Nazism and the Fedual System

A Comparison on the Nazi Style of Government and Medieval Feudalism

Jul 28, 2009

The Feudal system in Medieval Europe was a 'pyramid' system used, with promises to station above you. The Nazi system of government was strangely similar.

Feudalism, most prominent in the Middle Ages, before the Black Death of the 14th century, was a system of organising the land distribution and military service via a system of theoretical promises, called 'Bonds'. Imagine Medieval society as a pyramid. The King is at the top, alone, underneath him are a number of Lords and Barons, who are given huge chunks of land in return for the promise of military service, or money when needed. Of course these Lords can not look after all this land themselves, so then they pass on the responsibility to an even larger group of Knights, in return for promises of military service, and they then pass on the responsibility of farming the land to the peasants, again in return for promises of military service or rent. Essentially, land, in ever smaller chunks, went down the pyramid, and promises of service or money went the up.

Organisation of Nazi Government

The way Nazi government was organised was strangely similar: Hitler, at the top of the 'pyramid', had two or three people directly underneath him, e.g. Borman. They then passed on orders to the high-ranking members of the Nazi party with the power, e.g. Goering, or Himmler, and many others. They would then have their version of 'Knights', such as the SS, or the Luftwaffe, and finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, were the everyday members of the Nazi party at ground level.

Links Between Nazi Style of Government and Feudalism

Both Nazism and most types of Feudalism are based on a militaristic relationship, with power distribution falling to a hierarchy of individuals with their individual armies or loyalties, wielding power normally retained by the state. Marxists especially would tell us that Feudalism was a stepping stone in social development and organisation, the culmination of which would be communism, although the incompatability between Nazism and Marxism means one theory can not really be applied to the other. Was, therefore, Nazism a regression in terms of sociology, indeed since the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, there have been thinkers arguing about the progression of social structures, and that the Feudal system was simply another control mechanism employed by the landed aristocracy. Rushton Coulbourn found several examples of Feudal systems in his research and found none of them to be 'fully developed' as a society.

Was Nazism Doomed to Failure

Disregarding the unsustainability of the Nazi defence economy, and Hitler's warped eugenic dream, and taking this from a purely theoretical view, one could easily argue that Nazism was doomed to failure from the beginning, as Feudalism is. Though historians argue that the Black Death led to the rise of 'Bastard Feudalism', and therefore in its pure form it has never truly been overthrown, evidence from Revolutionary France shows us that the progression of society, especially when the bottom rung of society is literate and educated, is inevitable.

A Paradigm for Comparative History? Rushton Coulborn Current Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 2/3 (Apr. - Jun., 1969), pp. 175-178

The copyright of the article Nazism and the Fedual System in Medieval History is owned by George Julian. Permission to republish Nazism and the Fedual System in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.