I'm going to make some observations I've wanted to for awhile about the TVTropes Standard Evil Empire Hierarchy page. It's one of my favorite of their pages to revisit.
The more elaborate a TVTropes page is, the more likely it is it's mostly something the community editing that site imagined themselves and not something more general literary analysis scholars would take seriously. And this page is a perfect example of of that. Because I really don't think a single Fictional Empire that perfectly fits all the requirements actually exists. But to me that makes it all the more interesting to over analyze and speculate about what created these ideas in the minds of these Internet Nerds.
This is partly related to how many of the Evil Empires that inspired these Tropes were trying to at least partly base themselves on the Nazis regardless of not caring about their actual ideology. But the page currently doesn't have a real life section so they aren't trying to apply it to the Nazi Regime itself. Naturally Star Wars is a big middle man here.
It seems to me like the original concept behind this Trope was about the way the Protagonists in a JRPG or other kind of adventure story encounter the Empire rather then a truly objective view of how it's organized. But over the years many editing it and adding examples have lost sight of that.
The Guard's role in a story is chiefly as the first significant Underboss the Heroes deal with. He's often associated with a Fortress or Base of some sort because it's usually whichever one of those is nearest to the Starter Town. They are referred to as one of the least sympatric because their mustache twirling villainy is what establishes the Empire itself as evil, once that's established there is then room for more nuanced characters within it.
In Star Wars this role is played by Grand Moff Tarkin, but Tarkin's rank in the Empire is not a unique one, it's a type of regional Governor basically. Being entrusted with The Death Star may imply he's one The Emperor has particular confidence in, but the rank itself is still not unique. In the expanded universe we do get to meet other Moffs.
For Code Geass the page designates this role to Clovis which is probably one of the most accurate to the original intent of any Gaurds on the page in it's current form.
In fiction using explicit Nazis a good model for The Guard trope is perhaps Conrad Veidt's character in Casablanca. He's probably not a big wig in the overall Nazi hierarchy at all, but is locally who the people in Casablanca are most concerned about. But one could also look at Klaus Barbie in 2020's Resistance.
The big evidence of how this page has lost it's way here would be it's Tolkien examples. Sauron in the First Age and Saruman in the Third Age can be said to be guarding something, but that was never the actual point of The Guard. If I were to use that logic in designating a Guard for the Nazi regime the best bet would be Himmler, he did have that old Castle he ran the SS out of.
The Security Officer position was not originally part of the page, it wasn't there when I first started visiting it as recently as 2012. And for Code Geass giving this position to Cornelia feels wrong, she was just taking over the same position Clovis held, she's really just a second Gaurd. But is also equally as worthy as Schneizel for what The General refers to. Historically Reinhard Heydrich (Later replaced by Ernst Kaltenbruner) fits The Security Officer probably better then any other leading Nazi fits any of these roles.
The General is described as being the opposite of the Guard in how sympathetic they are typically depicted as being. Dennis Hopper's character in the 90s Samson movie is a pretty text book example of this kind of fictional General, the movie respects and sympathizes with him a great deal even though it also sees him as needing to die with the other Philistine leaders.
That role is often a General because something in the collective subconscious of many Military fixated cultures like Rome, America and at one time Japan desires to respect a good General, even an enemy one.
This is part of why Trotsky is sometimes spoken of positively even by stanchly anti-Communist Conservatives, he was the actual Military Mastermind of the early Bolshevik victories agaisnt the Western Imperial powers who invaded Russia to try and stamp them out. So these War fetishists can't help but admire Trotsky a little bit. Snowball is Trotsky in the Animal Farm allegory, that's why he's a Bad Ass in-spite of the cutesy name.
And to the extent that WWII has influenced how a lot of fiction about War has been written in the last 80 years, the (many would argue manufactured) reputation of Erwin Rommel has definitely played a role there, the honorable German General who wasn't really a Nazi. Patton's admiration of Rommel was a plot point in his movie.
But taking being THE General of the entire Empire too literally might result in one designating this to Goring. But Goring was actually quite bad at that job and only really kept it because he was a shrewd politician, so basically the Axis Counterpart of Douglas MacArthur.
In Code Geass the protagonist's main talent is largely being a good General, so the person literally playing The General is also his "Evil Counterpart", and over the course of the story Cornelia and Schneizel both fill that role. Schneizel isn't entirely unsympathetic, but this aspect of The General's role is clearly much better fulfilled by Cornelia, while Schneizel is more filling the Evil Counterpart role as Lelouch's aesthetic and ideological antithesis.
For Star Wars TVTrope's desire to designate this role to someone in the Original Trilogy results in it being claimed by someone who's name most casual viewers don't remember. In the old EU (called Legends now) Grand Admiral Thrawn is the archetypical General.
The Right Hand and the Hero's Evil Counterpart are often the same person because both are partly modeled after Darth Vader's role in Star Wars. That naturally makes it the least "Realistic" when trying to apply these tropes to Historical Empires, but there are still some historical things I could note.
In the 60s BBC miniseries The Caesars when Tiberius makes Germanicus the "Commander and Chief in the East" and then explains his intentions to Piso the Governor of Syria. He says he intentionally wants who actually outranks the other to be "unclear". So whenever I see a Star Wars podcast express confusion over the actual authority Vader and Tarkin have relative to each other, I think of that scene.
The part of how The Right Hand is defined about him being outside the normal organizational structure does make me when looking at the Nazis think of applying it to Rudolf Hess (and later Martin Borrman) they were the Deputy Fuhrer of The NSDAP Party but didn't technically have a government position at all, (kind of like being the Chairman of whichever Party the sitting United States President represents). But since everyone in a dictatorship's government is a member of the Party that does make them informally the number two figure.
Britannia in Code Geass really doesn't have a proper Right Hand. Bismarck who TVtropes designates that I would say is more a Security Officer but also an Evil Counterpart to Suzaku (while Suzaku himself was the Evil Counterpart to Kallen).
Since the page is open to new positions being added, I think something like "The Propaganda Minister" or "The Press Secretary" or "The Spokesperson" should be added. Since I think in order for any Fictional Evil Empire to be like any modern Governmental Regime someone ought to be filling the Joseph Goebbels role, and for a not so modern setting the equivalent role could be something like "The False Prophet".
For Apokolips in DC Comics that would be Glorious Godfrey. In V for Vendetta (the movie version at least) that would be Lewis Prothero. Currently many and probably most Fictional Empires don't have one, but the same is true for The Security Officer, and none of them are entirely universal.
In Code Geass I would oddly enough say Detard plays this role at the start for Britannia but then later for Zero and in the end for Schneizel.
The Oddball is defined as usually a Mad Scientist or Dark Magician, but the inclusion of Bobba Fett suggests it's sometimes just a mercenary being hired by the government. The page currently saying this is Suzaku's role in Britannia is pretty weird, it should be Earl Lyod Asplund. For the Nazis this is basically Mengele and other notorious Nazi Scientists, or from the Occult perspective people like Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, Karl Maria Wiligut, Savitri Devi or Miguel Serrano. But given how some Trope pages treat this almost as the miscellaneous position, I kind of feel you could give it to Albert Speer or Julius Streicher.
"The Man Behind The Man" is who the TVTropes page most admits to being optional. In Code Geass V.V. fits this pretty well. In Star Wars you could say it's The Dark Side of The Force itself (or just The Force from Kreia's perspective). In some JRPGs with a twist the Oddball and Man Behind The Man wind up being the same like Kefka in Final Fantasy VI(III on the SNES) and Dimentio in Super Paper Mario.
With the Nazis it depends on how you view them. If you insist on saying it's a logical end point of Capitalism then you could look at Emil Kirdof, Friedrich Flick, François Genoud and the other businessmen involved in the I.G. Farben and Krupp arrangement. People who continue to overstate the Thule Society's role would say Rudolf von Sebottendorf. But I kind of see this being the role of Alfred Rosenberg.
Rosenberg is the only major player of the Nazi Regime who was a member of the Party longer then Hitler. In fact everyone else who's name you're likely to remember or I mentioned in this post already didn't join till after the Kapp Putsch failed in 1920 at the soonest. Rosenberg however was a member several months before Hitler was joining in the same month it was founded (January 1919) and had previously worked on an Anti-Semitic newsletter with two of the party's four founders, Dietrich Eckhart and Gottfried Feder. So it almost seems justifiable to call him the fifth founder, and thus the only founder still important when the Party actually seized power.
It was Rosenberg who introduced Hitler to the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, making Rosenberg a key connection to both individuals who have been called "Hitler's John The Baptist". While his power in the Government was mostly just running some bureaucracies, he was the person who's job it was to to fully define and articulate what exactly Nazi ideology was. It kind of feels accurate to call him the High Priest of The Third Reich.
