Germany's New Civil Service Act

Prior to the National Revolution of 1933, one of the foremost postulates guiding the conduct of German civil servants was that of political neutrality. The permanent public personnel—national, state, and local—was to consider itself, in the apt formulation of the Weimar constitution, “servants of the whole people, not of a party.” Although imprudent legislative and executive measures taken during the republican era weakened rather than strengthened the principle of neutrality, it was effectively upheld by the disciplinary courts. Indirectly, the professional tenet of non-partisanship facilitated German bureaucracy's identification with a broadly conceived constitutionalism. At a time when the National Socialist vote had become the largest in national elections, organizers for the new creed still made least headway among the government personnel. Statistics published in 1936 disclose the fact that less than four per cent of all civil servants joined the national Socialist party before Hitler's rise to the chancellorship. As the incoming Reich cabinet was not slow to recognize the “impossibility” of large-scale displacements, it resorted to transitional regulations in order to weed out overtly heterogeneous elements.