Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, published in 1942 and expanded in 1944, was one of the earliest and most influential studies of national socialism. According to Peter Hayes, Neumann argued that “Hitler’s regime was a chaotic, lawless and amorphous monster” whose “policies expressed sometimes overlapping and sometimes contending drives of the four symbiotic but separate power centers (the Nazi party, the German state bureaucracy, the armed forces and big business) that composed it.”46 As a result, Olick writes, “no mere regime decapitation followed by a
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