Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich

Immediately before his planned invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler, the Führer and Reich Chancellor of Nazi Germany, anticipated spending an increasing amount of time prosecuting the war, to the detriment of his domestic duties. This would be a problem because the Enabling Act of 1933 had transformed what had been the democratic Weimar Republic into a totalitarian dictatorship in which all "legislation" was done by decrees which required Hitler's signature. A solution was needed to allow the domestic affairs of the country – at least as far as they involved the war effort – to continue. Thus a decree was issued on 30 August 1939 creating the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich to act in Hitler's stead, and setting out its membership and procedures. The idea for the Council appears to have originated with Göring, with Hitler agreeing to it in order to get legislation needed for the war effort quickly put into action. Hitler retained the right to overrule the council. In effect, his power had been delegated to the council, which did not replace him. ==Members==

All Council members were also members of the larger Reich Cabinet proper, which had met for the last time on 5 February 1938. The members of the council were: ==Authority and actions==

The council, per Hitler's decree, was given the right to issue decrees "with the force of law" for the whole period "of the current foreign policy tension". The council, upon coming into existence, immediately began issuing decrees touching on all aspects of Reich defense. Following the outbreak of the war on 1 September 1939, it appointed Nazi Party Gauleiters to the position of Reich Defense Commissioner (Reichsverteidigungskommissar) in each of the 15 Military Districts (Wehrkreis) to organize civil defense and mobilization. Later in the war (16 November 1942) the council would decree a change in jurisdiction from the Wehrkreis to the Gau level, and all 42 Gauleiters became Reich Defense Commissioners. (See image.) Another decree, issued on 5 September 1939, increased the penalties for certain criminal acts against persons or property during wartime. Another, issued on 7 September 1939, involved a ban on listening to foreign radio broadcasts. Despite these decrees, the council had little real practical impact, aside from reducing even further the policy influence of the individual ministries, continuing the trend of turning each into a mere technical apparatus which implemented decisions from above. The Council met on only a small number of occasions, and not after mid-November 1939, Göring having essentially lost interest in it. Historian Martin Broszat points out that: In theory this new War Cabinet could have become a new collegiate organ of the Reich government with Göring at the head of the cabinet. in practice, however, Göring did not make use of such possibilities. Instead, like Hitler, he soon urged that any extensive legislative schemes should be shelved during the war. On 5 June 1940, a Führer decree was also issued that ordered 'that all laws and regulations which are not directly relevant to the defense of the Reich must be postponed indefinitely'. Although Broszat refers to the council as a "war cabinet", Hitler biographer, historian Ian Kershaw, points out that a true war cabinet would have included Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, and the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. In Kershaw's assessment: ...Hitler's own sharp antennae towards any restriction on his power, any limitation to the principles of his untrammeled personalized rule, vitiated from the outset the possibility of a true delegation of the head of government's role to Göring and the erection of a genuine 'war cabinet'. Such was Hitler's sensitivity to anything which might impose limits on his own freedom of action, or constitute a possible internal threat to his position, that he would block Lammer's feeble attempts to reinstate cabinet meetings in 1942, and even refuse permission for ministers to gather occasionally for an evening around a beer table. ==Postwar indictment==

The Council ceased to exist with the fall of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945. As part of the Reichsregierung (Reich Government) the council, along with the broader Reich Cabinet, was indicted as a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Although it was ultimately adjudged at the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials to not be a criminal organization, all surviving members of the council were individually indicted by the IMT. ==Fate of Council members==

Bormann died by committing suicide during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May 1945. Himmler committed suicide on 23 May 1945 while in British custody. Göring, Frick, and Keitel were condemned to death at the Nuremberg trials in October 1946. Göring committed suicide the night before his scheduled execution, but the other two were hanged on 16 October. Hess and Funk received sentences of life imprisonment. Funk was released in 1957 due to ill health and died in 1960; Hess committed suicide in 1987 while still incarcerated at Spandau Prison. Lammers received a sentence of 20 years in the Ministries Trial in 1949, with the term later commuted to 10 years. He was released from prison in 1951 and died in 1962. == References ==