The Nazi rejection of civil-service neutrality marked a deliberate turn toward dictatorship

Evidence

91 Compare with this attitude the telling fact that in Great Britain Ramsay MacDonald was never able to live down his “betrayal” of the Labor Party. In Germany the spirit of civil service asked of those in public office to be “above the parties.” Against this spirit of the old Prussian civil service the Nazis asserted the priority of the Party, because they wanted dictatorship. Goebbels demanded explicitly: “Each party member who becomes a state functionary has to remain a National Socialist first …and to co-operate closely with the party administration” (quoted from Gottfried Neesse, Partei und Stoat, 1939, p. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2469

Categorization

• XREF: The party-over-state priority is the structural core of totalitarian organization that later chapters develop; useful contrast to the Westminster party-in-state model. — connects to: The Nazi coalition won only 51.8 percent yet leveraged it into full dictatorship — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 147; West German law restored Nazi civil servants to office with hiring preference — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1897
• SEED: Possible essay angle: how functional neutrality norms of a civil service get repurposed into loyalty tests — the Staatsbürger replaced by the party member as the model citizen-subject.