This study analyzes administrative policymaking and the organization of the civil service in Germany between 1918 and 1945. Although focusing particularly on the period of National Socialist rule, Caplan argues that the politicization of the administration between 1933 and 1945 cannot be understood without understanding both the longer-term history of German bureaucracy and the specific problems of policy in the Weimar Republic. She further contends that the status of the civil service as an apolitical and supra-social institution was under extreme strain by the 1920s, and that the National Socialist regime was only one episode in the ruptured process of state formation in modern Germany, and presents an illuminating series of case studies of the role of the Reich interior ministry.