These measures did not just deprive workers of the power of changing jobs, transferring to a better-paid position or moving to a different area. They also in many cases put them into situations where they found it difficult to cope. In February 1939, for example, Social Democratic observers reported that the workers forcibly removed from their jobs in Saxony to work on fortifications near Trier, on the other side of Germany, included a 59-year-old accounts clerk who had never wielded a pick and shovel before, and similarly unsuitable characters. Forced labour was being used as a punishment: ‘Anyone who in any way lets slip an incautious word is sent there, when the labour shortage means that he is not arrested.’ Textile workers were made to undergo compulsory medical examinations to see whether they were fitted for manual labour on the fortifications. There were reports that people who refused to go were arrested and transported by the prison authorities to their new place of work, where they were given the most exhausting jobs to do. Travelling by train to Berlin, one observer was surprised when: In Duisburg a group of about 80 people stormed onto the train, shouting loudly, poorly dressed, in some cases in their work-clothes, their luggage mostly the poor man’s suitcase in the Third Reich, the Persil carton. In my compartment the travel guide sits down with a few women and girls. It soon becomes clear that they are unemployed textile workers from the area around Krefeld and Rheydt, who are to be resettled in Brandenburg, the men to work on motorway construction, the women in a new factory in Brandenburg. The people turn up in our compartment one after another, to get their 2 Reichsmarks money for the journey from the travel guide. A short while later some of them are drunk; they have spent their money in the restaurant car, on beer.148
Such groups, the reporter was told, were taken by train to new places of work week after week. The married men had the right to visit their families four times a year.
Even this did not solve the problem, which was made still worse by the insatiable appetite of the armed forces for new recruits. In April 1939 the Hanover labour exchange district reported a shortage of 100,000 workers for a variety of jobs, about half of them in construction; the building of the West Wall had drained the industry of large numbers of employees. In August 1939 there were said to be 25,000 vacancies in the metalworking industry in Berlin. Shortly afterwards the air force administration complained that there was a shortage of 2,600 engineers in the aircraft construction industry. So desperate were the labour administrators in the government that they even suggested releasing 8,000 state prisoners who happened to be qualified metalworkers; since a good number of these were probably in prison for political offences, the suggestion was never actually taken up. All this put a new bargaining power in the hands of workers in the key industries. On 6 October 1936 the Ministries of Economics and Labour pointed out in a letter sent directly to Hitler that labour shortages were leading to late fulfilment of contracts and delaying the whole rearmament programme. Employers were taking matters into their own hands and enticing workers away from rivals with higher wage offers, thus increasing the price of the goods they produced. In some factories employees were working as much as fourteen hours a day, or up to sixty hours a week.149 Workers at Daimler-Benz averaged fifty-four hours a week by the late 1930s, as against forty-eight in the last pre-Depression years.150 In a number of cases the Labour Front, concerned about the goodwill of the workforce, took a more flexible line towards wage increases than the government wished, bringing down a fiercely worded directive from Rudolf Hess, in the name of the Leader, on 1 October 1937, urging all Party institutions not to curry popularity by giving in to wage demands. Things would get better eventually, he promised; but for the moment, it was still necessary to make sacrifices.151
On 25 June 1938 Goring allowed Trustees of Labour to fix maximum wages in an effort to keep costs under control. The economic logic of rearmament’s effects on the labour market was against him. By this time even work stoppages - in effect, informal strikes - were being used by factory employees to try and improve their wages; the pressure to work longer hours was leading workers to go slow or call off sick to a degree that some officials even began to speak of ‘passive resistance’ on the shop-floor. Labourers drafted into projects such as the West Wall faced arrest and imprisonment if they left without permission; early in 1939, for example, it was reported that one such worker, Heinrich Bonsack, had been sentenced to three months in prison for leaving the West Wall without permission twice to visit his family in Wanne-Eickel. That workers ran away from the West Wall was not surprising: construction was carried out round the clock in twelve-hour shifts, living conditions were primitive, the pay was poor, safety measures non-existent, accidents frequent, and if work got behind schedule, labourers were forced to work for double or even treble shifts to catch up, with a break only once every twelve hours. Another worker, a turner, was refused permission by his employer in Cologne to leave his job for a better-paid one elsewhere, and when he signed off sick, the company doctor forced him back to his workplace. When his workbench was found shortly afterwards to be damaged, he was arrested and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for sabotage, an offence that was being used by the authorities increasingly at this time. Conscription to jobs away from home led to so many incidents that in November 1939 Hitler ordered that workers where possible be conscripted into schemes or factories in the district where they lived, a measure that seems to have had little effect in practice.152
In characteristic fashion, the regime increasingly sought to enforce its measures by terror. A favourite measure on the part of employers was to threaten alleged troublemakers with sacking and immediate transfer to work on the West Wall. This had little impact. At their wits’ end, some employers began to call in the Gestapo to place agents on the shop-floor to spy out cases of loafing and slacking. From the second half of 1938, labour regulations had included increasingly severe penalties for contraventions such as refusing to work as ordered, or even smoking and drinking on the job, but these were relatively ineffective, and the courts were getting clogged with cases that were taking far too long to resolve. In August 1939 the Labour Front administration in the I.G. Farben factory at Wolfen wrote to all workers warning them that slackers would be handed over to the Gestapo without trial in future. Already in April, four companies in Nuremberg had called in the Gestapo to catch out under-performing employees. In the railway engineering works at Dresden, the Gestapo even carried out twice-weekly searches of the workforce without giving any reason. Munitions and war production factories were frequently convulsed by management fears of espionage or sabotage. Former Communists and Social Democrats were particularly vulnerable to arrest, even if they had long since ceased to be politically active. In the autumn of 1938, at the Heinkel aircraft works in Rostock and Warnemünde, where workers were relatively privileged and well paid, the works police were said to be arresting employees virtually every day, acting on denunciations from the spies they kept in the workforce. In many factories, workers were arrested for sabotage when they protested against the lowering of piece-rates or the worsening of working conditions. So intrusive did the Gestapo become in some factories that even the employers started to object. After the arrest of 174 employees at a munitions factory in Gleiwitz in 1938, the employers obtained their release after twenty-four hours, explaining to the Gestapo that a bit of criticism of the regime by the workers had to be tolerated, otherwise production would be disrupted, and that was surely not in the national interest.153
The suppression and fragmentation of political and organizational life directed people towards private pleasures and purposes: getting a steady job, marrying, having children, improving living conditions, going on holiday. It was for this reason that Strength Through Joy was so fondly remembered by many Germans after the war. Yet when people recalled this period, they found it difficult not just to remember public events, but even to recount their memories in chronological order. The years from 1933 to 1939 or even 1941 became a retrospective blur, in which the routines of private
life made one day difficult to distinguish from the next. Economic achievement became the only real meaning in life for many: politics was an irrelevant irritation, a life in which it was impossible to participate with any kind of autonomy or independence and so not worth participating in at all, except insofar as one was obliged to. From this point of view, 1939 attracted a kind of nostalgic glow, the last year of relative peace and prosperity before plunging into a maelstrom of war and destruction, destitution and ruin that lasted until 1948. It was in the mid-to-late 1930s, indeed, that the foundations were laid for the hard-working, relatively unpolitical German society of the years of the ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s. By the end of the 1930s, the great mass of German workers had reconciled themselves, often with varying degrees of reluctance, to the Third Reich. They might be unpersuaded by its core ideological tenets, irritated by its constant appeals for acclamation and support and annoyed by its failure to deliver a greater degree of prosperity. They might grumble about many aspects of life and privately pour scorn on many of its leaders and its institutions. But at least, most people reflected, it had given them a steady job and overcome, by whatever means, the economic hardships and catastrophes of the Weimar years, and for that alone, the vast majority of German workers seem to have thought it was worth tolerating, especially since the possibility of organized resistance was so minimal and the price of expressing dissent so high. There was widespread informal and individual refractoriness in Germany’s factories and workplaces on the eve of the Second World War, but it did not really amount to anything that could be called opposition, let alone resistance, nor did it create any real sense of crisis in the Third Reich’s ruling elite.154
II
How did the Third Reich deal with the unemployed and the destitute who suffered in their millions under the Depression and were still suffering when they came to power? Nazi ideology did not in principle favour the idea of social welfare. In My Struggle, Hitler, writing about the time he had spent living amongst the poor and the destitute in Vienna before the First World War, had waxed indignant about the way in which social welfare had encouraged the preservation of the degenerate and the feeble. From a Social Darwinist point of view, charity and philanthropy were evils that had to be eliminated if the German race was to be strengthened and its weakest elements weeded out in the process of natural selection.155 The Nazi Party frequently condemned the elaborate welfare system that had grown up under the Weimar Republic as bureaucratic, cumbersome and directed essentially to the wrong ends. Instead of giving support to the biologically and racially valuable, Weimar’s social state, backed by a host of private charities, was, the Nazis alleged, completely indiscriminate in its application, supporting many people who were racially inferior and would, they claimed, contribute nothing to the regeneration of the German race. This view was in some respects not too far from that of the public and private welfare bureaucracy itself, which by the early 1930s had become infused with the doctrines of racial hygiene, and also advocated the drawing of a sharp distinction between the deserving and the degenerate, although putting such a distinction into effect was not possible until 1933. At this point, welfare institutions, whose attitudes towards the destitute had become increasingly punitive in the course of the Depression, moved rapidly to bring criminal sanctions to bear on the ‘work-shy’, the down-and-out and the socially deviant. Nazi ideas on welfare were thus not wholly alien to the thinking of welfare administrators in the later stages of the Weimar Republic.156
Faced with ten million people in receipt of welfare assistance at the height of the Depression, however, it would have been political suicide for the Nazis to have written off the mass of the unemployed and destitute as not worth helping. However much the employment situation improved, or was made to look as if it improved, in the spring, summer and autumn of the Nazis’ first year in office, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels recognized that the economic situation would still be serious enough for many people to be living below the poverty line in the first full winter of the Third Reich in power. To boost the regime’s image and convince people it was doing everything it could to foster solidarity between the better-off and the worst-off amongst the Germans, he announced on 13 September 1933 that he was setting up a short-term relief programme which he called the Winter Aid Programme of the German People. This built on, formalized, co-ordinated and carried further a number of emergency relief schemes already launched by Regional Party Leaders; more importantly, it continued and expanded similar schemes that had already been mooted under the Weimar Republic and formally established in 1931 under Reich Chancellor Brüning.157 Soon, some 1.5 million volunteers and 4,000 paid workers were ladling out soup to the poor at emergency centres, taking round food parcels to the destitute, collecting and distributing clothes to the unemployed and their families, and engaging in a wide variety of other centrally directed charitable activities. When Hitler, in a widely publicized speech, urged people to contribute, two million Reichsmarks were pledged by a variety of institutions, including Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, the very next day. Donations received during the winter of 1933-4 eventually totalled 358 million Reichsmarks. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry blared forth its satisfaction at this evidence of a new spirit of community solidarity and mutual help amongst the German people.158 This was not charity, therefore, or state welfare, even though it was in fact run by the state, by the Propaganda Minister and by a specially appointed Reich Commissioner for Winter Aid. It was, on the contrary, Goebbels declared, a form of racial self-help run by the German people for the German people.159
Yet again the reality was different from the propaganda. For contributions to the Winter Aid were virtually compulsory for everyone from the outset. When a burly, brown-uniformed stormtrooper appeared at the door demanding a donation, few were brave enough to refuse, and those who did faced the prospect of escalating threats and intimidation until they relented and put their money in the collection box. In Bavaria it was announced that those who did not contribute would be regarded as enemies of the Fatherland; some were publicly paraded through the streets with placards round their necks advertising their sin of omission; others were even dismissed from their jobs as a result. The experience of a Reich Entailed Farmer in Franconia who had refused to contribute in 1935 can hardly have been untypical: he was informed by Party District Leader Gerstner ‘that you are not worthy to bear the honourable title of farmer in National Socialist Germany’ and warned that it would be necessary ‘to take measures to prevent public disorder being created by your attitude’ - in other words, that he could expect either removal to ‘protective custody’ in a concentration camp or face physical violence from the local SA. In one cinema in Breslau in December 1935, eight armed SS men appeared on the stage at the end of the performance and announced that the exits had all been sealed; there were enemies of the state in the auditorium, and everyone had to make a donation to the Winter Aid to prove that they were not amongst their number. As the brief announcement ended, the doors burst open and fifty stormtroopers poured in, armed with collection boxes. Across the land, workers came under pressure to allow their contributions to be automatically deducted from their wage packets at a rate of 20 per cent of the basic income tax (later reduced to 10 per cent). Those who earned too little to pay tax still had to contribute 25 pfennigs from each pay packet. In one factory in 1938, workers were told that if they did not agree to a deduction, the sum they should be paying would be added to the sums deducted from the pay packets of their fellow employees.160
Crucially, regular, automatic contributions entitled the donor to receive a plaque which he could nail to the front door of his home, which brownshirts, Hitler Youth members and other Party members knocking on doors to collect donations were instructed to take as an instruction to move on without disturbing him. In some factories, however, workers were asked for additional contributions even if they had agreed to have Winter Aid deducted from their wage packets. And this still did not protect such donors
from the importunities of brown-uniformed men standing on the streets with their collecting-boxes, or the pressure exerted by shopkeepers and customers to put loose change into the Winter Aid receptacles that were placed on the counters of most retail outlets. Winter Aid vendors also offered opportunities to collect various sets of illustrated cards, including a set of photographs of Hitler. Children were sometimes given part of a day off school and provided with knick-knacks to sell on the street for the Winter Aid collection. Purchase of a Winter Aid badge might help ward off the importunities of street-collectors; better still was to buy a Winter Aid nail, evidence that one possessed a Winter Aid shield, into which the nails, costing 5 pfennigs each, could be hammered, until the entire surface was covered with an estimated 1,500 of them. Wearing a Winter Aid badge on the street might have been a form of self-protection, but it also had the effect of advertising to others one’s solidarity with the regime. Nearly 170 million badges were sold in the winter of 1938-9. It became popular to use them as a decoration for Christmas trees in the home.161
The Third Reich in Power Page 59