How did German civil servants and judges respond to or resist Nazi Gleichschaltung in the first months after January 1933?
Executive summary
In the immediate months after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, German civil servants and judges largely accommodated and enabled Gleichschaltung by implementing new laws, purging targeted colleagues, and reframing loyalty to the state—with only scattered, limited forms of resistance; removals of legal professionals were significant symbolically but numerically modest, and many bureaucrats “self‑coordinated” to protect careers or because they accepted the new regime’s legitimacy [1] [2] [3]. The legal revolution combined coercive statutes like the April 7 Civil Service Law and the Enabling Act with administrative practices that made challenge difficult and appeal nearly impossible [4] [5].
1. Legal instruments that compelled conformity
The Nazis moved quickly to supply administrative and legal mechanisms that forced or encouraged compliance: the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties in February and the Enabling Act gave the Reich government law‑making power without parliamentary consent, while the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (7 April 1933) authorized dismissals of Jews, communists, and anyone deemed politically unreliable and made many decisions final and non‑appealable [6] [5] [1] [4].
2. Purges, numbers, and the gap between symbolism and scale
Those instruments produced highly visible purges—one estimate records 420 judges, prosecutors and ministry officials removed from the Prussian justice administration, roughly 6 percent of that cohort—but most civil servants remained in their posts, even as the regime reshaped personnel and institutions across the Länder and municipalities [2] [6]. The early laws also carried exemptions (for many First World War veterans) inserted to placate conservatives, revealing both coercion and bargaining in the early Gleichschaltung [1].
3. Judges’ behavior: legitimacy, obedience, and judicial acquiescence
Contemporary and retrospective accounts emphasize that many judges accepted the new order as legitimate and felt bound to “obey the law,” declining to challenge the constitutional transformation embodied in the Enabling Act and increasingly interpreting statutes in line with nationalist or racial premises rather than defending prior liberal norms [5] [7]. Professional associations were merged into Nazi bodies and legal culture shifted toward notions like “healthy folk sentiment,” while special courts and reinterpretations of “protective custody” diminished judicial checks [8] [9].
4. Self‑coordination and opportunism among administrators
Beyond formal coercion, senior administrators often “self‑coordinated”: sensing the political winds by late March 1933, ministers and bureaucrats began to implement radical policies on their own initiative and to “work toward the Führer,” while non‑Jewish colleagues and party loyalists filled vacancies created by dismissals—an opportunistic dynamic captured in recent scholarship and contemporary reports [3] [10]. Civil servants also drafted, enforced, and normalized discriminatory decrees that systematically removed rights from Jews and political opponents [7] [9].
5. Limited and constrained forms of resistance
Open institutional resistance was rare and rapidly marginalized: judges did not mount successful constitutional challenges to the Enabling Act or the civil‑service purges, and the law’s clauses made many dismissals final [5] [4]. Sources highlight pockets of reluctance or bureaucratic bargaining—Hindenburg’s insistence on exemptions is one example—but the dominant pattern in the first months was accommodation, administrative compliance, and selective enforcement rather than organized judicial opposition [1] [2].
6. Interpretive caveats and gaps in the record
The available reports emphasize structural legal changes, numbers of removals, and patterns of professional behavior, but they cannot fully reconstruct private acts of conscience or the full range of local variances in resistance; where sources are silent about specific individual refusals or local administrative backstops, the record should not be taken to prove their absence, only that large‑scale institutional opposition did not materialize in early 1933 [2] [3].