The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  On cruises and other trips, while Party officials and middle-class passengers spent lavishly on presents, souvenirs and expensive meals and entertainments onshore, the workers were unable to afford even the simplest additions to the basics provided by the tour itself. There were many complaints from working-class participants about the ostentatious behaviour of their bourgeois fellow tourists, and little real social mixing on most of the trips. Class antagonism was paralleled by regional rivalries; on one cruise to Italy, discord between the Rhinelanders and Silesians on board reached such a pitch that the two groups refused to stay in the same room with each other. On a later Italian trip on the same ship, a group of Westphalians insulted their Silesian fellow passengers, calling them ‘Polacks’, and only the intervention of the crew stopped the quarrel from degenerating into a brawl.119 Moreover, the behaviour of many participants on the tours often signally failed to match up to the standards set by the organizers. Like tourists everywhere, what most of them really wanted was to let their hair down. Instead of being restrained and committed to the racial community, they turned out to be pleasure-seeking and individualistic. Gestapo agents reported frequent mass drunkenness and riotous behaviour. On some ships, the lifeboats were said to be filled with writhing couples every night. Especially shameless, the Gestapo complained, were the young, single women who travelled on the cruise ships in considerable numbers. One agent thought they had only come along for ‘erotic purposes’. Flirtations, dalliances and affairs with men on board or, worse, with dark-skinned young Italian, Greek or Arab men on shore, aroused frequent critical comment from the Gestapo spies. The passengers in general showed a distressing lack of interest in political lectures and meetings. Worst of all were the Party functionaries, whose drunkenness and riotous behaviour became notorious. On one cruise organized for Party Regional Leaders, for example, the Gestapo discovered two known prostitutes on the passenger list. Predictably enough, the very worst was Robert Ley himself, who frequently went on Strength Through Joy cruises, where he spent much of the time so drunk that the captain had to have him flanked by two sailors when he went on deck to ensure that he did not fall overboard. Strength Through Joy wardens arranged for him also to be accompanied by a group of blonde, blue-eyed young women to provide him with ‘companionship’ on the voyage.120 No wonder a popular nickname for Strength Through Joy was the ‘bigwigs’ knocking-shop’ (Bonzenbordell).121

  Yet while it largely failed to achieve its ideological aims, Strength Through Joy was still one of the most popular of the regime’s cultural innovations. By providing holidays and other activities that otherwise would have been beyond the means of many of the participants, the organization became widely appreciated amongst workers.122 Much of what Strength Through Joy offered was new to those whom it targeted. Early in 1934, for instance, a poll of 42,000 workers at the Siemens factory in Berlin revealed that 28,500 of them had never taken a holiday outside Berlin and its surrounding countryside; they grasped the opportunity provided by Strength Through Joy. ‘If you get it so cheaply then it’s worth raising your arm now and then!’ said one of them to a Social Democratic agent in 1934.123 ‘The Nazis really have created something good,’ was often the reaction, noted another such report.124 Another agent reported from Berlin in February 1938: ‘Strength Through Joy’ is very popular. Its programmes meet the humble man’s longing to get out for once and participate in the pleasures of the ‘great’. It’s a clever speculation built on the petty-bourgeois inclinations of the unpolitical worker. For such a man it’s really something if he goes on a Scandinavian cruise or even just travels to the Black Forest or the Harz. He imagines that this has moved him up a rung on the social ladder.125

  So widespread was the use of Strength Through Joy’s offerings that a popular joke maintained that the people were losing their strength through too much joy.126 Some despairing Social Democratic commentators concluded, therefore, that the programme did in the end have an important function in reconciling people, especially formerly oppositional elements, to the regime. ‘The workers’, as one commented in 1939, ‘have a strong feeling that sand is being thrown in their eyes with Strength Through Joy, but they take part in it all the same, and in this way its propagandistic aim is still achieved in the end.’127

  Strength Through Joy, indeed, had a symbolic effect that went far beyond its actual programmes. Its tours and cruises stood out in retrospect amongst the experiences of the peacetime years when workers came to reminisce about the Third Reich after it was over.128 Even - or, as some former Social Democrats sourly asserted, especially - those who had never been on its organized mass tours or cruises admired its enterprise and initiative, and its concern to bring hitherto unattainable pleasures within the reach of the ordinary man’s pocket.129 A Social Democratic observer summed up its purposes and effects as early as December 1935:Atomization and the loss of individuality, occupational therapy and surveillance for the people. There is to be no room for individual leisure, physical exercise and cultural activities, there is to be no space for voluntary get-togethers or for any independent initiatives that could arise from them. And something is to be ‘offered’ to the masses . . . At the very least, Strength Through Joy distracts people, contributes to the befogging of their brains, and has a propagandistic effect on behalf of the regime.130

  People who took part in Strength Through Joy activities might have taken their ideological content with a pinch of salt, but at the same time these activities brought them still further away from the edifying and improving traditions of Social Democratic and Communist mass culture. This no doubt was one reason why some Social Democratic observers looked down on them (‘ “Strength Through Joy” ’, sniffed one in 1935, ‘lacks any cultural foundation. Its events remain at the level of village beer festivals in peasant inns’).131 At the same time, however, they brought about a further, and in the end fatal, undermining of labour movement cultural traditions by the growth of commercialized leisure activities. The vast cultural apparatuses of the Social Democrats and the Communists, built up since the nineteenth century, had been strongly educative, and were linked to a variety of core values of the labour movement. The Nazis not only took all this over, but also reoriented it in a more populist direction, dovetailing with the emergence of popular, unpolitical culture under the Weimar Republic. Partly as a consequence, when working-class culture re-emerged after 1945, it was to be in a far less ideological form than before.132

  These effects have to be kept in proportion, however. Most of the people who went to plays and concerts continued to do so as private citizens. Strength Through Joy attracted a good deal of attention, but it never accounted for more than 11 per cent of annual overnight stays in German hotels.133 The annual turnover of the largest commercial tourist agency, the Central European Travel Office, was 250 million Reichsmarks in 1938 compared to 90 million for the tourism department of Strength Through Joy.134 Moreover, while Strength Through Joy was drastically scaled down on the outbreak of war, its cruise ships converted into troop transports, its hostels into hospitals and its resorts into convalescent homes, commercial tourism, despite a few disapproving noises from the authorities, continued to flourish. From the beginning, however, the regime had sought to mould it to its own purposes, encouraging people to travel within Germany rather than abroad (for both patriotic and economic reasons), and attempting to direct tourists to countries abroad where their presence as ambassadors for the new Germany would be most useful. New tourist sites emerged, from grandiose structures such as the Reich Chancellery to sites of mourning and memory for the Nazi dead; guidebooks were rewritten to conform to the ideological dictates of the regime, giving greater emphasis to continuities with the remote Germanic past at one end, and mentioning wherever possible the association of Hitler and other Nazi leaders with tourist spots at the other. The leadership of the Third Reich was aware of the tensions that arose between the growing commercial tourist industry and the organized tourism of Strength Through Joy, but far from c
lamping down on the former in the interests of the latter, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the boss of the tourist industry, Gottfried Feder, realized that people needed to get away from the stresses and strains of everyday work even if they did so in an unpolitical environment. A consumer society was emerging in Nazi Germany, and for all its prioritization of rearmament in its economic policy, the regime was not only unable, but also unwilling, to stop it.135

  Consumer assertion was perhaps one reason for the failure of the department of Strength Through Joy that went under the name of ‘Beauty of Labour’. The basic intention was still to compensate for low wages and long hours, but here it was to be implemented not through the provision of leisure facilities, but through improvements in the workplace. Beauty of Labour campaigned energetically for the provision of washing facilities and toilets, changing rooms and lockers, showers, and generally improved hygiene and cleanliness in factories, for more air, less noise, proper work clothing, tidiness and order. Healthy workers in a clean workplace would work better and be happier in their jobs, and to reinforce all this, Beauty of Labour arranged concerts and similar events on the shopfloor, encouraged the building of onsite sports and recreation facilities and pressured employers to provide decent canteens for their workers and clean up debris and waste lying about on the shop floor. By 1938 it claimed that nearly 34,000 companies had improved their performance in many of these respects, repainting and decorating their shops, building recreation areas and improving sanitation. Tax incentives helped encourage employers to do this, and Beauty of Labour also staged competitions and awarded prizes for the most improved firm, issuing the winners with certificates signed by Hitler declaring them to be ‘model firms’. The benefits both to employers and the regime in terms of the increased productivity that could be expected were obvious. But all these improvements were bought at the workers’ own expense, since many firms expected their employees to do the painting, cleaning and building themselves after hours for no extra pay, docked their wages to cover the costs, and threatened those who did not ‘volunteer’ with dismissal or even the concentration camp.136

  Workers were not fooled by the inflated rhetoric of the scheme, least of all if they had been influenced by Communist or Social Democratic ideas before 1933, as millions of them had. If, despite all this, Strength Through Joy as a whole was popular, it was not because of its ostensible aim of motivating people to work harder, but because it allowed them a means of escape from the tedium and repression of everyday life on the shop-floor. People took its offerings of amusement and diversion because for the great mass of them there was nothing else on offer. Many calculated that they were paying for the organization anyway through their compulsory contributions to the Labour Front, so they might as well get their money’s worth. In time, it even overcame the reluctance of former Social Democrats who did not want to be seen taking anything on offer from the hated Labour Front.137 Strength Through Joy events, a Social Democratic report noted in 1935, ‘offer, to be sure, cheap opportunities to find simple relaxation. Old friends can meet each other there in a very casual environment and over a glass of beer they can discuss the very opposite of what the organizers want them to.’138 It was not only old Social Democrats who recognized the compensatory function of such events. A memorandum circulating in the Reich Labour Ministry in 1936 noted soberly: ‘Tourist trips, plays and concerts are not going to clear away any poverty-ridden slums or fill hungry mouths.’ ‘A relaxing cruise on a luxury steamer’, concluded an official of the Labour Front in 1940, ‘does not really bring relaxation, if the tourist has to go back at the end to the material oppressiveness of his everyday existence.’139

  SOCIAL PROMISE AND SOCIAL REALITY

  I

  That Strength Through Joy and associated programmes were a substitute for real economic improvements was a view that was widely shared, and had a good deal of basis in fact. Most statistical investigations are agreed that the economic situation of the mass of working-class wage-earners did not markedly improve between 1933 and 1939. Nominal hourly wages in 1933 were 97 per cent of what they had been in 1932, and they had still not recovered in 1939, by which time they had risen only by one percentage point, to 98.140 The German Institute for Business Research conceded on 24 February 1937 that rearmament had entailed ‘a large economic sacrifice for the German people’ even as it attempted to refute the claim that living standards had actually declined.141 Calculating real wages has always been a tricky business, more so in the Third Reich than in most economies. Price Commissioner Goerdeler took the business of keeping consumer prices low very seriously; but even the Reich Economics Ministry admitted in 1935 that official statistics underestimated price rises, not to mention rents and other factors. Recent estimates have put average industrial real wages below their levels for 1928 (admittedly a particularly good year) until 1937, rising to 108 per cent in 1939; in practice, however, this meant that many workers in the consumer goods industries continued to earn less than they had done before the Depression; only those in arms and arms-related industries earned substantially more.142 Moreover, shortages of many kinds also entered the equation, along with the declining quality of many goods in consequence of the growing use of substitutes for basic raw materials like leather, rubber and cotton. Per capita consumption of many basic foodstuffs actually declined in the mid-1930s. In addition, wage increases were achieved above all by longer hours. In July 1934, Trustees of Labour were given the right to increase working time to more than the legal norm of eight hours a day and, particularly in arms-related industries, they used it. In machine engineering, for example, average weekly hours, after falling during the Depression from 49 in 1929 to 43 in 1933, rose to over 50 in the first half of 1939.143 Despite this, however, wages as a percentage of national income fell by 11 per cent between 1932 and 1938. Inequality actually increased between 1928, when the top 10 per cent of earners took 37 per cent of total national income, and 1936, when they took 39 per cent.144 The numerous deductions made from pay packets, for Strength Through Joy, Labour Front membership and the like, not to mention the endless collections held on the streets, in effect reduced income still further, in some cases by as much as 30 per cent. Under such circumstances, it was not surprising that by 1937-8 workers were having to put in longer hours just to maintain their existing, very modest standard of living.145

  Overtime, generally paid at time and a quarter, was the only realistic way of increasing wages for most workers, since the closure of the trade unions had taken away their role in formal wage bargaining processes. Whether or not to work overtime was a matter for the individual employee. The result was a rapid atomization of the workforce, as each worker was pitted against his fellow workers in the struggle to increase wages and improve performance. It was not rationalization, but simple extra work, that led to increased production: the great period of rationalization and mechanization had been the mid-1920s; these trends did continue in many industries under the Third Reich, but at a much slower pace.146 And of course overtime, frowned on by the regime and its agencies in consumer goods industries, was strongly encouraged in war-relevant production. This was not least because the frantic pace of rearmament led not only to serious bottlenecks in the supply of raw materials but also to an increasingly serious shortage of suitably skilled and qualified workers. In the early days of the Third Reich, the government had concentrated on trying to direct labour into agriculture, where the shortage was obvious, particularly through labour service and labour camps of one kind and another. Laws passed on 15 May 1934 and 26 February 1935 required all workers to carry work-books, containing details of their training and qualifications and employment; these were kept on file at labour exchanges, where they could be consulted when the government was looking for workers to draft into new jobs. If a worker wanted to go abroad on holiday, he had to get permission from the labour exchange to do so. Employers could put critical remarks in the book, making things difficult for the employee in future posts. And as rearm
ament gathered pace, the government began to use the work-books to direct labour towards arms-related industries. On 22 June 1938 Göring issued a Decree on the Duty of Service, permitting the President of the Reich Institute for Labour Exchange and Unemployment Insurance to draft workers temporarily into particular projects where labour was in short supply. In February 1939 these powers were extended to make labour conscription indefinite in duration. Before long, over a million workers had been drafted in to munitions factories, defensive works like the so-called West Wall, better known as the Siegfried Line, a vast system of fortifications guarding Germany’s western borders, and other schemes judged vital for the coming war. Only 300,000 of these were conscripted on a long-term basis, but a million was still a sizeable chunk of a workforce that totalled 23 million by this time.147