“The extensified fragmentation of Weimar politics and eventual decline into little more than interest politics in the face of mounting internal crisis, entirely delegitimized the State system itself, wholly discredited pluralist politics, and paved the way for a full acceptance–already by 1932 of around 13 million Germans–of a new basis of unity represented in an entirely novel political form personalized in Hitler’s ‘charismatic’ leadership.
” In such conditions as prevailed in the last phase of the Weimar Republic, of the total discrediting of a State system based upon pluralist politics, the ‘functional’ leadership of the bureaucrat and the Party political politician as the representative of the ‘rational-legal’ form of political domination, imposing laws and carrying out functions for which they are not personally responsible and with which they are not identifiable, lost credibility. Salvation could only be sought with a leader who possessed personal power and was prepared to take personal responsibility, sweeping away the causes of misery and the faceless politicians and bureaucrats who prevail over it, and seeming to impose his own personal power upon the force of history itself [….] (255)
Hitler’s “well-documented fear of personal popularity and the corresponding growth in instability of the regime is further testimony of his awareness of the centrality of his integrative force of his role as Fuhrer. This integration was largely affective, for the most part forging psychological or emotional rather than material bonds. But its reality can scarcely be doubted.” (The Hitler Myth 257)