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If You consider the political situation in Germany during the Third Reich as not merely and pay more attention to the background, it is obvious that it was not such a monolith block as the Propaganda tried to show it, it was a confusing existence of rival hierarchies and competing centers of power at the same time.
A very good way to describe this is to look on the letter that the Gauleiter (Gauleader) of Munich - Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, wrote to the Minister of the Interior, Frick in June 1934 : " According to the actual legal Position, the Reichsstatthalter are under your control as you are the Minister of the Interior of the Reich. Adolf Hitler is Reichsstatthalter in Prussia. He has delegated his rights to the Prime Minister of Prussia, Goering. You yourself are at the same time Minister of the Interior in Prussia. As a Minister of the Interior of the Reich, Adolf Hitler and the
Prime Minister of Prussia are under your control. But as you are Minister of the Interior in Prussia at the same time, , you are under the control of the Prime Minister of Prussia, and so you are under your own control as a Minister of the Interior of the Reich. Now I am not a jurist, but I do not think that such a Construction has ever existed before."
Or as Joseph Goebbels wrote into his Diary on the 10th of February 1940 :"General Dissagreement. Ley is arguing with Kerrl against Rosenberg etc.. And this right now in the war, and everybody refers his position to the Fuehrer."
If you compare the two following diagrams, it is easy to see that the structure of the third Reich was a kind of \"Doppelstaat\"(Double - State) with the traditional Bureaucracy on the one hand, and the Party - Apparatus on the other hand .
The demise of an centralized government with clear divisions of the areas of responsibility led to the situation that something like a coordinated policy did not take place, each ministry worked independent by its own; at the same time there were a lot of crossings with the Party - Apparatus, but to make this Chaos complete, there where even some "Sonderbeauftragte" (special - emissary) which had gained their mandate on direct order of Hitler. If there where rivalries about one topic between all these, Hitler often waited to decide right in the end, when it already was clear which side would have more support.
Adolf Hitler did not like to take part in Conferences, he preferred to talk in private ; Meetings of the Cabinet did not take place regularly, the last Meeting of the Cabinet took place on the 5th of February 1938, but the "Reichsregierung" had lost its power as early as 1935. The only Representative of the State - Bureaucracy, Hans Heinrich Lammers was asked to report to Hitler the last time on the 29th of September 1944 .
This construction led to a lot of conflicts and caused delays with regard to responsibility areas between the traditional Ministers and the new Party - I
Instances. One reason for this was, that the allocation of responsibilities between the traditional Bureaucracy and the Party was not very clear; e.g. the Gauleiter of the Party where direct rivals of the Reichsstatthalter, the foreign office had its equivalent in the \"Diensstelle Ribbentropp\" (department Ribentropp of the NSDAP), the Police had their rivals in the SS, the Justice in the \"Volksgerichtshof\" (People\'s Court), and even Adolf Hitler had three different chancelleries of the Party with nearly similar areas of responsibility at the same time.
Some Historian stress the fact that there are only a few direct of direct "Fuehrer Befehle" about important topics, but as Hitler said in a secret speech to party leaders in 1937 "Never give a written order if you can give a oral order, never!" ; or as the State Secretary in the Foreign Office Ernst von Weizsaecker said ;" Ministerial skill in the Third Reich consisted in making the most of a favorable hour or minute when Hitler made a decision, this often taking the form of a remark thrown out casually, which then went its way as an Order of the Fuehrer" .
I think if you use this as a proof for Hitler's weakness, you have to be carefully with your conclusions of describing the Political Figure Adolf Hitler, because sometimes the missing of written orders is used as a kind of excuse for the terrible events that took place during the third Reich. A good example for this is the British Historian David Irving, in his Hitler Biography he tries to show that the Holocaust went on without knowing of Hitler, at least until 1943
But nevertheless some historians conclude out of the facts I have mentioned above, that Adolf Hitler was not a strong dictator, and sometimes it is even suggested that Adolf Hitler was not working towards the goals he had laid down in "Mein Kampf", and that he was more a umpire than a leader that sanctioned policy rather than initiating it.
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