The Final Order: When Regimes End

This is ‘book’ 8 in the series The Impossible Books of Keith Kahn-Harris. The cover was created by Gus Condeixa. For more on this series, read the introduction here.

What sort of book is it?

The kind of history book that potentially has a wider readership. Having said that, I am an incorrigible sociologist so there is a lot that is more abstract and conceptual (and hence uncommercial) in this idea.

How likely is it that I will write the book?

Unlikely. It would require a considerable amount of comparative historical research in multiple languages, for which I am not really qualified.

Am I happy for anyone else to write the book?

Actually yes. I’d love to read it.

Synopsis

When did the Third Reich end?

The question isn’t as easy to answer as you might think.

Nazi Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. There were local surrenders before that date though, and some units held out for a few more days. In some areas (most famously the Netherlands), the allies allowed the military chain of command, including military discipline, to function for a while after the surrender. Then there was Dönitz’s ‘Flensburg Government’, the notional successor to Hitler’s regime, that led a shadow-existence until it was dissolved by the allies on 23 May 1945.

But even after the termination of the Flensburg Government and the final dissolution of the German armed forces, there were still continuities with the old regime. Local government was reconstructed differently in different areas by the different allies, and in some places managed to continue with few changes. More broadly, not all of the institutions that held up Nazi Germany (and its predecessor regimes) could be easily or immediately replaced — money, utilities, communications and other building blocks of modern life were subject to both continuities and discontinuities.

The closer we look at the end of the Third Reich, the more complex it appears. Alongside abrupt and final end-points, we have a mass of ambiguous continuities, incremental changes and flat-out persistence.

The question of when the Third Reich ended raises issues of what the ‘ending’ of a regime actually consists of. Official bodies such as governments and states can be dissolved of course, but not all official bodies are necessarily coordinated with each other: the dissolution of a national government and state does not always imply that other ‘lower’ institutions necessarily fall with them at the same time. In any case, one cannot assume that institutions and official bodies are all that a regime consists of. As the Annales school of history showed, the longue durée can be remarkably persistent.

Yet there is perhaps one way in which an ending can be defined. Modern bureaucratic regimes are reproduced through orders; through hierarchies and rules. The ability to issue and carry out orders is a vital sign of legitimacy for any regime. The problem is that, when a particular bureaucratic institution continues across regimes, it is very difficult to identity the point at which legitimacy is transferred from the old to the new. When did a Nazi electricity company become a non-Nazi one?

The Final Order takes the form of a forensic search for the end-point of the Third Reich and other regimes. When was the last occasion at which a member of the Nazi hierarchy issued an order from within the hierarchy? This investigation is, to some extent, only undertaken in order to subvert it: Ultimately, as I argue, not only might a clear and final ending be impossible to identify, the existence of a hierarchy from within which orders can be given and obeyed is only one way of understanding what a regime is. Nonetheless, the process of searching for the end is, in and of itself, an instructive and fascinating one.

The Third Reich is only one of the regimes examined in The Final Order. Others include:

- The Russian state pre- and post- the two 1917 revolutions.

- Japan at the end of the Second World War.

- India pre- and post- independence.

- The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

- Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this Impossible Book, why not browse through the rest of the series here?

Also, please recommend and share it on Medium or elsewhere. I would love to read your comments too.

Many thanks!

Finally, here’s an alternative cover: