The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  By the 1920s, the economic situation of this last group had become precarious enough for a number of the menfolk to have to earn a living during the week by working as industrial labourers in nearby towns, to which the village was linked by a good railway connection. This brought them into contact with Communism and Social Democracy, which soon became the political preference of many of the poorer families in Körle. Nevertheless, the network of mutual dependencies and obligations helped unite the community and cement the role of the horse-farmers as its natural and generally accepted leaders; political differences worried the village elite, but they were still expressed largely outside the traditional structures of the village. The horse-farmers and cow-farmers were mostly Nationalist by political conviction, and cannot have been very pleased when the existing mayor was ousted in 1933 to make way for a leading local Nazi. Yet the rhetoric of Nazism had a powerful social appeal to the community at all social levels. Villagers, suitably encouraged by the outpourings of the Propaganda Ministry and its numerous organs, could readily identify with the image of Hitler as head of a national household based on a network of mutual obligations in the organic national community. If propaganda had its limitations in the countryside, with only one radio set for every twenty-five inhabitants compared with one in eight in the towns even in 1939, and no direct access to cinemas, then the Ministry did its best to get its message across through encouraging the purchase of ‘People’s Receivers’ and sending mobile cinemas round the villages. The message they conveyed, of the new People’s Community in which the peasantry would occupy a central place, was not unwelcome and helped reassure the older farmers that not a lot would change; perhaps the new regime would even restore the hierarchical community structures that had been undermined by the drift of young men from poor families into the towns and the spread of Marxist ideology amongst the goat-farmers.35

  Given such cohesive social structures, it is not surprising that village communities remained largely intact during and after the Nazi seizure of power. There was little resistance to the takeover; the local Communists were subject to house-searches and threatened with arrest, and in social terms the suppression of the labour movement in Körle, such as it was, clearly represented the reassertion of the dominance of the horse-farmers and cow-farmers over the village lower class, the goat-farmers. However, using the rhetoric of community to crush opposition to the new regime also had implications in the village as to how far the process of co-ordination could go. The goat-farmers and their sons were too valuable to the village elites to be crushed altogether. Thus the monarchist father of the local Nazi who led the police and brownshirt raids on the homes of the local Communists in 1933 threatened to disinherit him if any of those affected were taken out of the village, and thus he limited the effects of the action. When stormtroopers were brought in to the village from outside to confiscate the bicycles of the local cycling club, which was close to the Communist Party, the local innkeeper, a long-established Nazi Party member, presented them with a fictitious deed purporting to show that the club owed him so much money that he was entitled to seize the bicycles in lieu of payment. The stormtroopers withdrew, and the innkeeper stowed the bicycles away in his loft, where they remained until they were retrieved by their former owners after the war. Village solidarities were often more important than politics, particularly when they were threatened from outside.36

  Nevertheless, the Third Reich did not leave them wholly untouched. In Körle, for example, as in other parts of rural Germany, the Nazi regime opened up generational tensions as most fathers of all social groups remained opposed to Nazism while many sons saw membership and activity in the Party as a means of asserting themselves against an authoritarian older generation. By joining a variety of Nazi Party organizations they found a new role that was not dependent on their elders. Interviewed after the war, villagers said the early years of the Third Reich brought ‘war’ into every household.37 As the demand for industrial labour grew, more young men, and, increasingly, young women from the goat-farmer households spent more time working for wages in the towns, bringing new prosperity into the home but also getting exposed to new ideas and new forms of social organization. The Hitler Youth, the Labour Service, the army and a whole variety of women’s organizations took boys and girls, young men and women out of the village and showed them the wider world. The escalating Nazi attack on the Churches also began to undermine another central village institution, both as an instrument of socialization and as a centre of social cohesion. At the same time, however, these changes had their limits. The older generation’s belief in the community and the farmers’ dependence on the labour and other obligations of the young meant that the arrogance of the younger generation was tolerated, the tensions it generated dispelled by humour, and the household and community preserved intact. And the younger generation’s involvement in Nazi Party organizations did not bring them much new independence as individuals; it mainly meant they extended their community allegiance to a new set of institutions.38

  The fact that village social structures were not fundamentally affected by the regime perhaps helps explain why in the end, for all their grumbling, the peasants were not driven into outright opposition. The major bones of contention - labour shortages, the unwelcome side-effects of the Reich Entailed Farm Law, the low prices for their produce set by the Reich Food Estate - presented the peasantry with obstacles they did their best to circumvent with their traditional cunning, adulterating flour to make it go further, selling produce directly on the black market and so on. They could also have recourse to the law, and many did so. The effects of the Reich Entailed Farm Law, for example, were mitigated by the inclusion of provisions for legally removing entailed farmers who refused to pay their debts, or failed to run their farms in an orderly manner. Special local courts, on which the local farming community was well represented, were not afraid to disbar such miscreants, since it was clearly in the interests of efficient food production as well as of peace and stability in the countryside that they do so.39 On the whole, indeed, these courts took their decisions on a practical rather than an ideological basis, and they went some way towards assuaging the anger of the farming community at the deleterious consequences of the Entailed Farm Law.40

  In the rural Protestant district of Stade, on the North German coast, where the Nazis had already won far more votes than average in the elections of the early 1930s, peasant farmers were basically in favour of a system of fixed prices and quotas, since that made life less uncertain, and the whole ethos of peasant society there, as in other parts of Germany, had never been wholly attuned to free market capitalism in any case. What they did not like were prices that were fixed too low. The lower the prices, the more they grumbled. As might be expected from people whose whole lives, like those of their forebears, had been constructed around the need to eke a precarious living from the land, their dissatisfaction with the regime was limited to the instances in which it had an adverse effect on their livelihood. Moreover, evasion of the production quotas laid down by the Reich Food Estate or the Four-Year Plan often sprang more from the contradictory and irrational ways in which the agrarian economy was managed than from any objection to the quotas in principle. Thus, for example, when small farmers refused to meet their grain quotas, as they often did, this was in many cases so that they could use the withheld grain to feed their livestock and so meet their milk and cattle quotas. The solidarity of rural communities also meant that farmers felt relatively safe in evading the quotas or indeed in voicing their dissatisfaction over the regime’s agrarian politics: in contrast to the situation in urban Germany, it was rare for anyone in the countryside to be denounced to the Gestapo or the Party for uttering criticism of the regime, except where really severe conflicts emerged between the old village elites and the aspiring but politically frustrated younger generation. Despite the exhortations of the Reich Food Estate and the Four-Year Plan administration, peasant farmers often remained suspicious of agricultural moder
nization, new techniques and unfamiliar machinery, quite apart from the practical difficulties of obtaining these things, and the Third Reich did little in consequence to push on the modernization of small-farm agriculture. Instead, grandiose nationwide pageants like the annual Harvest Thanksgiving Festival, which drew more participants than any other ceremony or ritual occasion in the Third Reich, confirmed the peasants in their stubbornness through the uncritical celebration of their contribution to the national community. In the end, therefore, Darré’s promise of a new rural utopia was no more realized by 1939 than was the contrary ambition of the regime to achieve national self-sufficiency in food supplies; but few peasants were really interested in these things, however flattered they might have been by the accompanying propaganda. What really mattered to them was that they were making a decent living, better than they had done in the Depression years, and they could live with that.41

  THE FATE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES

  I

  The peasantry were generally assigned in German political discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to that peculiar and amorphous social group known by the untranslatable German appellation of the Mittelstand. This term expressed in the first place the aspirations of right-wing propagandists that the people who were neither bourgeois nor proletarian should have a recognized place in society. Roughly equivalent to the French petite bourgeoisie or the English lower middle class, they had come by the early 1930s to embody much more than a mere social group: in German politics they stood for a set of values. Located between the two great antagonistic classes into which society had become divided, they represented people who stood on their own two feet, independent, hard-working, the healthy core of the German people, unjustly pushed to the side by the class war that was raging all about them. It was to people like these - small shopkeepers, skilled artisans running their own workshops, self-sufficient peasant farmers - that the Nazis had initially directed their appeal. The Nazi Party programme of 1920 was indeed among other things a typical product of the far-right politics of the German Mittelstand; the support of such people was among the factors that had got the Party off the ground in the first place.42

  The resentments of such groups were many, their perceived enemies legion. Small shopkeepers resented the big department stores, artisans hated the mass production of the big factories, peasants grumbled about unfair competition from the big estates. All of them were susceptible to the appeal of political rhetoric that blamed scapegoats such as the Jews for their problems. Representatives of all these groups saw an opportunity in the coming of the Third Reich to realize their long-held aspirations. And initially, indeed, they met with some success. The locally based attacks on the department stores, the boycotts and discriminations driven in many cases by artisans and small shopkeepers themselves, acting through the Nazi Party and the SA, were quickly backed by a Law for the Protection of Individual Trade passed on 12 May 1933. From now on, chain stores were forbidden to expand or open new branches, to add new lines, or to house within their walls self-contained departments such as barbers’ shops or shoemaking and shoe-repair sections. Restaurants in department stores, widely believed to be undercutting independent innkeepers and restaurateurs, were ordered to be closed. In August 1933 a new decree imposed further bans on baking, sausage-making, watch-repairing, photo-developing, and car-servicing by department stores. Three months later, department and chain stores were prohibited from offering a discount of more than 3 per cent on prices, a measure also extended to consumer co-operatives. Mail-order firms were reined in; Party organizations did their best to ensure that contracts for uniforms and equipment went to small businesses. From September 1933 the government’s housing repair and reconstruction subsidies provided a boost for many carpenters, plumbers, masons and other craftsmen.43 Artisans’ pressure-groups, frustrated by their failure to get what they wanted during the Weimar years, pressed for better qualifications and recognition of their corporate status through compulsory membership in trade guilds, and got them: from June 1934 artisans had to belong to a guild (Innung), which was required to regulate their particular branch of trade, from January 1935 under the supervision of the Economic Ministry. After 1935 it was compulsory for artisans to pass a master’s examination in order to be officially registered and thus to receive permission to open a workshop. These were long-held ambitions which went some way towards restoring the status many artisans felt they had lost in the course of industrialization and the rise of factory-based mass production. They were strongly backed by Schacht, who felt that small workshops and their owners made a useful contribution to the economy and deserved defending against the attempts of the Labour Front to degrade their status to that of workers by incorporating them into its organization.44

  But for all the rhetoric and for all the pressure applied on the ground by local Party and brownshirt activists whose own background in many cases lay in the world of the small shopkeeper, trader or artisan, the initial flurry of practical action and legislative intervention in favour of small businesses soon died away as the economy began to be driven by the overwhelming imperatives of rearmament. Headlong rearmament necessarily favoured big business. Despite all the Nazis’ promises to rescue the lower middle class and the small businessman, the number of artisan enterprises, which had increased during the economic recovery by around 18 per cent between 1931 and 1936, declined by 14 per cent between 1936 and 1939.45 Between 1933 and 1939 the number of cobblers’ workshops decreased by 12 per cent, of carpenters’ by 14 per cent. The total turnover of artisanal trade had not recovered to its 1926 levels by 1939. Many artisans indeed were actually poorer than industrial workers. The shortage of raw materials, the competition of larger enterprises, the prohibitive expense of purchasing the machinery needed to process, for example, artificial leather, were some of the factors involved in bringing about these problems. Some traditional handicrafts like violin-making in Mittenwald or clock-making in the Black Forest were progressively undercut by factory production and went into a steep decline. Moreover, small business, like its bigger rivals, was increasingly beset by government regulations. Compulsory guild membership and the requirement to take an examination before receiving a formal certificate of competence that would allow them to go into business proved to be decidedly mixed blessings; many master artisans had to take the examinations all over again, and the paperwork involved in this was too much for many of them, particularly when in 1937 they were required to keep records of their income and expenditure. Instead of self-governing corporations, artisans found themselves drafted into guilds organized on the leadership principle and directed from above. The promise of enhanced status in a new corporate state had proved to be illusory. The Four-Year Plan, in addition, demanded rapid training rather than the thorough preparation and high standards which had been the idea behind compulsory examinations, so the Artisanal Chambers lost the exclusive right to award mastership qualifications.46

  Small business was squeezed in another way, too, by the loss of labour through conscription and the better wages offered to employees in directly war-related industries. The concentration of business was suggested strongly by a 7 per cent decline in the number of owners and managers in trade, communications and transport in the official statistics between 1933 and 1939. True, some of this was accounted for by the closure of Jewish-owned workshops; between 1933 and 1938 the number of Jewish-owned artisanal businesses fell from 10,000 to 5,000, and by the end of 1938 all the rest had disappeared as well. Almost all of them were too small to be worth taking over, and indeed the grand total Aryanized rather than driven to closure was no more than 345. But there was more to the decline than this. Over the same period, the number of unpaid family employees grew by 11 per cent in commercial establishments as it became more difficult to find paid employees. Increasingly, as young men drifted away from this sector of the economy to other, more attractive ones, or were drafted into the armed forces, businesses were run by older men and their womenfolk. A s
urvey of soap and brush shops at the beginning of 1939, for instance, showed that 44 per cent were run by women, and over 50 per cent of the male owners were over the age of fifty; nearly 40 per cent of the male owners also had to supplement their earnings from other sources of income. 47

  A further financial burden was imposed from December 1938, when artisans were required to insure themselves without government assistance. By 1939 the Four-Year Plan, with its fixed quotas and prices, had drastically circumscribed the independence of small businessmen, from butchers, greengrocers, sweet-shop owners, bakers and corner-shops to cobblers, tobacco-stall proprietors and stallholders on Germany’s markets. Regulations and auditing took up time, while new taxes and compulsory donations cut into profits. The drastic shortage of labour in armaments and arms-related industries had led to growing official pressure on small businesses and workshops to swell the nation’s industrial workforce; by 1939 even independent artisans had to carry a work-book with dates of their training, qualifications and experience; thus registered, they could be drafted into a compulsory labour scheme at any moment; master shoemakers, for example, were drafted into the Volkswagen factory to retrain and work as upholsterers. In order to facilitate this redeployment of artisanal labour into war-relevant production (as the Volkswagen factory indeed was), the Artisanal Chambers were required in 1939 to ‘comb through’ their trades and pick out unviable enterprises in the consumer industries; perhaps 3 per cent of artisanal businesses were wound up as a consequence, almost all of them one-man workshops in which the owner was so poor that he had to rely on welfare payments for part of his income.48