In the meantime, the huge apparatus of the German Labour Front quickly began to gain a reputation as perhaps the most corrupt of all the major institutions of the Third Reich. For this, Ley himself had to shoulder a large part of the blame. His position as head of the Labour Front made him comfortably off, with a salary of 4,000 Reichsmarks, to which he added 2,000 Reichsmarks as Reich Organization Leader of the Party, 700 Reichsmarks as a Reichstag deputy, and 400 Reichsmarks as a Prussian State Councillor. But this was only the beginning. His books and pamphlets, which Labour Front officials were encouraged to buy in bulk for distribution to the members, brought in substantial royalties, while profits from his newspaper - 50,000 Reichsmarks a year - went straight into his pocket. Ley made free personal use of the substantial funds confiscated by the Labour Front from the former trade unions, and in 1940 he benefited from a one-off gift of a million Reichsmarks bestowed on him by Hitler. With such funds, he bought a whole series of grand villas in the most fashionable districts of Germany’s towns and cities. The running costs, which in his villa in Berlin’s Grunewald included a cook, two nannies, a chambermaid, a gardener and a housekeeper, were met by the Labour Front up to 1938, and even after that it paid all Ley’s entertainment expenses. He was fond of expensive automobiles and gave two to his second wife as presents. Ley also had a railway carriage refitted for his personal use. He collected paintings and furniture for his houses. In 1935 he bought a landed estate near Cologne and promptly began to turn it into a Nazi utopia, demolishing the old buildings and hiring the architect Clemens Klotz, designer of the Nazi Order Castles, to construct a new house in a grandiose style, confiscated land to increase the acreage of his own, drained marshes, introduced new machinery and set up a training scheme for apprentice farmhands. Here Ley played the neo-feudal landlord, with the staff lined up, standing to attention, to greet him when he flew in from Berlin, and secured the farm’s official designation as a hereditary entailed estate.
Ensconced within such pretentious residences, surrounded by expensive paintings and furniture, Ley spent his leisure hours in womanizing and increasingly heavy drinking, both of which often led to embarrassing scenes in public. The drinking bouts he indulged in with his entourage often ended in violence. One such occasion in Heidelberg ended with the Minister-President of Baden being beaten up. In 1937 Ley was visibly drunk while hosting a visit by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and after driving them in his Mercedes straight through a set of locked factory gates, was hurriedly replaced on Hitler’s orders by Herman Goring for the rest of the visit. Two years earlier, after a string of affairs, Ley had begun a liaison with the young soprano Inge Spilker, whom he married in 1938 immediately after divorcing his first wife. His infatuation with her physical charms led to him commissioning a painting of her, naked from the waist up, which he proudly showed to visiting dignitaries, while on one occasion he was even said to have torn her clothes off in the presence of guests in order to show them how beautiful her body was. Subjected to such pressure, and unable to cope with Ley’s growing alcoholism, Inge herself took to the bottle, became a drug addict, and shot herself dead on 29 December 1942 after the last of many violent rows with her husband. Hitler warned the Labour Front leader about his behaviour on more than one occasion, but he carried on regardless. As so often, the Nazi Leader was prepared to forgive almost anything of a subordinate so long as he remained loyal.105
Corruption within the Labour Front by no means ended with Ley himself; indeed he could be said to have set an example to his subordinates in how to milk the organization for personal gain. A huge variety of business enterprises of one kind and another operated by the Labour Front offered multifarious opportunities for making money on the side. The Labour Front’s construction companies, led by a senior official, Anton Karl, a man with previous convictions for theft and embezzlement himself, paid out more than 580,000 Reichsmarks in bribes in 1936-7 alone in order to secure contracts. Sepp Dietrich, the leader of Hitler’s SS bodyguard, took due note of the gifts showered over him by Karl, including a gold cigarette-case, hunting-weaponry, silk shirts and a holiday in Italy for his wife, and issued Karl’s Labour Front construction firm with a contract to rebuild his unit’s barracks in Berlin. In return for favour and influence, Karl used the Labour Front’s bank to grant leading Nazis cheap credit or even to buy houses for them at well below their market price. Hitler’s adjutants, Julius Schaub and Wilhelm Brückner, his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and anyone else thought to possess the Leader’s ear were the frequent recipients of bribes from the Labour Front; Ley gave them 20,000 Reichsmarks each as a ‘Christmas present’ in 1935 alone.106 Social Democratic observers gleefully chronicled a whole mass of corruption and embezzlement cases involving officials of the Labour Front every year. In 1935, for example, they noted that Alois Wenger, a Labour Front official in Konstanz, had been condemned for pocketing funds intended for workers’ leisure activities and forging receipts to try and deceive the auditors. Another official, an ‘old fighter’ of the Nazi Party, embezzled his colleagues’ Labour Front contributions and obtained 2,000 Reichsmarks - probably with menaces - from his employer to cover the missing money. He spent it all on drink. What was done with Labour Front contributions, reported another Social Democratic agent, could be seen in front of the organization’s headquarters in Berlin:2 to 3 private cars used to be parked in front of the old Trade Union House up to 1932. They belonged to the Workers’ Bank or the Trade Unions. Nowadays you ought just to see them waiting there in a rank, it’s 50 or 60 cars a day, and sometimes even more. The Labour Front chauffeurs have got blank cheques for petrol, they can fill their tanks as much as they like, and they do it often because they don’t have to account for it. The corruption in the Labour Front is vast, and the general standard of morals correspondingly low.107
Ley was far from the only beneficiary of the Labour Front’s funds; his open and obvious corruption was only the tip of an enormous iceberg of peculation. Such goings-on did not endear the Labour Front to the millions of workers who were forced to sustain it with compulsory contributions from their wages.
III
The Nazi regime was all too aware that the closure of the trade unions and the regimentation and subordination of workers in the corrupt and authoritarian Labour Front might cause discontent in the ranks of Germany’s largest social class, a class which until 1933 had given powerful support to Nazism’s bitterest enemies, the Communists and the Social Democrats. Along with its constant propaganda trumpeting of victories in the ‘struggle for work’, therefore, it also sought to provide alternative means of reconciling the working class with the Third Reich. Chief among these was the extraordinary organization known as the ‘National Socialist Community Strength Through Joy’, founded as a subsidiary of the German Labour Front on 27 November 1933. Strength Through Joy aimed to organize workers’ leisure time rather than allow them to organize it for themselves, and thus to make leisure serve the interests of the racial community and reconcile the divergent worlds of work and free time, factory and home, production line and recreation ground. Workers were to gain strength for their work by experiencing joy in their leisure. Above all, Strength Through Joy would bridge the class divide by making middle-class leisure activities available to the masses. Material prosperity, declared Robert Ley in his inaugural address on 27 November, would not make the German nation happy; that was the vulgar error of the ‘Marxists’ of the Weimar years. The National Socialist regime would use spiritual and cultural means to achieve the integration of the workers into the national community. Borrowing from the Italian Fascist organization ‘After Work’ (Dopolavoro), but extending its tentacles into the workplace as well, Strength Through Joy rapidly developed a wide range of activities, and quickly mushroomed into one of the Third Reich’s largest organizations. By 1939 it had over 7,000 paid employees and 135,000 voluntary workers, organized into divisions covering such areas as sport, education and tourism, with wardens in every factory and workshop employing more
than twenty people.108 ‘Strength Through Joy’, proclaimed Robert Ley in June 1938, ‘is the shortest formula to which National Socialism for the broad masses can be reduced.’109 It would insert an ideological content into every kind of leisure. In attempting to fulfil this task, it commanded very considerable resources. By 1937 Strength Through Joy was being subsidized by the Labour Front to the tune of 29 million Reichsmarks a year, while its incorporation of the huge leisure and cultural apparatus of the Social Democratic labour movement brought in further assets, including premises such as hiking hostels and sports grounds. With such resources, Strength Through Joy was able to offer heavily discounted leisure activities that were within the financial reach of many workers and their families. By 1934-5, over three million people were taking part in its physical education and gymnastics evenings, while many others took advantage of the cheap coaching it offered in tennis, sailing and other hitherto quintessentially upper-middle-class sports. In the cultural field, the organization purchased blocks of theatre tickets to make available cheaply to its members, accounting for over half of all theatre bookings in Berlin by 1938. It laid on classical music concerts in factories, creating several touring orchestras to play at them; it built theatres, formed travelling troupes of actors, and arranged art exhibitions. In 1938, over two and a half million people attended its concerts and over thirteen and a half million its ‘folk performances’; more than six and a half million went to opera and operetta evenings under its auspices, and nearly seven and a half million to plays. One and a half million visited its exhibitions, and over two and a half million participated in ‘entertainments’ mounted on the Reich motorways. Membership came automatically with membership of the Labour Front, so that 35 million people belonged to it by 1936. It advertised intensively both at home and abroad, winning many enthusiastic supporters amongst those in Britain, the USA and elsewhere who admired its energy in civilizing the masses.110
Strength Through Joy’s most striking activity was undoubtedly the organization of mass tourism for the workers. ‘For many’, it was reported in February 1938, ‘ “Strength Through Joy” is nothing more than a kind of travel organization.’111 Already in 1934, some 400,000 people participated in package tours provided by Strength Through Joy within Germany itself; by 1937 the number had grown to 1.7 million, while nearly seven million took part in shorter weekend excursions and 1.6 million in organized hikes. Although these numbers fell slightly in 1938- 9, there could be no doubt about the success of these operations. Bulk ordering made it possible to put on package tours at a heavy discount - 75 per cent in the case of rail fares, for example, and 50 per cent in the case of hotel and bed-and-breakfast rooms. This could have a major effect on the economies of tourist regions; already in 1934, for example, Strength Through Joy tourists brought in 175,000 people to southern Bavaria, spending a total of five and a half million Reichsmarks on their vacations. Most striking of all were the foreign trips that the organization mounted, whether rail journeys to destinations in friendly Fascist Italy or cruises to Madeira, which was governed by the favourably disposed Portuguese dictatorship of Dr Salazar. In 1939 alone, 175,000 people went to Italy on such organized trips, a good number of them travelling on cruises. By 1939 the organization owned eight cruise ships (two of which it had had specially constructed) and rented four more on a more or less permanent basis, to carry its members to such exotic places as Libya (an Italian colony), Finland, Bulgaria and Istanbul, celebrating Germany’s solidarity with real or potential allies and advertising the contours of a future German-dominated European empire. That year 140,000 passengers travelled on these cruises. Wherever they called, delegations from the local German consulates were ready to greet them and arrange onshore visits and tours, while friendly governments frequently arranged lavish receptions for the tourists.112
Strength Through Joy cruises were carefully arranged so as to combine pleasure with indoctrination. They were intended to represent the new Germany to the rest of the world, or at least the friendlier parts of it. Traditional passenger liners were divided into different classes of cabin and other facilities, according to the ability to pay, but Strength Through Joy disdained such relics of the past, and celebrated the unity of the German racial community by building its new ships on a one-class basis and converting others to the same model. Once on board, passengers were reminded that they were not there to have fun, or to show off, like traditional bourgeois cruise passengers, but to participate in a serious cultural enterprise. They were exhorted to dress modestly, to avoid excessive drinking, to eschew shipboard affairs and to obey unconditionally the orders of the tour leaders. A new liner such as the Robert Ley included a gymnasium, a theatre and a swimming pool to ensure that participants engaged in regular healthy exercise and partook of serious cultural offerings. Tour brochures advertised the achievement of the cruises and land-based tours in bringing Germans of different classes and regional backgrounds together in a common enterprise to help build the organic racial community of the Third Reich. Participants had to travel to foreign parts above all to educate themselves about the world, and in so doing to remind themselves of the superiority of Germans over other races. Within Germany, a prime purpose of the tours was to help bind the nation together by familiarizing people with regions of their native land which they had never previously visited, especially if, as in some of the more remote rural areas, they could be presented as centres of ancient German folk traditions.113
Yet, as so often in Nazi Germany, the reality did not really match up to the propaganda claims. Often the facilities provided for Strength Through Joy tourists were poor, involving mass dormitories with little or no privacy, or accommodation without proper sanitation. Classical music concerts were not always to the workers’ taste, especially when they had to pay for them. One concert laid on for the organization in Leipzig had to be cancelled when only 130 out of the 1,000 tickets were sold.114 Some theatres, like the ‘Theatre of the West’ in Berlin, put on cheaply staged operettas exclusively for Strength Through Joy, while the mainstream theatres continued to be patronized largely by the middle classes; even when Strength Through Joy bought up blocks of seats for particular performances and made them available to members at a discount, these were generally snapped up by middle-class theatre-goers. 115 The vision of a classless society rapidly receded when Strength Through Joy parties descended noisily upon quiet rural resorts. Far from increasing feelings of national solidarity, package tours in Germany itself led to serious objections from local tourist industries, inns and spas who saw their prices being heavily undercut by the discounted block bookings of the new organization. Well-heeled tourists of the traditional sort, appalled at having their favourite holiday spots invaded by hordes of the socially inferior, whose often rowdy behaviour aroused frequent complaints from innkeepers and hoteliers as well as private holidaymakers, rapidly took their custom elsewhere.116
Undeterred, the organization set about building its own model resort on the Baltic island of Rügen, at Prora. Construction began under the supervision of Albert Speer on 3 May 1936 and was scheduled for completion in 1940. The resort spanned eight kilometres of the Baltic shore, with six-storey residence blocks interspersed with refectories and centred on a huge communal hall designed to accommodate all 20,000 of the resort’s holidaymakers as they engaged in collective demonstrations of enthusiasm for the regime and its policies. It was consciously designed for families, to make good the lack of tour facilities for them in other Strength Through Joy enterprises, and it was intended to be cheap enough for the ordinary worker to afford, at a price of no more than 20 Reichsmarks for a week’s stay. The resort was provided with the most up-to-date facilities available, including centrally heated rooms with hot and cold running water, a heated swimming pool, a cinema, bowling alleys, a pier for cruise liners to moor alongside, a large railway station and much more besides. Designed by Clemens Klotz, the architect of the Order Castle at Vogelsang, it represented pseudo-Classical Nazi modernism at its mo
st monumental. Like everything else in the Strength Through Joy organization, it emphasized gigantism, collectivism, the sinking of the individual in the mass. Unlike the contemporary British holiday camps set up by the entrepreneur Billy Butlin, which provided vacationers with individual holiday chalets and thus freed them from the intrusive supervision of widely feared figures such as the Blackpool landlady, Prora’s massive six-storey accommodation blocks lined up its small guestrooms along endless, anonymous corridors and regimented the visitors whenever they ventured outside, even regulating the amount of space each family was allowed to occupy on the beach. At its height employing almost as many construction workers as the motorways, the resort never opened for business: the outbreak of war led to an immediate suspension of work, though some buildings were later quickly finished to house evacuees from the bombed-out cities. Looted extensively by local people and by the occupying Russians after the war, it was subsequently used as a barracks and training centre by Communist East Germany and today lies in ruins.117
IV
Strength Through Joy thus never got round the difficulties that the Prora resort was intended to solve. But there were worse failures than this. For the people who travelled with Strength Through Joy obstinately refused to do so in the spirit in which the regime intended. Concerned at the possible influence of ex-Social Democrats who participated in the tours, and worried about illicit contacts between arms workers and foreign agents, the organization arranged for the Gestapo and the SS Security Service to send along undercover agents disguised as tourists to spy on the participants. The picture their reports revealed almost as soon as they started work, in March 1936, was a disturbing one. Far from overcoming the social divide in the interests of the racial community, Strength Through Joy tours often brought to light social differences that might otherwise have remained merely latent. Because the income they gained from the tours was so low, hoteliers and restaurateurs frequently served inferior food and drink to the package trippers, who took it ill that the private tourists at the next table were getting something better. Theatre tickets sold to the organization were often for the worst seats in the house, adding to class resentments as those who were allotted them were forced to look down from the gods at the fur-clad bourgeois in the stalls. On cruises, where no amount of internal restructuring of the ships could entirely abolish the differences in quality between cabins on the upper decks and those on or below the water-line, Party officials, civil servants and others took the best berths. Such people indeed took the lion’s share of the best cruises anyway, so much so that the Madeira cruise was popularly known as the ‘bigwigs’ trip’ (Bonzenfahrt). Surveys of passenger lists of Strength Through Joy’s cruise liners revealed that salaried employees were the largest single group, just as they were in ordinary tourism. Only 10 per cent of the thousand passengers on a Strength Through Joy cruise to Norway in 1935 were said to be from the working class; the rest were Party officials, who drank the ship dry long before it reached its home port again. ‘These chaps are stuffing themselves with food and slurping up the drinks like pigs,’ complained a crew member. Single women and young, unmarried men predominated amongst the workers, or in other words, wage-earners with disposable incomes rather than family men or mothers. Most of the workers on the trip were skilled and relatively well paid. The less well-off were usually heavily subsidized by their employers. The cost of the trips was still beyond the pockets of most wage-earners, who could only increase their income by working longer hours, thus reducing the opportunity to go on vacation. In many cases they could not afford the extra expenses that travel inevitably involved, such as holiday clothing.118
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