Führerprinzip

In practice, the Führerprinzip gave Adolf Hitler supreme power over the ideology and policies of his political party; this form of personal dictatorship was a basic characteristic of Nazism.

"[1][2] According to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, the Nazi German political system meant "unconditional authority downwards, and responsibility upwards.

[5] At the Bamberg Conference on 14 February 1926, Hitler invoked the Führerprinzip to assert his power,[6] and affirmed his total authority over Nazi administrators at the party membership meeting in Munich on 2 August 1928.

[11] The German cultural reverence for national leaders such as King Frederick the Great (r. 1740–1786) and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (r. 1871–1890), and the historic example of the Nordic saga, were also appropriated to support the idea.

This principle [of leadership], which made the movement strong, must be carried through systematically, both in the administration of the State and in the various spheres of self-government, naturally taking into account the [ideologic] modifications required by the particular area in question.

On 14 February 1926, at the Bamberg Conference, Hitler defeated all factional opposition and established the Führerprinzip as the managing principle of the Nazi Party.

[23] Following the adoption of the "Führer Oath" by the German armed forces in 1934, Hitler wrote a public letter to Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg, saying, "Just as the officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht bind themselves to the new state in my person, so shall I always regard it as my highest duty to defend the existence and inviolability of the Wehrmacht in fulfillment of the testament of the late field marshal and, faithful to my own will, to anchor the army in the nation as the sole bearer of arms.

[26] At school, adolescent boys were taught Nordic sagas as the literary illustration of the Führerprinzip possessed by the German heroes Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck.

In the aftermath of the Second World War (1937–1945), at the Allied war-crime Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946) of captured Nazi leaders in Germany, and at the Eichmann Trial (1961) in Israel, the criminal defence arguments presented the Führerprinzip as a concept of jurisprudence that voided the military command responsibility of the accused war criminals, because they were military officers following superior orders.