THE TAMING OF THE PROLETARIAT
I
By far the largest social class in Germany in 1933 was the proletariat, comprising roughly 46 per cent of the economically active population. The occupational census of 16 June 1933, long planned and carried out largely free of Nazi interference, showed that a further 17 per cent could be classed as civil servants, white-collar workers or soldiers, 16.4 per cent as self-employed, the same proportion, 16.4 per cent, as unpaid family assistants (mostly on small farms), and 3.8 per cent as domestic servants. Looking at the adult population by economic sector, the census-takers reckoned that 13.1 million were active in industry and artisanal trades in 1933, 9.3 million in agriculture and forestry, 5.9 million in trade and transport, 2.7 million in public and private service, and 1.3 million in domestic service. German society, in other words, was a society in which the industrial working class was large and growing, agriculture was still significant but in decline, and the service sector, which dominates the advanced economies of the twenty-first century, was only relatively small in scale, though expanding rapidly. Modern industries, like chemicals, printing and copying, and electrical products, pointed to the future with between a quarter and a fifth of their workers being women, and women were prominent in some areas of the service sector too. In the traditional and still immensely powerful industries such as mining, metalworking, construction and the like, however, it was still a man’s world. Roughly a quarter of all economically active people in industry were concentrated in metallurgy and engineering in their broadest sense. More than three million people were active in these industries in 1933, and over two million in building and construction; to these, in the core of the traditional industrial working class, could be added 867,000 in the timber and woodworking industries, just over 700,000 in mining, saltworking and turf-digging and 605,000 in quarrying and stone-working. Only a tiny proportion of those active in these fields were women - less than 2 per cent in mining and construction, for example. And it was these classic areas of male employment - or, in the early 1930s, unemployment - that gave the tone to the working class and the labour movement as a whole.92
Mass unemployment had undermined the cohesion and morale of the working class in the early 1930s. It had destabilized Germany’s large and well-organized trade union movement. In the search for a solution, the major working-class parties had either lost the capacity for independent action, like the Social Democrats, or deceived themselves with futile and self-destructive revolutionary fantasies, like the Communists. In 1933 they paid the price. Between March and July 1933 the Nazis destroyed the long-established German labour movement, closed down the trade unions and banned the two main parties of the working class. Organized resistance by remnants of the old labour movement continued for a while but it too was eventually suppressed.93 In the meantime, the Nazis moved to create a new labour organization that would co-ordinate the workers under the control of the state. The existing Nazi trade union, the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization, was viewed with suspicion by employers, who saw its potential for militancy as a threat. Business did not want to get rid of the old trade unions only to see another, more powerful form of unionism taking their place. Industrialists and bankers were dismayed by the disorder in the factories, as brownshirts and Factory Cell Organization agents attacked and expelled elected union and workers’ council representatives and took over the representation of employees themselves. Employers soon began complaining that these agents were interfering in the running of their businesses, making unreasonable demands, and generally disrupting things by throwing their weight around. In Saxony, for example, the Nazi Party Regional Leader Martin Mustchmann even arrested the President of the State Bank, Carl Degenhardt, and held him in custody for a month. Such actions were not welcomed by the business community.94
The disruption was a consequence not least of the radical ambitions of the Factory Cell Organization, whose influence in this period was out of all proportion to its relatively weak membership of a mere 300,000 employees. Backed by the muscle of the stormtroopers and the co-ordinating will of the new regime, its agents had already moved in to trade union offices and were beginning to run their affairs well before the unions were effectively abolished on 2 May 1933. The Factory Cell Organization’s leading figure, Reinhard Muchow, not yet thirty years of age at the time of the Nazi seizure of power, had cut his teeth in a series of bitter labour disputes in the final years of the Weimar Republic, most notably in the Berlin transport workers’ strike of 1932, when the Nazis had fought side by side with the Communists. As propaganda assistant to Goebbels in the latter’s capacity as Party Regional Leader for Berlin, Muchow had directed his appeal to the capital city’s working class, to which indeed he himself belonged. In his vision, the Factory Cell Organization would grow into a gigantic trade union organization representing every employed person in the Third Reich. In this capacity it would form a crucial element in the new corporate state; it would determine wages and salaries, present the government with new labour protection measures, and take over the unions’ social functions.95
But the Nazi leadership did not want class conflict imported from the Weimar Republic into the new Reich. Already on 7 April, Hess had ordered the Factory Cell Organization not to interfere in the running of businesses, or, indeed, to disrupt the work of the trade unions, whose role in paying benefits to unemployed members was crucial during the Depression. The takeover of the unions on 2 May was in some respects a classic example of the Nazi leadership’s tendency to try to channel uncoordinated activism into institutional forms when it began to become a nuisance.96 The unions were immediately replaced by the German Labour Front, officially celebrated at a ceremony attended by Hitler and the cabinet on 10 May 1933. The man appointed to lead the Labour Front was one of the Third Reich’s more colourful characters, Robert Ley. Born in 1890 as the seventh of eleven children of a West German farmer, Ley had suffered a life-shaping trauma as a child when his father had got deeply into debt and tried to raise insurance money to repay it by setting fire to his farm. To judge from Ley’s later autobiographical writings, the poverty and disgrace that ensued for the family after his father’s conviction for arson left the boy with a permanent sense of social insecurity and resentment against the upper classes. Intelligent and ambitious, he chose to rebound by working hard at his studies, and, unusually for someone of his background, entered university. Partly supporting himself through part-time work, he studied chemistry from 1910 onwards. In 1914, however, the war put a temporary halt to all this; Ley volunteered immediately and served in an artillery unit on the Western Front until 1916, when, bored with the constant pounding and the bloody stalemate of trench warfare, he trained as a pilot and began to fly spotter-planes. On 29 July 1917 his aircraft was shot down; almost miraculously, his co-pilot managed a crash-landing. But they landed behind enemy lines. Ley was captured, and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the French. The incident left Ley with serious injuries, including not just damage to his leg, which was saved only after six operations, but also to the frontal lobe of his brain, which seems to have gradually deteriorated over the years. He spoke with a stammer, and became increasingly prone to bouts of alcoholism and unrestrained behaviour of all kinds.97
Ley returned to university at the end of the war and completed his studies, gaining a doctorate in 1920 for his dissertation in food chemistry, part of which was published in a scientific journal. With this training, it is not surprising that he secured a good job in the Bayer chemical company, in Leverkusen. This enabled him to marry and start a family. Yet he remained discontented and insecure, his dissatisfaction with the humdrum routine of everyday life fired by his reading of romantic and utopian literature. The French occupation of the Rhineland, where he lived, fuelled his nationalist beliefs, which turned into admiration for Hitler when Ley read reports of the Nazi Leader’s speech at the trial of the Munich putschists early in 1924. Ley joined the Nazi Party and soon became a leading local camp
aigner, rising to become Regional Leader for the Southern Rhineland in June 1925. As with many other prominent early Nazis, Ley was won over by Hitler’s oratory on first hearing it. He conceived a boundless admiration for the Nazi Leader, perhaps, as psychohistorians have suggested, finding in him a substitute for the father whose disgrace had cast such a pall over Ley’s childhood. Ley backed Hitler in the disputes that divided the Rhineland branches of the Party from the leadership in the mid-1920s, and helped Hitler to take the reins of power in the Party back into his hands again after his enforced inactivity following the failure of the 1923 Munich putsch. It was for this reason, and because Ley, despite his stutter, proved to be an effective, rabble-rousing speaker, that Hitler repeatedly overlooked complaints from Ley’s colleagues about his financial mismanagement, his high-handed attitude towards subordinates, and his administrative incompetence. Ley was soon running a regional Nazi newspaper, full of antisemitic propaganda whose virulence yielded little to that of the more notorious The Stormer, published by Julius Streicher, the Party Regional Leader in Nuremberg. The paper, the West German Observer, ran repeated allegations of ritual murder by Jews, and carried pornographic stories about the supposed seduction of Aryan girls by their Jewish employers. Such claims led to several prosecutions and fines being imposed on Ley, which did nothing to deter him from repeating them.98
Brought by Hitler to Munich Party headquarters in 1931, Ley stepped into Gregor Strasser’s shoes on the latter’s sudden resignation as Reich Organization Leader of the Party in December, 1932, though he did not inherit the immense administrative power his predecessor had possessed. Ley’s experience in trying to win over the voters of the strongly working-class areas of the Rhineland, coupled with his utopian idealism and his social resentments, gave his Nazism a discernibly collectivist tinge. It made him Hitler’s obvious choice to work out plans for the remodelling of Germany’s labour organizations early in April 1933. In formal political terms, Ley’s task was to fulfil Hitler’s vision of integrating the working class into the new Germany, to win over perhaps the most recalcitrant, most anti-Nazi part of Germany’s population to enthusiastic support of the new order. But Ley lacked the expertise to do this on his own initiative. He was quick to install the Labour Front in the old trade union offices and to incorporate the Factory Cell Organization. But he had little alternative but to make use of the Organization’s officials in setting up the Labour Front’s internal structures. Initially, these just placed existing union institutions under new management with new names and arranged them into five large sub-groups. Thus the old trade union organization became one sub-group, with all its subordinate divisions such as its press bureau and its newspaper, while the white-collar unions formed another sub-group, retailers a third, the professions a fourth and business the fifth. The way for the Labour Front to become the nucleus of a Corporate State on the Italian Fascist model, reconciling the interests of all the different sectors of the economy in the service of the new political order, seemed to be open.99
But these ideas, pushed by Muchow and the Factory Cell Organization leaders, did not last very long. Neither the professions nor business were enthusiastic about them, the retailers never had much influence, and Muchow and his friends were by far the most dynamic force in the new structure. Before long, the Labour Front had become what they had wanted the Factory Cell Organization to be, a sort of super-union representing above all the interests of the workers. In this capacity it issued orders regulating paid vacations, wage agreements, equal pay for women, health and safety and much more besides. At a local level, agitation continued, with some officials threatening to send employers to concentration camp if they did not give in to their demands. Muchow declared that ex-Social Democrats and even some ex-Communists were responsible, and instituted an investigation of the political past of all the functionaries of the Labour Front with a view to purging 100,000 of them from the organization. But complaints continued to multiply, from the Minister of Labour, the Interior Minister, even the Transportation Minister, all worried that their authority was being eroded by the unilateral actions of lower-level Labour Front functionaries. Things seemed to be getting out of hand, and it was time to bring the situation under control.100
II
On 19 May 1933, acting under pressure from the employers and from government Ministries in Berlin, the cabinet promulgated a Law on Trustees of Labour. This established twelve state officials whose job it was to regulate wages, conditions of work and labour contracts in each of their respective districts, and to maintain peace between workers and employers. The Trustees were officials of the Reich Ministry of Labour. Only two of them belonged to the Factory Cell Organization; five of them were corporate lawyers and four were civil servants. The rather vague terms of the Law were filled out in detail in a further measure, the Law for the Ordering of National Labour, issued on 20 January 1934 and drafted by a civil servant who had previously been employed by an industrial pressure-group.101 The new Laws swept away the framework of bilateral collective bargaining and regulation between employers and unions that had been one of the great achievements of Weimar labour policy and replaced it with a new structure that incorporated the National Socialist ‘leadership principle’. They stressed that there was no need for antagonism between workers and employers in the new National Socialist state; both would work together in harmony as part of the newly unified German racial community. To underline this, the Laws were couched in a neo-feudal language of reciprocity which, like the real feudalism of the Middle Ages, concealed the fact that real power lay predominantly in the hands of one side: the employers. The powers of the Trustees of Labour included the appointment of Councils of Trust for individual plants, the arbitration of disputes, the confirmation of redundancies, the regulation of working hours and the basis for calculating piece-rates, and the referral of abuses of authority, provocation, disruption, breach of confidence and similar misdemeanours to Courts of Honour which would have a quasi-judicial function and include judges appointed by the Ministry of Justice among their members. The employer was now called the ‘plant leader’ (Betriebsführer) and the workers his ‘retinue’ (Gefolgschaft). Replacing Weimar’s system of elected works councils and legally binding contracts of employment, the new system put all the cards into the hands of the bosses in collaboration with the Trustees of Labour. In fact, the Courts of Honour were virtually a dead letter; only 516 cases were brought before them in 1934-6, mostly concerning the physical abuse of apprentices by master-artisans. They might have looked fair and just on paper, but in practice they had little real effect.102
This new system of industrial relations represented a major victory for the employers, backed by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, who badly needed the co-operation of industry in their drive to rearm. While the new Trustees of Labour poured open scorn upon the idea of a corporate state, the chances of the Factory Cell Organization’s ideas gaining wider influence were struck a fatal blow by the shooting of Reinhard Muchow in a tavern brawl on 12 September 1933. This took the driving force out of the radical wing of the Labour Front, and opened the way for Ley, now more versed in the complexities of labour relations than he had been the previous spring, to re-establish his authority. On 1 November 1933, Ley told workers at the Siemens factory in Berlin: We are all soldiers of labour, amongst whom some command and the others obey. Obedience and responsibility have to count amongst us again . . . We can’t all be on the captain’s bridge, because then there would be nobody to raise the sails and pull the ropes. No, we can’t all do that, we’ve got to grasp that fact.103
Ley now reorganized the Labour Front, getting rid of the remnants of trade union culture and attitudes, abolishing the last separate functions of the Factory Cell Organization, and acceding to the insistence of the Labour Ministry and the new labour laws that it had no role to play in the negotiation of wage agreements. The Labour Front was restructured along the same lines as the Party, with a top-down organization replacing the previous paral
lel representation of workers, white-collar employees and the rest. It now had a number of central departments - propaganda, law, education, social affairs, etc. - whose orders went down to the corresponding departments at the regional and local level. The old Factory Cell Organization officials did their best to obstruct the new system, but after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ they were summarily dismissed en masse. Behind these political manoueverings lay the recognition of Hitler and the other regime leaders that rearmament, their principal economic priority, could only be achieved smoothly and rapidly if the workforce could be kept under control. This involved clearing away the more revolutionary elements in the Labour Front, just as it involved clamping down on any ideas of a ‘second revolution’ pushed by the brownshirts and their leaders. By the autumn of 1934 it was clear that in the battle to control labour relations, the employers had come out on top. Yet the struggle had not left them in the situation they really wanted. The organization and structure of the shopfloor under National Socialism certainly had a lot in common with the kind of management and industrial relations system desired by many employers in the 1920s and early 1930s, but it also introduced massive interference in labour relations by the state, the Labour Front and the Party, in areas where management had traditionally sought exclusive control. The trade unions were gone, but despite this, the employers were not masters in their own house any more.104
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