The six permanent members of the Ministerial Council comprised Göring (as chairman), Frick (as Plenipotentiary for Administration), Funk (Plenipotentiary for the Economy), Lammers (head of the Reich Chancellery), Keitel (head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht), and Heß (Hitler’s deputy as leader of the Party). The Council was given the right to promulgate decrees on internal matters with the power of law. But it was not intended to be a ‘War Cabinet’. Neither the Foreign nor Propaganda Ministers were members. In the main the decrees were signed by Göring, Frick, and Lammers, but did not have to go to Hitler, as conventional laws did. Hitler was nevertheless careful to place restrictions on the Council which protected his own rights to overrule it if necessary. His own powers were delegated to, not replaced by, the Council.
In practice, the Council met only on a handful of occasions, for the last time in mid-November 1939. Most of the decrees it promulgated concerned relatively routine administrative and economic matters, and were brought about by the circulation of draft legislation rather than by collective deliberation. The number of ministerial representatives demanding a presence soon turned the few Council meetings that did take place into large and unwieldy affairs — precisely what it had been the intention to avoid. Göring himself lost interest. Hitler was quite happy to see the new body wither on the vine. An attempt to speed up the legislative process through a ‘Three-Man Collective’
The half-hearted attempt to resurrect some form of collective government had not got off the ground. Partly, Göring’s own autocratic style, combined with an administrative incompetence arising from his belief that ‘will’ was all that mattered, meant that any collective body under his command was certain to atrophy. His own contempt for bureaucracy meant that, like Hitler, he rode roughshod over it, favouring the elimination during the war of all legislation not absolutely necessary for the defence of the Reich.184 Even more important, Hitler’s own sharp antennae towards any restriction on his power, any limitation to the principles of his untrammelled personalized rule, vitiated from the outset the possibility of a true delegation of the head of government’s role to Göring and 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 Lammers’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.185
Hitler was now largely removed from the day-to-day running of the Reich. But no individual, let alone any collective body, had filled the vacuum. The administrative disorder could only grow.
Ministers, or their State Secretaries, met from time to time in
