As with so many other emergency measures in the Third Reich, the Winter Aid soon became a permanent feature of the sociopolitical landscape. The action was underpinned legislatively on 5 November 1934 by a Collection Law which allowed the Interior Minister and the Nazi Party Treasurer to suspend any charities or funds that competed with the Winter Aid, thus forcing all other philanthropic activities into the summer months and ensuring that demands for contributions would be addressed to the German people all the year round. On 4 December 1936 this was backed up by a Winter Aid Law that formally put the scheme on a permanent basis. The statistics were impressive. By the winter of 1938-9, 105 million Reichsmarks were coming in from wage deductions, with collections and donations, the largest from industry and big business, making up the rest of the total of 554 million. Winter Aid donations thus accounted for nearly 3 per cent of the average worker’s income at this time. Some changes had taken place since 1933, of course: after the winter of 1935-6, Jews were no longer included in the ranks of either donors or receivers. And the economic recovery had brought about a halving of the number of those in receipt of Winter Aid, from 16 million in 1933-4 to 8 million in 1938-9. Notable additions to the scheme included a ‘Day of National Solidarity’ every 1 December, when prominent members of the regime appeared in public to solicit donations on the streets, netting 4 million Reichsmarks in 1935 and no less than 15 million in 1938. By this time, too, it had become more or less compulsory for every family, indeed every German, to eat a ‘one-pot meal’ or cheap stew, with ingredients costing no more than 50 pfennigs in all, on the first Sunday of each month, ‘one-pot Sunday’; in the evening, stormtroopers or SS men or a representative of the Nazi People’s Welfare would appear at the door to demand the difference between 50 pfennigs and the normal cost of a family meal as a contribution. The same policy was implemented in restaurants as well. Hitler ostentatiously followed suit, passing round the Sunday dinner-table a list for his guests to pledge a donation of suitable grandeur. Every such meal, Albert Speer later complained, ‘cost me fifty or a hundred marks’. Under such pressure, the number of Hitler’s guests on the first Sunday of every month soon shrank to two or three, ‘prompting’, Speer reported, ‘some sarcastic remarks from Hitler about the spirit of sacrifice among his associates’.162
In the meantime, however, the Nazi Party had also been active in reshaping the private charity sector. The leading figure here was Erich Hilgenfeldt, a Saarlander, born in 1897 and an officer in the First World War. A former Steel Helmet activist, Hilgenfeldt had joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and become a District Leader in Berlin; he was thus close to Joseph Goebbels, who was his immediate Party boss as Berlin’s Regional Leader. Hilgenfeldt had co-ordinated and centralized a variety of internal brownshirt and Party welfare groups in the capital into the National Socialist People’s Welfare. With Magda Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister’s wife, as its patron, and with the backing of Hitler himself given on 3 May 1933, Hilgenfeldt extended his grip on Party self-help groups across the entire country, against considerable opposition from Robert Ley and Baldur von Schirach, who wanted welfare to be run by their own respective organizations. Hilgenfeldt successfully argued that welfare was not the first priority for either the Labour Front or the Hitler Youth, so a separate, comprehensive institution was needed that would put welfare at the top of its agenda. In the turbulent months from March to July 1933, he successfully took over virtually all the private welfare and philanthropic organizations in Germany, above all the massive welfare arms of the Social Democrats and the Communists. From 25 July 1933 there were just four non-state welfare organizations in Germany: the Nazi People’s Welfare, the Protestant Inner Mission, the Catholic Caritas Association and the German Red Cross. However, only the Nazi organization now received state funding; a good number of welfare institutions such as church kindergartens were passed over to it by the Inner Mission during the brief hegemony of the German Christians over the Protestant Church; and despite formal permission to collect contributions during the summer months, the other organizations, especially the Caritas, were increasingly disrupted in their work by physical attacks from brownshirt gangs, and then from 1936 onwards they were required to run their street and house-to-house collections at the same time as those of the Nazi organization, putting them at a severe disadvantage against this powerful competitor.163
Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick left people in no doubt as to where their contributions should go: it was, he declared in October 1934, ‘indefensible to allow the population’s charitable impulses and sense of sacrifice to be used for purposes whose implementation is not in the interests of the National Socialist state and thus not for the common good’. As this suggested, Christian charity was now to be displaced by the desire for self-sacrifice that Nazi ideology placed so high on its list of supposed attributes of the German race. There was another point to this, too: unlike the Winter Aid and other organizations like the Red Cross, the Nazi Party restricted its donations from the very beginning exclusively to people of ‘Aryan descent’.164 The National Socialist People’s Welfare enshrined in its constitution the statement that its aim was to promote ‘the living, healthy forces of the German people’. It would only assist those who were racially sound, capable of and willing to work, politically reliable, and willing and able to reproduce. Those who were ‘not in a condition completely to fulfil their communal obligations’ were to be excluded. Assistance was not to be extended to alcoholics, tramps, homosexuals, prostitutes, the ‘work-shy’ or the ‘asocial’, habitual criminals, the hereditarily ill (a widely defined category) and members of races other than the Aryan. People’s Welfare officials were not slow to attack state welfare institutions for the indiscriminate way in which they allegedly handed out their charity, thus pushing them still further down the racial hygiene road they had in fact already begun to tread. The Christian concept of charity was if anything even more reprehensible in Nazi eyes, and the pushing aside of Caritas and the Inner Mission by the Nazi welfare organization was in part designed to limit as far as possible what were seen as the racially undesirable effects of Church philanthropy.165
Despite these limitations, the National Socialist People’s Welfare was, alongside Strength Through Joy, probably the most popular Party organization in the Third Reich. With 17 million members by 1939, it projected a powerful image of caring and support for the weaker members of the German racial community, or at least, those who were judged to have got into difficulties through no fault of their own. By 1939, for example, it was running 8,000 day-nurseries, and it was providing holiday homes for mothers, extra food for large families and a wide variety of other facilities. Yet it was feared and disliked amongst society’s poorest, who resented the intrusiveness of its questioning, its moral judgments on their behaviour and its ever-present threat to use compulsion and bring in the Gestapo if they did not fulfil the designated criteria for support. Many others were dismayed at the way it brusquely elbowed aside the Church welfare institutions upon which they had traditionally relied in time of need. It was also impossible to ignore the widespread irritation, even anger and fear, aroused more widely by the ubiquity of street collections which, a Social Democratic agent reported in 1935, had ‘completely assumed the character of organized highway robbery’. ‘The importunity is so great’, reported another agent, ‘that nobody can escape it.’ ‘Last year one could still speak of it as a nuisance,’ one informant complained of the Winter Aid in December 1935, ‘but this winter it has become a plague of the first degree.’ There were not only Winter Aid collections but also Hitler Youth collections for the building of new youth hostels, collections for the support of Germans abroad, collections for air-raid shelters, collections for needy ‘old fighters’, a lottery for the benefit of job creation, and many more collections for local schemes. There were pay deductions for the Volkswagen car and workplace contributions for Strength Through Joy and Beauty of Labour, and much, much more. Such contributions, whether in kind or in money or in t
he form of unpaid voluntary work, amounted in effect to a new, informal tax. People grumbled and cursed, but all reports agree that they paid up anyway. There was no organized boycott of any of the collection actions, despite a few individual incidents of refusal to pay. People got used to the perpetual demands for money, clothing and other contributions; it became a normal part of everyday life. It was widely believed that old Nazis were amongst the most frequent and most favoured recipients of the aid dispensed in this way, and there were many stories of preferential treatment to Party members over ex-Communists or Social Democrats. This was not surprising, since political reliability was indeed a prime criterion for the receipt of support. Those who benefited were indeed most frequently Party members and their hangers-on. It was equally unsurprising that there were also many jokes about the corruption that was said to be inherent in the whole operation. One joke had two Party officials discovering a 50-Reichsmark note in the gutter as they were walking along the street. Picking it up, one of the two men announced he was going to donate it to the Party’s Winter Aid relief scheme. ‘Why are you doing it the long way round?’ asked the other.166
By devolving welfare spending onto the (allegedly) voluntary sector, the regime was able to save official tax-based income and use it for rearmament instead. Conscription, marriage loans and other schemes to take people out of the labour market led to further reductions in the burden of benefit payments on the state and so to further savings in state expenditure that could then be turned to the purposes of military-related expenditure. Unemployment benefits had already been severely cut by governments and local authorities before the Nazis took power. The new regime lost little time in cutting them even more sharply. Voluntary Labour Service and other, similar schemes to massage the unemployment statistics downwards also had the effect of reducing the amount of unemployment benefits that had to be paid out. Unemployment, of course, as we have seen, had by no means vanished from the scene by the winter of 1935-6, but local authorities continued to drive down the level of benefit payments by whatever means they could. From October to December 1935, when the official figure of welfare unemployed rose from 336,000 to 376,000, the total benefits paid to them across the Reich actually fell from 4.7 to 3.8 million Reichsmarks. Everywhere, welfare authorities were calling in the unemployed for questioning and examination as to whether they were fit to work; those who were deemed fit were drafted into the Reich Labour Service or emergency relief schemes of one kind or another; those who failed to appear were taken off the register, and their payments stopped. Rent supplements were cut, payments to carers for the old and the sick for medication were slashed. In Cologne, a working-class woman who asked the welfare officer for help in paying for medication for her 75-year-old mother, whom she cared for at home, was told that the state would no longer pay for such people, who were nothing but a burden on the national community.167
Cutting back on welfare payments was only part of a wider strategy. Urging the German people to engage in self-help instead of relying on payouts from the state carried with it the implication that those who could not help themselves were dispensable, indeed a positive threat to the future health of the German people. The racially unsound, deviants, criminals, the ‘asocial’ and the like were to be excluded from the welfare system altogether. As we have seen, by 1937-8 members of the underclass, social deviants and petty criminals were being arrested in large numbers and put into concentration camps since they were regarded by the Nazis as being of no use to the regime. In the end, therefore, as soon as rearmament had soaked up the mass of the unemployed, the Nazis’ original scepticism about the benefits of social welfare reasserted itself in the most brutal possible way.
III
The National Socialist Welfare organization, Winter Aid and Strength Through Joy were by far the most popular schemes mounted by the Third Reich at home. For many, they were tangible proof that the regime was serious about implementing its promise to create an organic national community of all Germans, in which class conflict and social antagonisms would be overcome, and the egotism of the individual would give way to the overriding interests of the whole. These programmes explicitly aimed to obliterate distinctions of class and status, to involve the better-off in helping their fellow Germans who had suffered in the Depression and to improve the lives of the mass of ordinary people in a variety of different ways. Paradoxically, it was the better-off who were most attracted to the ideology of the people’s community; workers were often too deeply imbued with Marxist ideas of class conflict to yield directly to its appeal. Not untypical was the reaction of Melita Maschmann, a young woman brought up in a conservative, upper-middle-class household, where her nationalist parents instilled in her a conception of Germany that she later described as ‘a terrible and wonderful mystery’.168 Conversation in her parents’ home in the early 1930s frequently turned to matters such as the humiliation of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the divisions and squabbles of the political parties in the Reichstag, the constantly escalating violence and mayhem on the streets, and the poverty and desperation of the growing numbers of unemployed. Nostalgic for the Kaiser’s day, when, her parents said, Germans had been proud and united, Melita herself found it impossible to resist the lure of the Nazis’ promise to stop internal dissension and unite all social classes in a new national community in which rich and poor would all be treated as equals.169 Her experience was echoed by that of many others. Yet although reactions to the welfare and leisure schemes that the Nazis deployed to give effect to such unifying ideas were often favourable, especially in retrospect, there was a down-side too. The element of compulsion in all of them could hardly be ignored. Despite the regime’s constant trumpeting of the virtues of self-sacrifice, these did not possess a universal appeal; on the contrary, many people were fixated on the achievement of material improvements in their own situation - hardly surprising after all they had been through in the war, the inflation and the Depression. Class distinctions seemed as alive as ever, and were compounded by a newly emerging distinction between ‘old fighters’ and local Party bosses, who were widely perceived as the principal beneficiaries of these schemes, and the rest. Deeply held beliefs among wide sections of the population, possibly even the majority, ranging from faith in the Christian idea of universal charity to an ingrained habit amongst many workers of viewing everything through the lens of a Marxist-influenced idea of class struggle, proved extremely difficult for the regime to eradicate.
By 1939, therefore, disillusion was widespread even with some of the most popular schemes implemented by the Third Reich. The first flush of enthusiasm for the regime had already begun to fade in 1934, and by early 1936 it had reached such a low level that even Hitler’s popularity was beginning to wane.170 How far did this disillusion reach, how general was it, and why did it fail to translate into a wider and more principled opposition to the regime? A good picture of how ordinary people regarded the Third Reich, the ways in which society changed between 1933 and 1939, and the extent to which the promise of a united, organic national community was realized, can be derived from the experience of a provincial town during this period. In the Lower Saxon town of Northeim, the most obvious outward and visible sign of change in the eyes of the inhabitants was the return of prosperity and order after the poverty and disorder of the last years of the Weimar Republic. Street clashes and meeting-room brawls, which had caused so much anxiety among the citizenry, were now a thing of the past. The town’s Nazi mayor, Ernst Girmann, after ousting his rivals within the local Party in September 1933, ruled Northeim alone, unfettered by any democratic controls, a position confirmed in January 1935 when a new, nationwide law came into effect giving mayors untrammelled power over the communities they ran. Girmann put out a substantial propaganda campaign unveiling elaborate plans for a revival of the job market in the town. These plans were never taken up by Northeim’s hard-headed businessmen; but after the unemployed had been taken off the streets into labour camps and public works schem
es, the general revival of the economy that had already begun before the Nazi seizure of power started to have a real impact. Workers drafted into the Reich Labour Service were engaged on highly visible municipal improvements such as the extension of the town’s parkland, or the repainting of some of the town’s old houses.171
The most notable construction project involved the building of a Thingplatz or Nazi cultic meeting-place, an open-air theatre in a nearby forest, on land purchased by the city at an extremely high price from one of Girmann’s friends. A large number of new houses and apartment blocks were built in the town with subsidies made available by the government, though the most widely trumpeted construction project, a settlement of forty-eight new houses on the outskirts of the town, had been conceived already in the early 1930s and had in fact been delayed by objections raised by the local Nazis themselves in 1932. Only Aryan families who belonged to the Party or an ancillary organization could move in, and only if they were sponsored by the local Party. Still, the propaganda surrounding the ‘battle for work’ had the effect in Northeim of convincing most people that the Third Reich had indeed brought about a miraculous economic recovery. The sense of everyone pulling together to get Germany out of the economic rut was strengthened by the hyper-activism of the local National Socialist Welfare organization, with its collection boxes, benefit evenings, stewpot Sundays and mass rallies. However, the Third Reich’s most significant benefit to the local economy was brought by the army’s reoccupation of a local barracks, whose refurbishment triggered a mini-boom in Northeim’s construction industry. A thousand soldiers and ancillary staff meant a thousand new consumers and customers for local shops and suppliers.172
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