In terms of its propaganda value for the regime, Triumph of the Will was the film about Hitler. As one latter-day scholar of Nazi film put it, “here Hitler was shown the way he wanted to be seen for all time.”106 The cult surrounding the Führer was also maintained in other visual media, for instance in Hoffmann’s popular books of photography, Youth around Hitler (1935), Hitler in His Mountains (1935) and Hitler beyond the Everyday Routine (1937), which sought to present the dictator as a nature enthusiast, a caring head of state and a lover of children.107 But more than any other work, Riefenstahl’s second Nuremberg rally film created the dominant image of Hitler and his relationship to the German people, not just in Germany but abroad as well, where Triumph of the Will was also screened and awarded prizes. During the Second World War, excerpts from it would be used for anti-Nazi educational films in Anglo-Saxon countries.108
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“One People—one Empire—one Leader”: those who saw Riefenstahl’s opus usually came away with the impression that this was not just a propaganda slogan, but reality in the Third Reich. But was it truly? Did the ideal of Volksgemeinschaft, the ethnic-popular community, really exist, or was it a deceptive illusion, a construct alien to reality? Prior to 1933, Hitler’s promise to overcome party and class divisions had been one of his most persuasive campaign slogans, greatly contributing to the attractiveness of Hitler and the National Socialist movement.109 It enlisted people’s desires for a stable social and political order, as free as possible from conflict, as an indispensable basis for German national renewal. After coming to power, Hitler always wove these leitmotifs into his speeches. The new government, he emphasised in his first radio address as chancellor on 1 February 1933, would attempt “to make our people conscious once again, across all castes and classes, of its ethnic and political unity and the corresponding responsibilities.” The introduction of a universal compulsory labour service, he explained at the end of that month in an interview with the stringer for the Associated Press in Berlin, Louis P. Lochner, would help “bridge class divides.” In Potsdam’s Garrison Church on 21 March, he demanded that “a German people must once more coalesce from farmers, the middle classes and workers.” And two days later, when the Enabling Act was introduced, he intoned that the “creation of a genuine ethnic-popular community, which would rise above the special interests and conflicts of castes and classes,” was Germany’s only way out of crisis. “The millions of people who are divided up into professions, who have been separated into artificial classes, who have been blinded by obscure caste thinking and class insanity and can no longer understand each other, will all have to find a way back to one another,” he reiterated at the 1 May celebration on Berlin’s Tempelhof Field.110
Like much of Hitler’s political platform, the idea of ethnic-popular community was deliberately kept opaque and open to interpretation. When the writer Hanns Johst asked for a clearer definition of the idea in conversation with Hitler in January 1934, he received the nebulous answer: “Ethnic-popular community means the community of all productive labour, the unity of all life interests, the overcoming of the private bourgeoisie and mechanistic union-organised masses, the uncompromising identity of personal destiny and the nation, of the individual and the people.”111 What stood beyond all doubt was that the society Hitler envisioned would be forged along racist lines. The only people allowed to be “ethnic-popular comrades” were those “of German blood,” as the first point in the NSDAP party programme of 1920 had declared. There was no place in the ethnic-popular community for Jewish Germans or other groups stigmatised as racially inferior. It was also clear that Hitler’s promise to overcome class antagonism did not mean that he denied the existence of conflicts of economic interest and the need for them to be represented. It did mean that they were to remain subordinate to politics.112
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From the very beginning, the Nazis were keen to court the working classes, which was not just the largest group of employed people but also the one that, prior to 1933, in so far as they were organised by the SPD or KPD, had proved most resistant to the lure of Nazi propaganda. Hitler knew that there was no way to realise his ethnic-popular community without them or against their will. The “German worker,” he stressed in his speech at Berlin’s Sportpalast on 10 February 1933, would in future no longer be an “alien” in the German Reich. On the contrary, “the gates would be opened” so that he could “join the German ethnic-popular community as a bearer of the German nation.”113 To this end, the regime pursued a carrot-and-stick strategy. The party violently broke up working-class political parties and union organisations on the one hand, while offering attractive opportunities for integration on the other. On 10 May 1933, in a speech at the founding of the German Labour Front, which replaced the forcibly disbanded unions, Hitler characterised himself as an “honest mediator for both sides,” who would ensure the interests of business and labour were balanced.114
Nonetheless, the Law on the Ordering of National Labour, of January 1934, clearly privileged employers, transferring the Führer principle to the realm of business. At the head of the “company community” was the “company leader,” with the workers defined as his “followers.”115 In return for their loss of the right to influence company decisions and negotiate wages, however, workers were offered a series of concessions. The German Labour Office made efforts to approve work conditions and relations. Factory canteens were established; sports facilities and swimming pools were built; measures were taken to reduce noise and improve air quality and hygiene; and green spaces were laid out around factories. These were all attempts to give workers a sense of the “dignity of labour.” The historian Peter Reichel has offered a precise summary: “In reality, capitalist conditions of production were not changed. They were only differently interpreted and staged. Perception was to be changed, via a veil of beautiful illusion.”116 Men’s social existence was not to determine their consciousness, as Marxist teaching had it: their consciousness was to determine their social being.
More important and successful in the long term was a German Labour Front subsidiary programme, the “Strength through Joy” initiative, which was founded in November 1933 and modelled after the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro in Fascist Italy. Its goal was to improve leisure activities for workers as a means of boosting their productivity and willingness to assimilate into Nazi society. In a short time, it developed into a mammoth organisation with 7,000 paid employees and 135,000 volunteers. “Strength through Joy,” said Robert Ley, the director of the Labour Front, in June 1938, “is the most concise formula for introducing the broad masses to National Socialism.”117 The leisure-time activities on offer included theatre and concert visits, exhibitions, tours of museums, tennis and riding lessons, adult education courses and even holidays. The latter were particularly popular. “For many people, ‘Strength through Joy’ is simply a travel agent that offers enormous advantages,” an SPD-in-exile observer reported in February 1938.118 Travelling presupposed that workers got paid holidays, and in fact after 1933, they usually enjoyed six to twelve days’ annual leave. Between 1934 and 1938 an average of more than a million Germans took all-inclusive trips with “Strength through Joy” every year. An additional 5 million took part in weekend excursions or short trips of a day or two.119
Especially coveted were trips overseas, for which “Strength through Joy” had its own fleet of cruise ships, including the newly built MS Wilhelm Gustloff and MS Robert Ley. In contrast to conventional passenger ships, these vessels did not have different classes of cabins. “The difference between third-, second- and first-class quarters on big cruise ships were terrible and incomprehensible,” Hitler opined in one of his monologues in his wartime headquarters, since they rendered differences in lifestyle visible for all to see. “This is one of the main things for the German Labour Front to take care of,” he added.120 In the classless society on board a state-sponsored cruise ship, people from various walks of life were supposed to come together in harmony and prov
ide an example for the assimilation of workers into the ethnic-popular community. “Towards the sun—German workers travel to Madeira,” promised one popular travel report.121 Goebbels was enthusiastic: “This is also something wonderful. Workers who have left their hometowns travel across land and sea and are glad when they’re back in Germany.”122
Of course, there was a considerable gap between promises and reality. The holidaymakers aboard “Strength through Joy” ships were by no means a cross section of German society. Members of the middle classes, white-collar employees, civil servants, the self-employed and party functionaries were disproportionately represented, while workers remained in the clear minority.123 The costs of a trip by sea to Madeira were still beyond the means of most working-class households. In the SPD reports, people repeatedly complained that the trips abroad were reserved for the “bigwigs” and were far too expensive for average earners.124 On the other hand, there was growing appreciation of the leisure activities on offer, especially weekend and holiday trips within Germany. “ ‘If it is that cheap, you might as well put your hand up.’ That’s what many workers are saying and taking part,” reported one SPD observer.125 In February 1938, it was reported that “Strength through Joy” had become very popular in Berlin: “The events address the desire of the little man who wants to let his hair down for once and experience the same things the ‘big boys’ enjoy. It is a clever speculation about the petit-bourgeois desires of the apolitical workers.”126 But the SPD-in-exile observers had to admit that even formerly committed Social Democrats were susceptible and that this was an effective form of propaganda: “At the very least, ‘Strength through Joy’ is a distraction that serves to cloud people’s minds and works propagandistically on behalf of the regime.”127
“Strength through Joy” planners were aware that, despite the publicity campaigns, a lot of holiday wishes remained unfulfilled. To alleviate the dissatisfaction, they turned their attention towards constructing gigantic holiday resorts and leisure facilities. The most prestigious enterprise was the “Strength through Joy” sea spa Prora on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen.128 Construction began in 1936, and the six-storey apartment blocks were supposed to stretch for 4.5 kilometres and house 20,000 holidaymakers. A one-week stay was supposed to cost no more than 20 reichsmarks, affordable even for low-income workers. Hitler was enthralled by what he called the “biggest seaside resort on earth.”129 An SPD report in April 1939 admitted: “This building is one of the most effective advertisements for the Third Reich.”130 But the structure was never completed: work on it was suspended with the start of the Second World War.
The beginnings of mass tourism in the Third Reich were part of a larger project and an example of the vision of a Nazi leisure and consumer society. Hitler wanted the racially homogeneous ethnic-popular community to be characterised by high levels of consumption.131 Yet as we have seen, in its early years the Hitler regime prioritised rearmament over the desires of private consumers. In keeping with this policy, wage and income rises were quite modest. Real wages for workers in Germany rose only slightly between 1933 and 1939, and this was largely due to an extension of working hours.132 Against this backdrop, there is little evidence for the argument advanced by Götz Aly in his book Hitler’s Willing Beneficiaries that the Nazi regime was a “dictatorship of favours” that primarily served the interests of the weaker members of society.133
The Nazi mass consumer society remained little more than a promise, a vision of things possibly yet to come. A taste of it was provided by a series of Volksprodukte—people’s products—which were supposed to be made widely available as state-of-the-art technological items. First and foremost among them was the Volksempfänger (People’s Receiver) radio. Bearing the model number VE 301—a nod to the “seizure of power” on 30 January—it was unveiled to the public, with Hitler in attendance, at the Berlin Radio Trade Fair in August 1933. Standardisation and serial mass production meant that the radio could be purchased for the sensationally low price of 76 reichsmarks—with instalment plans available for low-income consumers. In 1939, it was joined by a further model, the Deutscher Kleinempfänger (DKE—Small German Receiver), which cost only 35 reichsmarks.134 The Nazis never achieved their stated goal of putting a radio in every German household, but the number of listeners jumped from 4.5 million in 1933 to more than 11 million by 1939: 57 per cent of all households owned a receiver.135 In radio, the National Socialists had control over the most important means for manipulating the masses. But Goebbels was aware that the aggressive propaganda the regime had promulgated at the start of its reign would cause people to tune out in the long term. For that reason, by September 1933 he was already calling for more entertainment programming. “The programmes have to be relaxing,” the propaganda minister demanded. “Party politics must be kept to a minimum.”136
Hitler never offered an opinion about television, whose development was encouraged after 1933, but as a gadget enthusiast, he is likely to have been interested in it. “I openly admit that I’m a fool for technology,” he said in February 1942. “Anyone who comes to me with some surprising technological innovation will have an advantage.”137 Goebbels, who recognised early on the potential of the new medium, kept him apprised about the progress being made in developing television. The propaganda minister repeatedly noted in his diary that television had a “great future” and that people were on the threshold of “revolutionary innovations.”138 In 1935, the first “television parlours” were established. But the technology was primitive, and there were not many programmes to watch. A mass-produced television comparable to the “people’s receiver” was a long way off, even if the Westdeutscher Beobachter newspaper prophesied in a report on the Radio Trade Fair in 1938 that television would soon be as commonplace as radio.139
The Nazis were less successful with another Volksprodukt, the Volkswagen. As an automobile fanatic, the mass motorisation of German society was an ideal close to Hitler’s heart. Just as the radio industry had succeeded in making an affordable “people’s receiver,” Hitler proclaimed at the International Motor Show in early March 1934, the automobile industry should do its part “to build a car that will attract a million new customers.”140 Hitler did not use the term, but the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten was hardly putting words in his mouth when it ran the headline: “Create the German Volkswagen!”141 The price for the new vehicle was supposed to be less than 1,000 reichsmarks—a sum that most carmakers felt was far too low to be profitable. Ferdinand Porsche, whom Hitler greatly respected and defended against resistance from the automotive industry, was commissioned to design the vehicle. At the 1936 International Motor Show, Hitler told carmakers that the automobile had to go from being a “luxury item for the few to a practical item for all.” He would see the Volkswagen project through with “uncompromising determination,” Hitler announced, and he had no doubt that the ingenious Porsche would bring the “costs for procuring, running and maintaining the vehicle into an acceptable relation with the income of the broad masses of our people.”142
But the Reich Association of the Automobile Industry remained sceptical, so Hitler transferred responsibility for the project to Ley’s German Labour Front. In late May 1937, the “Society for the Preparation for the German Volkswagen” was founded, and that summer it was decided to base the main factory near the town of Fallersleben.143 When laying the foundation stone on 26 May 1938, Hitler once again aimed a barb at critics who had argued that it was impossible to produce an affordable motor vehicle for the masses. “I hate the word ‘impossible,’ ” Hitler declared. “It has always been a mark of cowardly people, who do not dare to realise great ambitions.” Hitler revealed that the new vehicle would be called the “Strength through Joy Car” and announced that he would build both “the most massive German automobile factory” and a “model German workers’ city.”144
The public response was extraordinary. Many Germans greeted the announcement of a car for the people as “a great, pleasant surprise,”
an SPD observer reported in April 1939. “A veritable ‘Strength through Joy’ psychosis has arisen. For a long time, the ‘Strength through Joy Car’ was one of the main topics of conversation among all social classes in Germany.” The idea of an automobile for the masses temporarily pushed aside all domestic and international concerns. “The politician who promises everyone a car is, if the masses believe his promises, a man of the masses. As far as the ‘Strength through Joy Car’ is concerned, the German people believe Hitler’s announcements.”145 To help people purchase the car, the “Strength through Joy” organisation set up a savings plan that had potential customers putting aside a minimum of 5 reichsmarks a month towards the 990 reichsmark price of the car. By late 1939, 270,000 people had signed on, and by the end of the war that number had risen to 340,000. But only 5 per cent of them came from the working classes. And they never got their cars. During the war, the Volkswagen factory mainly produced jeeps for the Wehrmacht.146
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The gap between propaganda and reality was even more marked in the social welfare institution the National Socialists considered the epitome of a functioning ethnic-popular community: the “Winter Relief.” In the summer of 1933, Hitler announced his intention to found a welfare programme for the needy. Private welfare organisations had already run a Winter Relief for those requiring help in the late Weimar Republic, but it had not been much of a success.147 The Nazi regime approached the project with far greater élan. Under the slogan “Fighting Hunger and Cold,” the government wanted to show that it was serious about its principle of “communal before individual benefit.” Erich Hilgenfeldt, the Reich administrator of the National Socialist People’s Welfare, the largest mass organisation after the German Labour Front, was charged with setting up the new entity. On 13 September 1933, Hitler and Goebbels opened the first Winter Relief agency to great fanfare. With this measure, Hitler announced, he wanted to prove “that this ethnic-popular community is not just an empty concept, but is truly something alive.” “International Marxist solidarity” had been broken, he added, so that it could be replaced with “the national solidarity of the German people.”148
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