both
Weimar Germany and the 1932 US presidential race abounded (Horton 2007).
American students of administration have frequently crossed the Atlantic in order
to gain a new perspective on their own country (Rodgers 1998, pp. 84–85). During the
Great Depression the exodus of German scholars fleeing the Nazi dictatorship stimulated
the comparative study of political and administrative systems in the United States
(Loewenberg 2006). Comparisons between policy responses to the Great Depression
have been made for discrete policy areas such as public works programmes (Patel
2005), but have also depicted Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and New Deal America as
crisis regimes with important similarities (Schivelbusch 2006). These recent accounts of
structural similarity were prefigured by actual comparisons made at the time. The study
of public administration is a case in point. Nazi Germany remained an important point
of reference and comparison for public administration scholarship until the outbreak of
the Second World War, perhaps a reason why these debates and those who contributed
to them have been largely forgotten.
Many scholars argued at the time that administrative centralization, the sidelining
of parliamentary politics, and the politically motivated ‘reorganization’ of the civil
service – the apparent thrust of Nazi administrative reforms – were universal recipes for
comprehensive reform. A lack of empirical knowledge about the inner workings of the
Nazi regime combined with a functionalist view of administration led to ambiguous and
even sympathetic assessments of the Third Reich prior to America’s entry into the Second
World War. This is especially surprising in the case of German ´
emigr´
e scholars, many
of whom had been forced to leave by the Nazis. For them the Nazi administrative state
Paul Petzschmann is at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, Norway.
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 2, 2014 (259–273)
©2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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