From The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes, 2017) pp172-3
The Junker officer caste were delighted with the deal. Hitler, it turned out, was just the sort of civilian leader they’d more or less openly longed for ever since 1919. On the very day the ancient Hindenburg died (2 August 1934), Blomberg introduced a new oath without even being asked by Hitler, never mind ordered: soldiers now swore unconditional loyalty to the Fuhrer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler.
Prussia Squared
Between 1871 and 1918, Prussia had tried, with little success, to impose on all Germany its signature features: a militarised society, state-worship, leader-adoration, zombie-like obedience (Cadavergehorsam) and scar-faced, armed young Junkers swaggering about in uniform, looking for trouble, virtually beyond the law. After 1934, the Nazi state was far better at it.
The alleged new elite of race deliberately mimicked the Junkers’ arrogance, their clipped, parade-ground speech and their readiness to use personal violence if crossed. When the SS (Schutzstaffel) set up its own cadet camps, it called them SS Junker Schools. One of the textbooks used in them taught that cutlery should be held only with the fingers, not in the entire hand. For this was social radicalism: so-called aryan certificates replaced family trees of noble lineage as the way to advancement. No matter how ancient your title, if you had any Jews in your family, you were in trouble — whereas any chicken farmer or bank-clerk with proper German blood and a party card was now invited to act in the way the Junkers always had. SS functionaries who had never been near a horse aped the riding breeches of old cavalry regiments; their black uniforms (often proudly tailored by Hugo Boss) and skull device were taken straight from the exclusive 1st Imperial Hussar Life Guards.
This new would-be aristocracy simply made the law up as they went along, confident that so long as they were being radical, they were working towards the Fuhrer, as the expression had it. But an aristocracy must have someone to lord it over. All so-called pure-blood Germans were now said to be equally part of the Folk-Community. Of course, there were traitors to the people ~ leftists and liberals — but with them imprisoned, exiled, or terrified into silence, the Nazis needed to find, or invent, non-Germans in Germany. Without the friendless Jews, the Master Race would have had no one to be master of until 1939. Anti-semitism, which had been made into a political movement by Prussian radicals, and made respectable by Prussian conservatives, became the very glue of the peacetime Nazi state.
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