No aspect of the Rechtsstaat, or civil state under the rule of law, would have been capable of continuity of function under the conditions of Nazi power; and none had done so. Consequently, any relief offered to former civil servants by federal law post-1949 was a matter of parliamentary grace, not of fundamental right. Although the legal personality of the German Reich was considered to have survived into that of the Federal Republic, all of the organs and institutions of the Reich had long since been extinguished by the actions of the Nazi Regime, and their post-1949 successor state institutions were in no sense their continuators.