Hitler’s New Germany

The following article was taken, with generous permission from Castle Hill Publishers, from the recently published second edition of Richard Tedor’s study Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs (Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, December 2021; see the book announcement in Issue No. 1 of this volume of Inconvenient History). In this book, it forms the second chapter. This is the second sequel of a serialized version of the entire book, which is being published step by step in Inconvenient History. The last installment will also include a bibliography, with more info on sources mentioned in the endnotes. Illustrated print and eBook versions of this book are available from Armreg at armreg.co.uk.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Germany Prostrate

On February 10, 1933, Hitler discussed his economic program at a mass meeting in Berlin for the first time as chancellor. Telling the audience, “We have no faith in foreign help, in assistance from outside of our own nation”[1], the Führer opined that Germany had no friends beyond her own borders. World War I had ended in 1918 when the German Reich and Austria-Hungary surrendered, and harsh terms imposed by the Allies, despite U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s promise of an equitable settlement, had left the Reich more or less on a solitary course.

Allied delegates opened the peace conference in Versailles, France, in January 1919. They demanded that Germany accept blame for the war and compensate the victors for damages. This enabled them to initiate reparations requirements that reduced the Germans to virtual bondage. To extort the Reich’s signature onto the treaty, Britain’s Royal Navy maintained a blockade of food imports destined for Germany. The blockade had been in force since early in the war. Over 750,000 German civilians, mainly children and the elderly, perished from malnutrition.[2]

Despite Germany’s capitulation, the British continued to block food deliveries until the summer of 1919. On March 3 of that year, the English cabinet minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons:

“We are holding all our means of coercion in full operation or in immediate readiness for use. We are enforcing the blockade with vigor. We have strong armies ready to advance at the shortest notice. Germany is very near starvation. The evidence I have received from the officers sent by the War Office all over Germany shows first of all, the great privations which the German people are suffering, and secondly, the great danger of a collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition. Now is therefore the moment to settle.”[3]

Allied leaders bluntly told German delegates at Versailles to accept the treaty or face a military invasion and extension of the blockade. The Germans signed on June 28, 1919.

The Allies’ conditions degraded Germany to a secondary power. The victors divided 13 percent of the Reich’s territory among neighboring states. The 7,325,000 Germans residing there became second-class citizens in their new countries.[4] Lost natural resources and industry included 67 percent of Germany’s zinc production, 75 percent of iron ore, a third of the coal output and 7.7 percent of lead. The Allies demanded twelve percent of Germany’s exports, with the option of raising the amount to 25 percent, for the next 42 years.[5]

The malnourished German nation also surrendered a million cattle including 149,000 milking cows, plus 15 percent of the harvest. The Allies confiscated a quarter of Germany’s fishing fleet. In addition to large amounts of timber, 7,500 German locomotives and 200,000 freight cars went to the former enemy.[6] Germany also relinquished her prosperous African colonies to the Anglo-French overseas empires. Every transport vessel exceeding 1,600 tons, practically the Reich’s entire merchant fleet, enriched the Allies’ war booty.[7] Germans forfeited private investments abroad.

Morally justifying the terms, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George described how the Allied victory accomplished Germany’s “liberation from militarism”.[8] He gloated on another occasion:

“We have got most of the things we set out to get. The German navy has been handed over, the German merchant shipping has been handed over, and the German colonies have been given up. One of our chief trade competitors has been most seriously crippled and our allies are about to become Germany’s biggest creditors. This is no small achievement!”[9]

Between 1880 and 1900, Germany’s share of world trade had risen from 10.7 percent to 13.8 percent. During that period, Britain’s had declined from 22 to 16 percent, and France’s from 13 to eight percent.[10] Woodrow Wilson remarked in September 1919:

“Is there any man or woman – let me say, is there any child – who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? This was an industrial and commercial war.”[11]

The war transformed Germany from a flourishing industrial power to a distressed state. Military service had cost 1,808,545 German soldiers their lives.[12] Another 4,247,143 had been wounded. The country was bankrupt from defense expenditures. Marxist agitation provoked labor walk-outs. There were 3,682 strikes in 1919, which impacted 32,825 businesses and 2,750,000 workers.[13] Decline in industrial output and reparations burdens contributed to massive unemployment. Demobilized soldiers couldn’t find jobs. A new law required managers to reinstate former employees who had served on active duty during the war; however, many business owners were among the slain and their companies were gone.

Additionally, large numbers of foreign workers were in Germany, having taken over the manufacturing positions of men inducted into the army. Soldiers returning home found their pre-war jobs occupied by ersatz labor. People out of work lacked purchasing power. This decreased demand for consumer goods, leading to production cut-backs and further lay-offs. Unemployment fluctuated dramatically. The downward spiral began late in 1927. In 1931 alone, 13,736 companies filed for bankruptcy. An average of 107,000 people per month lost their livelihood. In mid-1932, almost 23 million Germans (36 percent of the population) were receiving public assistance.[14]

The London Declaration of May 5, 1921 established Germany’s aggregate debt at 132 billion reichsmarks (RM). One mark equaled approximately 50 cents. It also imposed a “retroactive payment” of twelve billion gold marks plus another billion in interest. The German government in Weimar could not meet the obligation. Without foreign commerce, Germany had little income. Fearing inordinate taxation to meet Allied demands, affluent Germans invested capital abroad. The flight of currency and the national deficit contributed to inflation. In November 1922, Weimar requested a moratorium on cash payments. The Inter-Allied Reparations Commission declared Germany in default. The French army garrisoned the Ruhr-Lippe region, source of almost 80 percent of Germany’s coal, steel and pig iron production. Demonstrating passive resistance, civil servants and laborers there boycotted the workplaces. This increased the number of persons on public aid and further reduced productivity. The Ruhr debacle precipitated the currency’s slide into worthlessness. Inflation wiped out the savings of Germany’s middle class.

A commission chaired by the American Charles Dawes made recommendations to balance Germany’s budget and stabilize the money system. The Allies assumed control of the Reich’s Bank and sold shares in the national railroad. They fixed annual payments at $250 million. Another committee convened in Paris in February 1929 under the American banker Owen Young. The Young Plan arranged a new payment plan for Germany to extend to 1988. Since 1924, Weimar had been borrowing from Wall Street banks to meet reparations demands. The worldwide fiscal crisis of 1929 curtailed this source of capital. Despite tax increases, the German government failed to generate sufficient revenue to restore the economy. By March 1933, the German national debt amounted to 24.5 billion reichsmarks.

In mid-1931, the Allies reluctantly approved Germany’s request for a one-year moratorium on reparations. In June 1932, Chancellor Franz von Papen negotiated a further three years’ suspension of payments. Another benefit for Germany at this time was two consecutive mild winters. This created a favorable climate for agriculture and new construction. From January to October 1932, another 560,000 Germans found jobs. Even with this improvement, unemployment still exceeded five million.

In July 1932, Hitler described the Reich’s economic woes in a speech distributed on gramophone records during an election campaign:

“The German farmer destitute, the middle class ruined, the social aspirations of millions of people destroyed, a third of all employable German men and women out of work and therefore without earnings, the Reich, municipalities and provinces in debt, revenue departments in disarray and every treasury empty.”[15]

These were the consequences of Allied exploitation of Germany after World War I. It deeply scarred the German people. Doctors reported alarming statistics of undernourishment among children. The divorce rate was disproportionately high. During the Weimar Republic’s 13 years, thousands of Germans committed suicide, many driven by despair and frustration over months of inactivity. The German author Rudolf Binding placed the number at 224,900.[16] Throughout the period, the Germans endured violations of their sovereignty by countries whose armies had never conquered Germany but had persuaded her leaders to surrender in 1918 through the insincere promise of a conciliatory peace. It was a disillusioned and destitute nation that Hitler inherited when he took office on January 30, 1933.

The Road to Recovery

Two days after becoming chancellor, Hitler outlined his economic program in a national radio address:

“Within four years, the German farmer must be rescued from poverty. Within four years, unemployment must be finally overcome. This will create the prerequisites for a flourishing economy.”[17]

The government enacted laws based on the strategy conceived by Fritz Reinhardt, a state secretary in the Reich’s Ministry of Finance. This unassuming, pragmatic economist introduced a national program to create jobs on the premise that it is better to pay people to work than to award them jobless benefits.

The Labor Procurement Law of June 1, 1933 allotted RM 1 billion to finance construction projects nationwide. It focused on repair or remodeling of public buildings, business structures, residential housing and farms, construction of subdivisions and farming communities, regulating waterways, and building gas and electrical works. Men who had been out of work the longest or who were fathers of large families received preference in hiring. None was allowed to work more than 40 hours per week. The law stipulated that German construction materials be used.[18]

Also passed that summer, the Building Repair Law provided an additional RM 500 million for smaller individual projects. Homeowners received a grant covering 20 percent of the cost of each project, including repairs and additions. Owners of commercial establishments became eligible for grants for conducting renovations, plus for installing elevators or ventilation systems. Renters could apply for grants to upgrade apartments.

Under the law’s provisions, property owners receiving grants borrowed the balance of new construction costs from local banks or savings & loans. The government provided borrowers coupons to reimburse them for the interest on the loans. The Tax Relief Law of September 21, 1933, offered income and corporate tax credits for repairs. The regime covered nearly 40 percent of the cost for each renovation. The Company Refinancing Law, legislated the same day, converted short-term loans into long-term ones with lower interest. The law reduced the previous seven percent interest rate to four (and ultimately to three) percent. This did not hamper finance companies, since it prevented defaults on loans. The refinancing law released businesses from the obligation to pay their portion of unemployment benefits to former employees. The resulting available capital enabled them to re-hire employees and expand production.[19]

The Labor Procurement Law provided newlyweds interest-free loans of RM 1,000 to be repaid in monthly payments of one percent of the principal (RM 10). The loans came in the form of coupons to buy furniture, household appliances and clothing. To be eligible, the bride had to have been employed for at least six months during the previous two years, and had to agree to leave her job. Returning women to the home vacated positions in commerce and industry, creating openings for unemployed men. For each child born to a couple, the government reduced the loan by 25 percent and deferred payments on the balance for one year. For larger families, upon birth of the fourth child, the state forgave the loan. It financed the program by imposing surtaxes on single men and women. By June 1936, the government approved 750,000 marriage loans.[20] Reinhardt described the policy of diverting women into the household economy as

“steadily deploying our German women with regard to the labor market and with respect to social policy. This redeployment alone, in the course of which practically all working women will be channeled into the household economy and marriage, will be sufficient to eliminate unemployment in a few years and lead to an enormous impetus in every branch of German economic life.”[21]

The marriage law released approximately 20,000 women per month from the workforce after November 1933. The increase in newlyweds created a corresponding need for additional housing. More tradesmen found work in new home construction. In the furniture industry, manufacture increased by 50 percent during 1933. Factories producing stoves and other kitchen appliances could not keep pace with consumer demand. The state imposed no property tax on young couples purchasing small single-family homes. As Reinhardt predicted, reduced payments in jobless benefits and increased revenue through corporate, income and sales taxes largely offset the enormous cost of the program to reduce unemployment and revive the economy. He stated in Bremen on October 16, 1933:

“In the first five months of the present fiscal year, expenditures and income of the Reich have balanced out.”[22]

When Hitler took power, labor represented 46 percent of German working people and 82 percent of the nation’s unemployed.[23] The government initiated massive public works projects to expand the job market for labor. It especially concentrated on upgrading the national railway. Also, construction of a modern superhighway began in September 1933, which found work for an additional 100,000 men each year. The production and delivery of building materials for pavement, bridges and rest stops simultaneously employed another 100,000. The Reich’s Autobahn project, originally planned for over 3,700 miles of new highway construction, relied primarily on manual labor. Limiting the use of modern paving machinery enabled the Autobahn commission not only to keep more men on the job, but devote 79 percent of the budget to workers’ salaries. The Autobahn was a toll road; however, reduced wear on vehicles using this efficient highway system and savings in travel time were worthwhile compensation to motorists for the fee.

The Reich also focused on relieving the distressed circumstances facing the German farmer. The depression had left many farms in debt. Younger family members often left their homes to seek opportunities in the cities. A September 1933 law established the Reichsnährstand (Reich’s Food Producers), an organization to promote the interests of people in the agrarian economy, fishermen and gardeners. With 17 million members, the Reichsnährstand’s principal objectives were to curtail the gradual dying-out of farms in Germany, and prevent migration of rural folk to concentrated population centers or industry. Controlling the market value of foodstuffs, the organization gradually raised the purchase price of groceries by over ten percent by 1938. This measure was not popular among the public, but greatly assisted planters.

The Reichsnährstand not only arranged for a substantial reduction in property taxes for farms, but wiped the slate clean on indebtedness. This gave heavily mortgaged farm owners a fresh start. Another organization, the Landhilfe (Rural Assistance), recruited approximately 120,000 unemployed young people to help work farms. The government financed their salaries, training and housing. It also arranged for temporary employment on farms for school graduates and students on summer break. The Landhilfe permitted foreigners living in Germany, primarily Poles, to enter the program. Hitler had a particular interest in preserving Germany’s farming stratum. During World War I, his country had suffered acutely from Britain’s naval blockade of food imports. He considered a thriving agrarian economy vital to making Germany self-sufficient in this realm. By reducing the effectiveness of a potential naval blockade in the event of future hostilities, growers indirectly contributed to national defense.

On the ideological plane, Hitler regarded a robust agrarian class to be essential for a healthy general population. In the turbulence of the modern age, industrialization and progress removed man further and further from his natural surroundings. Bound to the soil and the family homestead for generations, the farming community was an anchor rooted in traditional German customs and values. It drew sustenance from the land and passed it on to the nation. While labor represented a dynamic political force, the farming stratum remained the “cornerstone of ethnic life.”[24] The Führer esteemed such self-reliant, rugged people as an indispensable mainstay for the nation. Addressing half a million farm folk in Bückeberg in October 1933, he stated:

“In the same measure that liberalism and democratic Marxism disregard the farmer, the National-Socialist revolution acknowledges him as the soundest pillar of the present, as the sole guarantee for the future.”[25]

Hitler not only maintained Germany’s agrarian class but augmented it; housing planners sited many new settlements of single-family homes in rural areas where residents took up farming. The government provided interest-free loans and grants for the purchase of farm implements along with special marriage loans for newlyweds. The debts were to be forgiven after the family had worked the farm ten years.[26]

Germany’s economic reforms would never have been so successful without overhauling the tax structure. In the Weimar Republic, state and local governments had raised revenue for operating expenses, reparations payments to the Entente, and public aid through steadily increasing taxation. The drain on working families’ budgets had reduced purchasing power, restricted the demand for consumer goods, decreased production and caused lay-offs. As more people lost jobs, unemployment pay-outs were augmented, placing greater demands on those still in the workforce. Municipalities collected taxes and fees according to local needs without a nationally coordinated revenue system. Costly, inefficient, and overlapping bureaucracies burdened citizen and economy alike.

Tax reform was a major element of Reinhardt’s recovery program. Initial measures legislated to this end demonstrate what a crippling influence the Reich’s runaway taxation had previously exercised on commerce. The first to benefit from tax relief was Germany’s automotive industry. The Motor Vehicle Tax Law of April 1933 abolished at one stroke all operating taxes and fees for privately purchased cars and motorcycles licensed after March 31 of that year. The reduction in consumer costs to own and operate a car was so dramatic as to significantly boost sales. While the industry produced just 43,430 passenger vehicles in 1932, the number rose to 92,160 during Hitler’s first year in office. New car production increased annually. The number of people employed in automobile manufacture climbed from 34,392 in 1932 to 110,148 in less than four years. From 1933 to 1935, the industry built 15 more assembly plants.[27]

The government recovered the revenue lost from repealed automotive taxes through reduced payments of jobless benefits, income tax from newly employed auto workers, highway tolls and corporate tax. The state collected an additional RM 50 million by offering owners of older cars the opportunity to pay a one-time reduced fee to permanently eliminate their annual vehicle tax liability. The government devoted the entire amount to improving roads, thereby hiring more people for pavement and bridge repair. Others found work in industries that manufactured machinery. The tax law ratified on June 1, 1933, eliminated fees for the replacement and purchase of tools and machinery, as long as buyers opted for German-made articles. This measure breathed life back into industrial equipment production.[28]

Reinhardt demanded the creation of a simplified, centrally supervised tax structure. New tax laws and instructions used every-day German, easily understandable to taxpayers. He emphasized in his 1933 Bremen speech:

“Not only will the number of taxes be substantially fewer, but the tax laws and new payment instructions will be worded so that the Reich’s Finance Ministry will no longer have as much latitude as before in interpreting the tax laws. The fact that the room for interpretation of tax laws was previously so broad was a serious blow to the protection of taxpayers’ rights.”[29]

Under the Reinhardt system, the government gradually supplanted the plethora of municipal, provincial and state taxes and fees with a single national tax. The finance office calculated the budgets of local and state administrations, collected all revenue and distributed it to agencies and municipalities. During the year, each citizen received an annual income-tax invoice and paid the amount in twelve monthly installments. This covered his or her total tax liability. The arrangement greatly reduced administrative costs of mailing local tax bills, collecting individual fees and pursuing delinquencies. It also simplified the accounting of private corporations no longer required to deduct withholding taxes from employees’ paychecks.

In the long run, Germany’s policy of reducing taxes to promote commerce increased public revenues. During the first half of 1939, the finance office reported over RM 8.3 billion in revenue, compared to RM 6.6 billion in fiscal year 1932/33.[30] These were evenly assessed taxes in 1939, paid by a fully employed population; not an imbalanced, excessive liability burdening working people to provide jobless benefits for the less-fortunate.

In a Nuremburg speech in 1936, Reinhardt described income tax as

“the main source of revenue. Income tax is measured according to (the citizen’s) actual income and is therefore the most socially just form of collecting taxes.”[31]

A 1933 Swedish study comparing taxation among Great Powers established that the German people paid 23 percent of their income in taxes. In the United States the amount was 23.4 percent, in Norway 25.1 percent, Britain 25.2 and Italy 30.6 percent.[32] (The figure did not take into account America’s numerous hidden taxes that were non-existent in Germany.)

No program to restore German prosperity could omit international trade. Deprived of its colonies, the Reich had to develop foreign markets to acquire raw materials for industry and a portion of the food supply. With gold reserves exhausted, the National-Socialist administration had to create an alternative source of purchasing power. Despite objections from Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reich’s Bank, Hitler withdrew Germany’s money system from the gold standard. Gold was the recognized medium of exchange for international commerce. Over centuries, it had become a commodity as well. Financiers bought and sold gold, speculated on its fluctuations in price, and loaned it abroad at high interest. Hitler substituted a direct barter system in foreign dealings. German currency became defined as measuring units of human productivity. The British General J.F.C. Fuller observed:

“The present financial system is not based on the power of production, but the means of exchange, money, has itself become an article of commerce. Since Germany stands outside of this golden ring, she is regarded with suspicion. Germany is already beginning to operate more on the concept of labor than on the concept of money.”[33]

In January 1938, the Soviet diplomat Kristyan Rakovsky commented on the German money system. Rakovsky had held posts in London and in Paris and was acquainted with Wall Street financiers. He explained:

“Hitler, this uneducated ordinary man, has out of natural intuition and even despite the opposition of the technician Schacht, created an especially dangerous economic system. An illiterate in every theory of economics driven only by necessity, he has cut out international as well as private high finance. Hitler possesses almost no gold, and so he can’t endeavor to make it a basis for currency. Since the only available collateral for his money is the technical aptitude and great industriousness of the German people, technology and labor became his ‘gold supply’. This is something decisively counterrevolutionary and as you know, like magic it has eliminated all unemployment for more than six million skilled employees and laborers.”[34]

Germany’s withdrawal from the gold-based, internationally linked monetary system in favor of a medium of exchange founded on domestic productivity corresponded to Hitler’s belief in maintaining the sovereignty of nations. This was an unwelcome development in London, Paris and New York, where cosmopolitan investment and banking institutions profited from loaning money to foreign countries. Germany no longer had to borrow in order to trade on the world market. Foreign demand for German goods correspondingly created more jobs within the Reich.

Upon taking office, Hitler had assigned the elimination of unemployment as his first priority. During the first twelve months of his administration, unemployment declined by nearly 2.3 million. In 1934, 2,973,544 persons were still out of work, but by November 1935, 1,750,000 more Germans had found full-time jobs.[35] Addressing the National-Socialist Party congress in Nuremburg on September 12, 1936, Reinhardt presented statistics demonstrating that “mass unemployment in Germany has been overcome. In some occupations, there is already a shortage of workers.” He stated that among other civilized nations, of the 20 million people out of work in 1932, only two million had returned to the workforce over the previous four years (The statistics did not include the USSR, since no figures were available).[36] During the same period in Germany, the economy created jobs for over five million previously unemployed persons. In addition, the average work day within this time frame increased from six hours 23 minutes to over seven hours per shift.[37]

In November 1938, the German government officially recorded 461,244 citizens as unemployed. The statistic included individuals who were physically or mentally disabled, mostly homebound and hence unemployable.[38] It also incorporated the populations of Austria and the Sudetenland. Germany had annexed these economically depressed lands the same year. Both had suffered massive unemployment, which Hitler had not yet had time to fully alleviate.[39] From 1934 to 1937, the number of women in the workforce increased from 4.5 million to 5.7 million. Despite programs to encourage women to return to traditional family roles, the government did not restrict those choosing a career. They were equally eligible for tax incentives offered for starting small businesses.[40]

An interesting element of Germany’s recovery is that Hitler, against the recommendations of Germany’s principal financier, Schacht, authorized the economic programs developed by Reinhardt, a man possessing comparatively little influence. A disciple of the liberal economic theory, Schacht disapproved of government interference in commerce. He opposed state-sponsored programs to combat unemployment. Otto Wagener, head of the NSDAP’s economic policy branch, told Hitler that Schacht was “an exponent of world capitalism” and hostile to the state’s revolutionary approach to economics.[41] Historians have nonetheless described Schacht as a “genius of improvisation” and a “financial wizard.” One British author credits this American-educated international banker with “financing rearmament and unemployment programs by greatly expanding public works and stimulating private enterprise.”[42] Schacht’s pre-1933 writings and verbal statements reveal no trace of the ideas introduced by Reinhardt to revitalize the economy and create jobs. Regarding unemployment, the “solutions” Schacht suggested were to reduce workers’ wages, encourage thrift, and resettle people out of work in state-operated camps.[43]

The campaign to stabilize Germany’s economy witnessed measures that were only possible in an authoritarian state. The National-Socialist maxim, “community interest before self-interest,” guided a policy that was efficient and uncompromising. Among the first to feel its weight were Germany’s trade unions. By 1932, they had far less influence than during the previous decade. Few workers were prepared to risk their jobs by striking. Union representatives voiced no protest when Hitler, five weeks after taking power, banned the Iron Front and the Reichsbanner. These organizations had provided muscle at public demonstrations of the Social Democratic Party, which was closely affiliated with labor. In April 1933, the German trade unions issued a public statement declaring their desire to cooperate with the new government.[44]

Hitler had no interest in collaborating with trade unions. On May 2, the police and deputized SA men occupied union offices throughout the Reich. National-Socialist labor commissioners replaced the union leaders. The government confiscated union funds. It banned strikes and lock-outs. The new chancellor acknowledged the necessity for an organization to advocate labor’s interests. He believed however, that it should be a state agency. When Hitler had been a combat infantryman in 1918, strikes called by independent trade unions stalled the delivery of munitions to the front. During a visit to Berchtesgaden between the world wars, Lloyd George had told the Führer:

“Your revolution came to our aid at the last minute.”[45]

Considering trade union leaders to be Marxist-oriented, Hitler viewed them as little more than instruments of Soviet Russia’s Comintern. Moscow had established this organization to promote Communist movements abroad. In 1935, the Executive Committee of the Communist International redefined the Comintern’s role. The “active endeavors of the Comintern” were to be brought “in the minutest detail into harmony with the objectives and tasks of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.” Stalin himself added:

“The Comintern cannot play a complacent part now, at this time its task is solely to serve in a supporting role. The Comintern is to be transformed into an apparatus of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, into a powerful instrument in the struggle against the enemies of the Soviet Union.”[46]

To allow the continued existence of non-government-regulated trade unions, Hitler reasoned, placed German labor under the influence of a foreign power that was a commercial rival on the world market. In Soviet export, Hitler saw “a dangerous dumping policy with slave wages to undermine the economic systems of other countries.”[47]

How the USSR misused Europe’s labor unions, a former Communist explained in a 1938 book. The forestry engineer Karl Albrecht had worked in Soviet Russia as a director of various projects in the timber industry from 1924 to 1934. His memoirs, penned upon return to Germany, corroborated Hitler’s misgivings:

“Serious economic concerns alone were what caused Communist party leaders of the Soviet Union to contrive strikes on precise schedules in the forestry industries of Finland, Sweden, Canada, Poland or other competing timber-exporting countries. This was to paralyze work in wooded regions or sawmills there, to make export impossible. The purpose of these actions was to create shortages of lumber in the wood-importing lands England, France, America, Holland and so forth. This would overcome importers’ reluctance to bring in Soviet timber and pave the way for capturing these markets. Thousands upon thousands of foreign laborers, sincerely believing in their revolutionary mission, waged a presumed struggle for existence against their employers and fell into difficult conflict with the governments of their own countries… Strikes and other revolutionary activities, senseless wage demands in mining and coal production, in the lumber, paper and textile industries, ordered by the Comintern or the Red trade unions international, in no way served the interests of those employed in these branches of industry.”[48]

After Hitler nullified the unions, workers came under the newly established Reich’s Institute for Labor Mediation and Unemployment Insurance, the RAA. A common procedure of the RAA was to redistribute manpower where it could better serve national interests. The institute not only possessed the authority to transfer workers to critically distressed areas, but to prevent others from relocating. It required, for example, that young farmers seeking “occupationally unfamiliar employment” in cities first obtain RAA permission. Applications were rarely approved. In this way, it contributed to the goal of sustaining Germany’s agrarian economy and farming stratum. Another RAA regulation removed workers and supervisors in industrial centers who had come from farms, transplanting them into rural areas to resume their previous occupation. The RAA also prevented members of the workforce, regardless of vocation, from entering fields of endeavor that already had a higher rate of unemployment.

The restrictions generally impacted a small portion of the population. The institute relaxed some regulations as more Germans found jobs and the economy improved. By democratic standards, these initial steps represent an infringement on personal liberty. Directing people to specific occupations where their skills were better utilized developed out of Bismarck’s perception of labor as “soldiers of work.” National Socialism capitalized on this martial approach by defining vocational endeavor as an achievement for the nation or, in Hitler’s words, a “willingly given offering to the community.”

As a sacrifice for Germany, toil elevated “the working person to the first citizen of the nation.”[49] No longer, as in the traditional sense, would material possessions determine social status, but service to the common good through labor. Imposing a “duty to work” on his people, Hitler accordingly honored their achievements in the spirit that a country pays homage to the sacrifices of its soldiers. Still, the overall goal of his comparatively strict policy was not to militarize the national psyche but first and foremost to combat unemployment.

Pursuant to his maxim that controls are fair and just when enforced uniformly without exempting any particular group, Hitler resorted to equally undemocratic methods to protect the working population from exploitation. He forbade speculation on nationally vital commodities such as agricultural harvest and energy. The stock exchange, which Reinhardt dismissed as a “gangster society,” suffered increasing limitations to its freedom of operation.[50] Only rarely, and then with difficulty, could novice applicants obtain a broker’s license.

The government also protected smaller and newer businesses by banning the practice by established enterprises of ruining retail competitors by underselling their products.[51] The state appointed the Price Oversight Commission to stop businesses from decreasing production or delivery of certain commodities, especially foodstuffs, for the purpose of creating artificial shortages to inflate prices and overcharge consumers. Hermann Göring, a member of Hitler’s cabinet, declared:

“It is a crime when an individual or group tries to place private capitalist profit above the people’s welfare.”

Göring warned that the state would “intervene in the severest way” upon identifying offenders.[52] In some cities, the government closed businesses found to be not in compliance.

Perhaps nowhere was Hitler more restrictive than with regard to regulations governing the conduct of public officials. Sponsoring massive construction programs to improve the economy required civil servants to solicit bids and award contracts, issue building permits, conduct inspections, re-zone districts, recruit manpower and so on. The opportunity for them to favor certain private commercial interests in exchange for gratuities was particularly troublesome to Hitler. He enacted laws making it illegal for public servants to possess stock portfolios or to serve as consultants to private corporations. The law also affected members of the armed forces and the National-Socialist Party in positions of procurement. It was a violation for anyone leaving the public sector to accept a job with a private concern that he had previously contracted with in an official capacity. Even as private citizens, former civil servants were forbidden by Hitler from investing their personal wealth in stock shares.[53]

By 1937, Germany’s workforce was fully employed. The former American President Herbert Hoover, whose own country’s unemployment rate then stood at 11.2 percent, praised the Reich’s labor procurement program for both efficiency and frugality. The parallel New Deal program in the United States was more costly and making less headway. The U.S. national debt was $37.2 billion in June 1938. This was three times that of Germany. Even America’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, confided in his diary the Germans’ success at creating jobs.[54]

The German parliament gave Hitler a free hand by ratifying the Empowering Act on March 21, 1933. This authorized him to write all laws, automatically approved by the Reichstag whether constitutional or not, for the next four years. The measure allowed the Führer to proceed aggressively against unemployment and national bankruptcy.

The Social Renaissance

Germany’s triumph over unemployment, without foreign help and during worldwide economic depression, was in itself an accomplishment any government could be satisfied with. For Hitler, it was a step toward far-reaching social programs intended to elevate and unify the populace. Like other elements of National-Socialist rule, subsequent reforms realized ideas that long had been developing in German society. During the mid-18th Century, the Prussian monarch Friedrich the Great created an efficient state bureaucracy and revised taxation. His law providing pensions for civil servants and officers invited criticism that it would bankrupt the treasury.

The progressive thinking in the Prussian-German civil service led to the country’s first labor law the following century. The regulation, ratified on April 6, 1839, banned the practice of working small children in mines. No boy could enter the workforce until after at least three years of schooling. It became illegal for children to work night shifts or Sundays. More child-labor laws followed in 1853. Though primitive by modern standards, the regulations were advanced for the time. The North German League’s Vocational Decree of 1869 and further measures to safeguard labor after the country’s unification in 1871 placed Germany in the lead among industrial nations in the realm of social reform.

The social programs Hitler introduced had two objectives. One was to improve the standard of living of the average citizen. The other was to create a classless society in which the bourgeois, labor, agrarian folk and nobility enjoyed equal status as Volksgenossen. This translates literally to “ethnic national comrades,” though the expression “fellow Germans” better conveys its spirit. Hitler believed that removing traditional class barriers would create social mobility for talented individuals to advance. All Germany would benefit through the maturation of the more promising human resources.

An important organization for promoting National-Socialist community values was the Volunteer Labor Service (FAD). Founded in August 1931, the FAD recruited the unemployed for public works. Paying volunteers two reichsmarks a day, a primary purpose of the FAD was to improve the physical and mental well-being of unemployed and unoccupied young Germans. Upon assuming power, Hitler expanded the organization and raised the pay scale. It numbered 263,000 members by mid-1933. The Führer considered it “superbly suited for conscious instruction in the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft (national community).”[55] Membership in the FAD declined as more jobs became available. In June 1935, Hitler enacted a law making six months’ labor service compulsory for teenagers upon high school graduation. No longer voluntary, the FAD became the RAD: Reich’s Labor Service. Members assisted in Autobahn construction, drained swamps, planted trees, upgraded poorer farms and improved waterways.

At the NSDAP congress in September 1935, Hitler defined the RAD’s social purpose to 54,000 assembled members:

“To us National Socialists, the idea of sending all Germans through a single school of labor is among the means of making this national community a reality. In this way, Germans will get to know one another. The prejudices common among different occupations will then be so thoroughly wiped away as to never again resurface. Life unavoidably divides us into many groups and vocations. The task of the political and moral education of the nation is to overcome these divisions. This is the primary task of the labor service; to bring all Germans together through work and form them into a community.”[56]

At an earlier NSDAP congress, Hitler had described the labor service as “an assault against an odious pre-conceived notion, namely that manual labor is inferior.”[57]

Having disbanded the trade unions in 1933, Hitler wanted an umbrella organization devoted to the welfare of both labor and management:

“Within its ranks the worker will stand beside the employer, no longer divided by groups and associations that serve to protect a particular economic and social stratum and its interests.”[58]

In his own proclamation defining the organization’s objectives, Hitler stated:

“It is in essence to bring together members of the former trade unions, the previous office worker associations and the former managers’ leagues as equal members.”[59]

The structure supported the goal of eliminating strife within industry by encouraging mutual respect, based not on position but on performance. As defined in one publication:

“There is neither employer nor employee, but only those entrusted with the work of the entire nation… Everyone works for the people, regardless of whether a so-called employer or so-called employee, as it was in the previous middle-class order.”[60]

This represented a revolutionary departure from the liberal democratic perception, as an essay published in Der Schulungsbrief maintained:

“In the capitalist system of the past, money became the goal of work for the employee as well as for the employer. It was the individual’s wages that appeared to give work a sense of purpose. The employee saw the employer simply as someone who ‘earns more.’ And the employer regarded the staff of workers in his firm only as a means to an end, an instrument for he himself to earn more. The consequences of this thinking were ominous. Should the working man have any ambition to work anymore when he says to himself, ‘I’m only working so that the man over in the office can earn more?’ Can a business deliver quality work if everyone thinks only of himself? … Labor – its purpose, its honor, the creative value, the German worker as a master of his trade and a proud, capable working man, all this became secondary. Reorganizing labor does not just mean removing the crass material deficiencies of life. It must penetrate the relationship of person to person.”[61]

In May 1933, the first congress of the German Labor Front took place in Berlin. Known by the acronym DAF, it replaced the disbanded unions and managers’ associations. Hitler stated:

“The goal of the German Labor Front is the formation of genuine cooperative fellowship and efficiency among all Germans. It must see to it that every single person can find a place in the economic life of the nation according to his mental and physical capabilities that will ensure his highest level of achievement. In this way, the greatest benefit to the overall community will be realized.”[62]

The DAF therefore contributed to Hitler’s goal of welding the Germans into a Volksgemeinschaft. Here, he stated:

“The head and the hand are one. The eternal petty differences will of course still exist. But there must be a common foundation, the national interests of all, that grows far beyond the ridiculous, trivial personal squabbles, occupational rivalries, economic conflicts and so forth.”[63]

The Führer’s blueprint for eliminating class division was largely an equalization process. Through useful work, everyone could earn the respect of the community. Hitler argued:

“No one has the right to elevate himself socially above another because some outward circumstance makes him appear better. The loftiest individual is not the one who has the most, but the one who does the most for everyone else… The honest man, even if he is poor, is worth more than a wealthy one possessing fewer virtues.”[64]

One revolutionary measure, appalling to laissez faire disciples like the banker Schacht, was the government’s regulation of salaries and managerial privileges. It first addressed the custom in the private sector of paying white-collar workers monthly stipends even when absent from the job, while according no similar benefit to factory personnel. The government abolished this discrepancy. It arranged instead

“to ensure the laborer a certain measure of compensation when missing work due to important family matters, plus a fixed, company-financed subsidy in case of illness.”[65]

The Law for Regulation of Wages introduced guidelines for calculating salaries. Based on the principle of comparable pay for equal demands on an individual’s time and energy, its goal was to guarantee a decent standard of living for everyone who worked hard. The law stated:

“Grading of salaries must correspond to the actual demands of the work involved. It therefore doesn’t matter what job the individual has. Personal engagement is the decisive factor.”[66]

The regulation further called for an adjustment in salary for employees with unavoidable financial hardships, in order to guarantee their standard of living. Even time lost from work due to weather conditions became a factor. It also required that every citizen receive pay premiums for overtime.

The wage law did not level off personal income regardless of occupation. Grading took such factors into consideration as physical or mental demands of a job, the precision or independent initiative required, education, hazards and experience. Its purpose was to establish a system that could be applied to the most-diverse careers and activities and help reduce social and economic differences. It acknowledged the value of honest labor and the need to adequately compensate all who perform it. A guiding principle of the wage grading program was not to reduce the standard of living of previously higher-paid associates, but to elevate that of those who earned less.

This arrangement sliced into the profits of industry. By 1938, the costs to employers for workers’ salaries had risen by another 6.5 percent. [67] They included paid holidays for labor, a measure Hitler personally introduced. The wage law established a minimum monthly income per person, sufficient to guarantee a decent living standard. It affected 96 percent of all salaries nationwide. The Führer himself wrote that

“incorporating a particular class of people into the community does not succeed by dragging down the upper classes, but by elevating the lower. This process can never be carried out by the higher class, but by the lower one fighting for its equal rights.”[68]

His concern for the welfare of poorer working people sometimes led to Hitler’s personal involvement in correcting lesser social ills. During a dinner monolog, he once complained of the contrast in comfort and luxury between passenger accommodations and those of the crew on steamship lines:

“On one side every refinement and everything that could be desired, and on the other side no comforts, only harsh and unhealthy conditions. It’s unbelievable that no one worried about how conspicuous the differences in living conditions of this sort were.”

Apparently during a tour of an ocean liner, Hitler took umbrage at the comparatively wretched crew’s quarters. He ordered them upgraded on all passenger ships. The controversy he later described in a discussion about social problems with Abel Bonnard, a member of the Academie Française, in May 1937:

“When we demanded that crew members should have better quarters, we received the answer that space on large steamers is too precious to fulfill our wishes. When we required that crew members should have a deck specially reserved for them to get fresh air, we were told that this involves technical difficulties the engineers haven’t solved yet.”[69]

As can be imagined, these objections had no influence on Hitler’s resolve. He further related to his French guest:

“Today crews on the ships have decent cabins. They have their own deck where they can relax on comfortable deck chairs, they have radios for diversion. They have a dining room where they take their meals with a deck officer. All these improvements really weren’t so costly. They just had to want to do it.”

Funneling officers into the same mess hall as the sailors corresponded to Hitler’s commitment to demolish class barriers throughout society. The German navy custom of providing four menus per ship, the quality of meals varying according to rank, he also abolished. Observing once at dinner that “during the World War, the field kitchen was incomparably better when officers had to be fed from it too,” Hitler arranged that henceforth the German armed forces sustain all ranks with the same rations:

“The view that it will weaken authority if distinctions are not maintained is groundless. Whoever can do more and knows more than another will have the authority he needs. For one who is not superior in ability and knowledge, his rank in whatever office he tenants won’t help.”[70]

Corrections in salary, benefits and accommodations not only raised the standard of living for labor, but helped integrate it socially. Advantages previously associated with middle-class prestige became universal. This diminished one more status symbol dividing the complacent, privileged caste from those seeking acceptance. Hitler had no faith in the good will of the bourgeois and in fact blamed it for Germany’s class barriers. He passed laws making exploitation of labor a punishable offense:

“This must be considered necessary as long as there are employers who not only have no sense of social responsibility, but possess not even the most primitive feeling for human rights.”[71]

In January 1934, the government enacted the Law for Regulation of National Labor, containing 73 paragraphs. At a press conference, Reich’s Labor Minister Franz Seldte defined the foundation of the law as removal of “unsavory” class distinctions which had previously contributed to the collapse of the German economy, in favor now of “emphasizing the concept of social esteem,” and the leadership idea in business life.[72]

The law’s vocabulary replaced the terms “employer and employee” with “leader and follower.” It designated respective roles in this way:

“The leader of the facility makes decisions for the followers in all matters of production in so far as they fall under the law’s regulation. He is responsible for the welfare of the followers. They are to be dutiful to him, in accordance with the mutual trust expected in a cooperative working environment.”[73]

The law imposed moral obligations on both. The German economist Dr. Hans Leistritz described them in these words:

“Both the facility leader and the followers are under the commission of the people. Each always faces the same choice, of whether he should fulfill his duty or become caught up in self-serving goals. Both the facility leader and the followers can face disciplinary action that punishes transgressions against this social code of honor.”

The law cited examples, such as

“if a contractor, leader of the facility or other supervisory personnel misuse their authority in the workplace to unethically exploit the labors of members of the following or insult their esteem.”

The law likewise held workers accountable for “jeopardizing the harmony of the workplace by intentionally stirring up their co-workers.”[74]

Though according management autonomy in decision-making, the law included serious restrictions as well. Business owners and directors were responsible not only for sound fiscal management of the company, but for the protection of employees from abuse. This was not presented as benign advice from the government. It was a law word for word. Income and profit were no longer the primary objectives of an enterprise. The well-being of its associates became a concurrent purpose. The Reich’s Ministry of Labor published a table of offenses under the category of unjust exploitation of employees. These included paying salaries below fixed wage scales or failure to compensate workers for overtime, refusing to grant employees vacations, cutting back hours, providing insufficient meals, inadequate heating of work stations, and maintaining an unhygienic or hazardous work environment. Supervisors were even disciplined for browbeating their staff to work harder.[75]

Provisions of the labor law extended to rural regions as well, according similar protection for farm hands. In 1938, the periodical Soziale Praxis (Social Custom) reported on “serious punishments” meted out to landowners who quartered their hands in inadequate accommodations. Owners were also cited

“for not taking advantage of possibilities for financing the construction of housing for farm workers offered by the agent of the Four Year (reconstruction) Plan.”[76]

The record of court proceedings for 1939 demonstrates that the labor law primarily safeguarded the well-being of employees rather than their overseers. During that year, the courts conducted 14 hearings against workers and 153 against plant managers, assistant managers and supervisors. In seven cases, the directors lost their jobs. For more serious violations, the Labor Ministry enlisted Germany’s Secret State Police, the Gestapo. This generally resulted in the arrest and confinement of “asocial” managers and usually involved cases where consciously allowing hazardous or unsanitary working conditions impaired an employee’s health.[77]

One of the most proactive advocates for the working class was the leader of the DAF, Dr. Robert Ley. A combat airman during World War I and former chemist, Ley had joined the NSDAP in 1925. His words lent emphasis to the regulations governing treatment of labor:

“Today the owner can no longer tell us, ‘my factory is my private affair.’ That was before, that’s over now. The people inside it depend on his factory for their welfare, and these people belong to us. This is no longer a private affair, this is a public matter. And he must think and act accordingly and answer for it.”[78]

Despite the involvement of law enforcement, the DAF’s long-term goal was to voluntarily correct attitudes that led to social injustices. Hitler opined that “the police should not be on people’s backs everywhere. Otherwise, life for people in the homeland will become just like living in prison. The job of the police is to spot asocial elements and ruthlessly stamp them out.”[79] A 1937 issue of Soziale Praxis maintained:

“The state does not want to run businesses itself. It only wants to arrange that they operate with a sense of social awareness.”

The DAF acknowledged that any labor law

“will remain ineffective as long as it fails to persuade the leaders and followers working in the factories of the correctness and necessity of such a perception of labor, and train them in a corresponding viewpoint.” [80]

In October 1934, Hitler published a decree defining the nature and the tasks of the DAF. He wrote:

“The German Labor Front is to ensure harmony in the workplace by creating an understanding among facility leaders for the justifiable requirements of their followers, and balancing this with an appreciation among the followers for the circumstances of and for what is feasible for their factory.”

In this sense, Hitler assigned the DAF an educational mission as well. It was but a single element of an extensive, lengthy process of “total inward re-education of people as a prerequisite” to achieve “genuine socialism.”[81] At the party congress in 1935, Hitler pledged to “continue educating the German people to become a true community.”[82]

The Führer was personally skeptical regarding the possibility of winning his own generation for the NSDAP’s social program. He expressed concerns to his aid Wagener in September 1930:

“Do you think that a die-hard industrialist is ready to suddenly admit that what he owns is not a right but an obligation? That capital no longer rules but will be ruled? That it’s not about the life of the individual, but about that of the whole group? It’s a radical and total adjustment that the grown-up is no longer capable of making. Only the young people can be changed, made to adjust and align with a socialist sense of obligation to the community.”[83]

During a speech to leaders of the party’s fighting organizations in 1933, Hitler stated:

“With very few exceptions, practically all revolutions failed because their supporters did not recognize that the most essential part of a revolution is not taking power, but educating the people.”[84]

At an address in Berlin opening the annual winter charity drive for 1940, Hitler discussed the importance of education:

“National Socialism has from the start held the view that every outlook is really the product of schooling, customs, and heredity, therefore susceptible to re-education. The child who grows up in our nation today is not genetically born with any sort of prejudices of an occupational or class-conscious origin. These have to be instilled in him… Only in the course of a lifetime are these differences artificially forced upon him by his environs. And to eliminate this is our mission, unless we are to despair of building a truly organic and enduring society.”[85]

Hitler told German youngsters in a 1938 speech in Nuremburg that the job of inwardly transforming the population

“can only be accomplished by a unified body of our people, which did not come into being through wishes and hopes, but only through education. Through it alone can we create the nation we need.”[86]

In this way, the Führer strove to achieve acceptance of the party’s socialist program among the German people with voluntary obedience rather than compliance based on law enforcement. “With police, machine guns and rubber clubs, no regime can be maintained in the long run,” he warned.[87] In 1939, he called for drastic reduction of the national police force to release manpower to relieve the industrial labor shortage.

New legislation, public instruction and the DAF worked together to upgrade on-the-job conditions for labor. Hitler simultaneously devoted equal attention to improving housing for the working class. Revitalizing the construction industry, which was the crux of Reinhardt’s program to reduce unemployment, played a crucial role in the government’s social agenda as well. Without decent homes, labor could not obtain self-respect and the respect of the German community to fully integrate into national life.

Since before World War I, inadequate dwellings for the working people had been an acute problem in German society. Of available residences, 47 percent had just one to two rooms plus a kitchen. An estimated 900,000 homes suffered from overcrowding. There was a shortfall of one-and-a-half million houses. New construction added 317,682 in 1929, the peak year, but just 141,265 in 1932. Nearly half consisted of small dwellings. An estimated four to six million houses required modernization. A large percentage lacked electricity, hook-up to municipal water lines, or facilities for bath and shower.[88] A study by the DAF concluded:

“At present, the German people live under conditions that represent a genuine hazard… In the interior of the Reich, most families are concentrated into cramped and insufficient lodgings. Because of this not only are morals, cultural awareness, health and social tranquility jeopardized, but especially the future offspring. At present around 300,000 children annually are never born, just because the miserable living conditions rob parents of the heart to bring them into the world.”[89]

Hitler tackled the issue in his customary way, by addressing it as a social problem affecting the entire nation; taxpayers could subsidize construction costs of new homes. The Labor Ministry resisted this proposal. Its staff consisted largely of conservative economists who wished to limit spending and avoid the tax increases such social programs require. The ministry promoted the Volkswohnung, or People’s Residence, with just two bedrooms, a kitchen and bath. During the first years of National-Socialist rule, 46 percent of new home construction adopted this unpopular design. Frequently at loggerheads with the Labor Ministry, the DAF advocated more-spacious bedrooms and the addition of a living room for family activities. The director of the Reich’s Homestead Office, Dr. Paul Steinhauser, helped solve the problem of the additional cost for larger houses in a novel way. He involved businesses in co-financing construction of superior homes for their employees. The DAF rewarded participating companies with civic honors and favorable publicity. The campaign enjoyed widespread success.[90]

Hitler became personally involved in designing four-room homes. Each was to have central heating, a combined coal/electric kitchen range and a shower with a hot-water heater. The government ordered development of a basic, affordable refrigerator to replace the commercially available models that were still a luxury for most families. Hitler himself decided on installing showers instead of baths in each new home. He stipulated that the stall must include a low wall to enable parents to bathe small children. Buyers had the option of ordering a bathtub as an upgrade.

In May 1938, the ground-breaking ceremony took place for Wolfsburg, a new city designed for the families of industrial workers employed at the KdF automobile assembly plant. By supporting the project, Hitler tacitly demonstrated his disapproval of the plan to relocate labor back to farms, which many National Socialists advocated. He considered the “return to the soil” program “wasted effort and money thrown away.” Wolfsburg provided comfortable, well-appointed units, avoiding what Hitler called a “monotonous pile of stacked floors like American big-city skyscrapers.”[91] The plan made liberal use of space for laying out residential areas. It included landscaped corridors to screen off motor vehicle routes, plus parks, walking trails, sidewalks and bicycle paths. Eight percent of the housing consisted of single-family homes, for people who preferred gardening and yard work.

Hitler helped in details of the city planning. He determined the square footage of domiciles, insisting on large kitchens where families could dine together. The Führer conducted repeated, in-depth conferences with his court architect Albert Speer and Dr. Ley regarding the project. Based on Hitler’s plan to construct pre-fabricated houses at the factory to be assembled on site, Ley calculated that builders could reduce construction costs by half.[92]

When Hitler appointed Ley commissioner for social housing construction in November 1940, it gave the DAF director a free hand to pursue his agenda without obstruction from the Labor Ministry. Ley had already fought this ponderous bureaucracy to implement social-security benefits for retired persons, widows and the disabled. Recipients also included orphans or children with infirmities.[93] Opponents considered the measure too costly. Under the old insurance system supported by Seldte’s ministry, Ley contended that aging was tantamount to growing destitute. He demanded that payments be sufficient to allow the recipient to maintain a standard of living nearly equal to that during one’s working life. Here too Ley triumphed, but only after years of persistent effort.

Insufficient funding also delayed legislation of a national healthcare program. When Hitler became chancellor, most working-class people had no medical insurance. Labor relied on plant physicians, while ailing family members cared for one another at home. Bad lighting, factory noise, excessive toil and similar circumstances contributed to illness in the workplace, so that an average of three percent of employees were absent from their jobs each day nationwide. Poor housing and lack of recreation were also detrimental to workers’ health. Most people could not afford doctors, likening the medical profession to a fire brigade only summoned during dire emergencies. Physicians often set up shop in districts where clientele could pay more for their services. This led to a dearth of healthcare professionals in rural communities. Remote and less-populated areas lacked not only doctors but clinics. The death rate among infants and small children in one poorer district polled was six percent.

Ley grappled with the Reich’s Director of Physicians, Dr. Leonardo Conti, over reforms. Conti resisted the suggestion that family doctors be distributed at the discretion of the government to cover underprivileged communities, or be posted to new clinics established there. He presented the somewhat lame argument that transferring sick persons from the home environment to healing institutions contradicts the National-Socialist concept of the family as the hub of society. Ley argued that allowing healthcare professionals to practice only in areas where they can earn a profit is a typically liberal perception, which neglects the welfare of the community for the benefit of the individual. He insisted that health-insurance companies be disbanded and replaced by socialized medicine. Each German was to receive a medical card for life, which when presented during clinic or doctor’s visits would entitle him or her to state-financed care. Conti considered the price for establishing, supplying and staffing rural clinics, plus governmental obligation to cover treatment costs, an oppressive burden on taxpayers.

Another proposal introduced by the DAF leader was that when workers have to stay home due to illness, the employer must continue to pay 70 percent of their salary. Employees absent from work to care for family members would receive the same compensation. Once again, Ley advocated tapping into the profits of industry to elevate the standard of living for labor. Ley and Conti eventually compromised, signing a national healthcare agreement at Bad Saarow in January 1941. It authorized founding of free local clinics, annual physicals for all citizens, and state-financed coverage for medical treatment of sick and injured persons. This negated the need for people to purchase medical insurance. To offset expenditures, the plan called for far-reaching “preventive medicine” measures. The DAF allotted funds to build more health spas, resorts, and other recreational facilities to serve as local weekend retreats for workers and their families. This was to improve public health through rest and relaxation.

The agreement also called for expanded educational programs to instruct citizens in maintaining wholesome lifestyles. Plant physicians received the additional task of training employees in disease prevention. The government’s companion publicity campaign urged Germans to avoid indulgences detrimental to physical well-being, describing it as a civic duty to preserve one’s health and not burden the community. The overall program led to a substantial reduction in premature deaths, and also reduced time lost from work by nearly half. Thus the government, while providing healthcare for its citizens, also in turn imposed the obligation on them to live responsibly.

The government’s emphasis on social reform penetrated the public consciousness. It was the responsibility of every German, Hitler declared, to assist the underprivileged, the economically ruined and those no longer self-sufficient. At the 1935 party congress, he said that the German community must

“help them back on their feet, must support them and incorporate them once more into the affairs of our national life.”[94]

The annual Winter Help Work charity drive demonstrates how Hitler envisioned a dual purpose for public assistance: both to bring relief to the poor and to promote solidarity. Launched in the fall of 1933, the program solicited financial contributions from the populace to aid the unemployed. Agents used the donations to purchase groceries, heating fuel and vouchers for the needy, or to fund affiliated charitable institutions. During the winter of 1935/36, the drive assisted nearly 13 million Germans. As the Reich’s employment situation improved, Winter Help Work became less necessary. Considering it “an essential means for continuously educating fellow Germans in the spirit of a German community,” Hitler maintained the charity throughout his tenure in office.[95] He opened the drive each September with a well-publicized speech before a live audience in Berlin.

Strength through Joy

One of the most popular organizations to advance socialism and harmony in Germany was the DAF’s recreational division, “Strength through Joy.” In German KdF, its role was to provide diversion for the working populace. Ley announced upon its founding:

“We should not just ask what the person does on the job, but we also have the responsibility to be concerned about what the person does when off work. We have to be aware that boredom does not rejuvenate someone, but amusement in varied forms does. To organize this entertainment, this relaxation, will become our most important task.”[96]

Hitler considered travel an excellent activity for regenerating mind, body and spirit. Ley stated:

“The Führer wants every laborer and every employee to be able to take a good-value KdF trip at least once a year. In so doing, the person should not only visit the loveliest German vacation spots, but also go on sea voyages abroad.”[97]

Few Germans could afford to travel prior to Hitler’s chancellorship. In 1933, just 18 percent of employed persons did so. All were people with above-average incomes. The KdF began sponsoring low-cost excursions the following year, partly subsidized by the DAF, that were affordable for lower income families. Package deals covered the cost of transportation, lodging, meals and tours. Options included outings to swimming or mountain resorts, health retreats, popular attractions in cities and provinces, hiking and camping trips. In 1934, 2,120,751 people took short vacation tours. The number grew annually, with 7,080,934 participating in 1938. KdF “Wanderings” –  backpacking excursions in scenic areas –  drew 60,000 the first year. In 1938 there were 1,223,362 Germans on the trails.[98] The influx of visitors boosted commerce in economically depressed resort towns.

These activities were only possible because Hitler, upon founding the “Strength through Joy” agency in November 1933, ordered all German businesses and industry to grant sufficient paid time off for employees. Prior to that year, nearly a third of the country’s labor force had no union contract and hence worked without vacations. In 1931, just 30 percent of laborers with wage agreements received four to six days off per year. The majority, 61 percent, received three days.[99] The National-Socialist government required that all working people be guaranteed a minimum of six days off after six months’ tenure with a company. As seniority increased, the employee was to earn twelve paid vacation days per annum. The state extended the same benefits to Germany’s roughly half-a-million Heimarbeiter, people holding individual contracts with industry who manufactured components at home. Contracting corporations financed their holidays as well. Ley fought the Labor Ministry for years before finally extending the workforce’s paid annual leave to four weeks.

Many choosing to travel during their vacation took advantage of inexpensive cruises sponsored by the KdF. The agency initially chartered two passenger ships early in 1934. On May 3, the Dresden left Bremerhafen with 969 vacationers for a five-day voyage. The Monte Olivia, carrying 1,800 passengers, put out from Hamburg the same day. Both vessels steamed to the Isle of Wight off the English coast and back. Few aboard

had ever experienced a cruise, and they returned to port exhilarated. In well-publicized interviews, travelers enthusiastically described the new KdF fleet as “dream ships for workers.” News coverage enhanced interest in the program. With applications for bookings flooding the KdF, the vessels began a continuous shuttle of five-day cruises to and from Norway, offering passengers a tour of the coastline’s majestic fjords.

The voyages became enormously popular, leading Ley to charter five more ships that summer. By the end of 1934, the KdF fleet had provided five-day cruises, mostly to Norway, for 80,000 German workers and their families. The KdF introduced Mediterranean cruises the following season. Voyages to Italy allowed passengers to go ashore at Genoa, Naples, Palermo and Bari. The Portugal cruise docked at Lisbon or Madeira. During the first 1935 voyages beginning March 15, four KdF ships carried 3,000 passengers to Madeira, among them Ley. Portuguese and Italian residents of ports of call saw for the first time working-class Germans enjoying a recreational activity previously restricted to the upper class. During 1935, over 138,000 Germans took KdF cruises.[100]

Ley contracted the Hamburg shipyard Blohm & Voss to construct the first KdF liner in 1936. Taking considerable interest in the design, Ley insisted that all decks be free of ventilators, machinery and equipment. There was to be sufficient deck space for all the passengers to enjoy it on reclining chairs at one time. Promenade decks, game and exercise rooms, concert and dance halls, auditoriums and large, brightly lit salons with comfortable chairs were also requirements. Every passenger cabin was to face outward with portholes, and crew members were to receive cabins as well. There were no first- or second-class accommodations; all passenger quarters were identical in size and furnishings. Hitler attended the launching of the 25,484-ton Wilhelm Gustloff on May 5, 1937. At the ceremony, Ley told the crowd:

“It is wonderful, amazing, it is unique in the world, that any state would endeavor to build such a great ship for its workers. We Germans don’t get old tubs for our working people, but instead only the best is good enough for our German worker.”[101]

With 1,465 passengers aboard, the Wilhelm Gustloff began its first cruise on March 15, 1938. It was a free voyage, and the guests were Blohm & Voss workers who had built the ship and their spouses, as well as female sales clerks and office personnel from Hamburg retail stores. From that day on until August 1939, the ship undertook 50 KdF cruises to Norway, Spain, Portugal, Italy or Tripoli. Employers enabled poorer working-class families to participate in the vacations by voluntarily subsidizing a share of the ticket costs.[102] Some firms financed the entire cost of family cruises for employees including pocket money. The national railroad discounted fares for Germans travelling to Hamburg and Bremen by rail for KdF voyages. In March 1939, the brand-new Robert Ley, an even larger passenger liner built for “Strength through Joy” cruises, joined the KdF fleet as its tenth ship.

The sports office of the DAF sponsored labor’s involvement in other “exclusive” activities such as tennis, skiing, horseback riding and sailing. It offered inexpensive courses in these sports and built new facilities. Interest in the programs became so widespread that the DAF had to train a large number of additional instructors. In 1934 alone, 470,928 Germans took part in DAF sports courses. In 1938, the number had swollen to 22,474,906.[103] The agency also promoted sports clubs in factories and businesses. Within two years, there were over 11,000 company clubs competing in team events against those from other firms or departments.

In its endeavors to fully integrate labor into German society, the KdF introduced cultural activities as well. Its 70 music schools offered basic instruction in playing musical instruments for members of working-class families. The KdF arranged theater productions and classical concerts for labor throughout the country. The 1938 Bayreuth Festspiel, the summer season of Richard Wagner operas, gave performances of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal for laborers and their families. The KdF also established travelling theaters and concert tours to visit rural towns in Germany where cultural events seldom took place.

The “Strength through Joy” agency’s recreational programs had many positive benefits for labor. As Ley stated, it offered the working man the opportunity

“to satisfy his urge to learn more about life in all areas of endeavor, and release the forces of creativity and industriousness resting within him.”[104]

The goal was not just to improve the material circumstances of this stratum, but to help the workers develop an inner harmony through the balance of useful work for the nation and playful diversion during leisure time. It supported Hitler’s ambition to craft a genuinely socialist state, to which he himself contributed with various policies. For example, few in Germany could afford an automobile prior to the Führer’s order to design and mass-produce the “KdF Car,” known later as the Volkswagen. Sales of this robust, inexpensive vehicle to average-income households eliminated the status previously connected with car ownership. Major improvements in Germany’s highway system made automobile travel practical and popular.

Hitler’s practice of instituting uniforms for the labor service, youth and women’s organizations, state and party functionaries, veterans’ clubs and so forth also advanced the socialist agenda. Uniforms equalized Germans, rich or poor. It identified them only as belonging to a particular group contributing to national life. Hitler stated in 1930, “We must get to a point where Germans can walk together arm in arm without respect to social position. Today unfortunately, the fine creases in one’s suit and another’s blue mechanic overalls are often a source of division.”[105]

The goal of Hitler’s policies was to realize a cooperative, harmonious society, a fair and reasonable distribution of national assets, and a life for the working population as free from anxiety and want as possible. In 1942, General Walther Scherff, a military historian in the German army, summarized the popular impression of his Führer during the times:

“Hitler’s principle of life was the same as that of his role model, Friedrich the Great; that it is not war, but civilized, creative activity such as works of art, social institutions, and travel routes that will bring the German people a practical, carefree and secure future existence.”[106]

Hitler once described himself as living for the future of his nation, for “these countless millions of people who work hard and possess so little of life.”[107]

Rearming the Reich

Promoting programs to alleviate unemployment, rebuild the economy and socially unify the nation, Hitler devoted far less attention to strengthening national defense. Provisions of the Versailles Treaty had limited the German army to a 100,000-man force comprising professional soldiers with long enlistments. It possessed no armor, heavy artillery or chemical weapons. The treaty forbade Germany to maintain an air force. Following the London Ultimatum, the Allies banned production of motorized aircraft within the Reich. This drove Germany’s leading aeronautics firms Junkers, Dornier and Heinkel to continue aircraft development in Sweden, Switzerland and Russia. After World War I, the Allies had required the Reich’s navy to steam its modern surface fleet to a British port. Remaining with the navy, reduced to just 15,000 sailors, were six obsolete ships of the line, six small cruisers, twelve destroyers and twelve torpedo boats. There were no submarines.

In June 1919, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau had stated:

“German disarmament represents the first step toward multilateral reduction and limitation of arms…. After Germany has shown the way, the Allied and associated powers will follow the same path in complete security.”[108]

Nonetheless, during the 1920s, France, Britain, the United States, Italy, Japan and the USSR had resumed a partial arms race, focusing on the expansion of naval and air forces. This breach of faith offered Germany the moral foundation to rearm in defiance of the treaty.

Thanks to the small size and limited weaponry of the German army, the country possessed virtually no armaments industry in 1933. The Germans had to conduct secret experimental development of armored vehicles, artillery and military aircraft, since it was still illegal. Though engineers re-tooled some factories for arms production, Hitler introduced proposals for international armaments reduction during his first two years in office. During 1933 and 1934, the Reich devoted less than four percent of its budget to defense. This was not even half the percentage spent by France, Japan and the USSR, which already maintained large arsenals.[109]

Germany was in a position to implement a massive rearmament program, had Hitler wanted it, by 1936. Factories were operating at nearly full capacity. The Reich possessed a modern, efficient machine-tool industry. The USA and Germany controlled 70 percent of the international export market of this commodity, with minimal corresponding import. In fact, in 1938 Germany had 1.3 million machine tools in industry, twice the number of England’s.[110] This circumstance, however, proved of little value to Germany’s armed forces because Hitler did not assign priority to the manufacture of military hardware.

Industry in Germany focused on housing construction, improving working conditions for labor, public works, consumer goods, and KdF automobile and ship-building programs. These projects consumed large quantities of materials such as metals, rubber and timber, and employed a significant percentage of skilled labor. Qualified tradesmen, engineers and technicians were unavailable for the arms industry. One German historian concluded:

“In the six-and-a-half years until the outbreak of the war, the German economy achieved enormous success. But the result of these huge endeavors remained relatively small for the armed forces, in the face of demands from the civilian sector. To require a high level of armaments production in addition to the civilian demands would have overburdened the German economy.”[111]

One of Germany’s more famous public works, the Autobahn, was without strategic value, contrary to popular assumption. The General Staff concluded that the expressway system would be too easy for enemy airmen to spot from high altitude in wartime, and motorized units using the Autobahn, if strafed, would have no place to take cover.[112] Few pre-war military formations were motorized anyway, and the army relied mainly on rail transport. In contrast to his senior army commanders, Freiherr von Fritsch and Ludwig Beck, Hitler fully recognized the tactical value of armor in future warfare. However, as to the expansion of this service branch, the attention he customarily devoted to parallel civil projects was again lacking. In the opinion of a renowned military analyst, Sir Basil Liddell-Hart:

“He ultimately paid the penalty for not promoting it more emphatically.”[113]

In November 1934, the Army Ordnance Department opted for the manufacture of a main battle tank mounting a 75-mm cannon. The army produced two lightly armored, under-gunned types, the Panzer I and Panzer II, for troop training during development of the combat model. In the interim, the army also introduced the Panzer III medium tank, which proved suitable for frontline service. The Panzer IV, the main battle tank contracted in 1934, was actually in the planning stage before Hitler took power. The first did not roll off the assembly line until 1936. During 1936 and 1937, the factory in Magdeburg manufactured just 35 Panzer IV tanks. In 1939, the number was 45.[114] In comparison, the German automobile industry produced 244,289 cars in 1936. During the final months of peace, the German army helped fill out its few armored divisions with Czech-built tanks it acquired when occupying Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939.

Production of other crucial ordnance suffered similar neglect. By the summer of 1939, German factories were turning out only 30 heavy field howitzers per month.[115] Manufacture of all kinds of ammunition was so limited that when war broke out in September, the army only had enough stockpiled for six weeks of combat. The air force had a three-month supply of light and medium bombs and no reserves of heavier calibers. Considering that most weapons are a means of delivering projectiles to a target, an insufficient store of ammunition decisively influences their effectiveness.

Hitler saw the armed forces first as an instrument of diplomacy. He told General Erhard Milch in 1938:

“No one asks about whether I have bombs or how much ammunition I have. All that matters is the number of airplanes and cannons.”[116]

During 1938, Germany produced less than one-sixth the munitions its plants would manufacture throughout the war year 1944. In the verdict of General Georg Thomas, chief of the Armed Forces Armaments Staff:

“It must be pointed out that Germany went to war with completely insufficient economic preparations…. The enormous economic preparations that would have been necessary for a new world war were practically not even implemented.”[117]

When Hitler assumed the chancellorship, his navy was significantly smaller than the fleets of rival European powers. Between the end of World War I and 1931, German wharves laid keel on three new warships; during the same period France built 81.[118] The Anglo-German Naval Agreement, concluded in June 1935, limited the size of the Reich’s surface fleet to 35 percent of Britain’s Royal Navy. At war’s outbreak over four years later, the German navy comprised just 17.5 percent of the tonnage of its nautical adversary; only half what was allowed. Shipbuilders had postponed the pre-war launching of Germany’s formidable battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz due to a shortage of steel.[119] Concurrent construction of the KdF liners Wilhelm Gustloff and Robert Ley, at a cost of over RM 50 million, had continued on schedule.

Shipyards began fabricating submarines, or U-boats, around 1935. This weapon, potentially the most potent in Germany’s arsenal, received a low priority. During 1937, the year work began on the Wilhelm Gustloff, the wharves launched just one U-boat. The Germans built nine the following year and 18 in 1939.[120] Germany began the war with 22 boats capable of Atlantic sorties, of which only a third could patrol target areas at any one time.

Military commanders met with Hitler in November 1938 to discuss coordinating rearmament among the three principal service branches. One German military historian summarized:

“Hitler assigned no armaments objectives for the three service branches… He had no plan for realizable goals for the arms industry to pursue… The vague instructions as to how these as-yet-unspecified armaments objectives were to be attained over the next several years, do not suggest that Hitler at this time expected to be at war just three-quarters of a year later.”[121]

Between September 1937 and February 1939, German firms holding arms contracts filled only 58.6 percent of their orders.[122] During 1938, barely nine percent of German industry produced military wares.[123] The amount increased as the war approached, reaching around 15 percent by the end of 1939, though some estimates are slightly higher. England, by contrast, spent 15 percent of her budget on rearmament in 1935 and 38 percent during 1938.[124] The economist Dr. Anja Bagel-Bohlen concluded:

“Arms production in reality never received unrestricted priority in the economy as it appeared….Even in September 1939, Germany had not implemented the fundamental restructuring of the economy made necessary by war, while it had already been introduced in Great Britain… The German industry was in no way prepared for an extended confrontation with the enemy’s industrial potential. Germany began a war in 1939 that based on her industrial preparations had no prospect of success.”[125]

The German army lagged well behind other Great Powers with respect to manpower as well. In 1935, the French army numbered 655,000 men, Poland’s 298,000, and the Czech army 140,000. The Soviet Union had 885,000 men under arms. None of these countries was well-disposed toward Germany. Since the Reich had had no draft for the last 15 years, there were no reservists. These are militarily-trained men who return to civilian life, but can be recalled to active duty in order to rapidly expand an armed force in the event of war. France possessed 4.5 million, Poland 3.2 million, and Czechoslovakia 1.3 million reservists.[126]

Hitler concentrated Germany’s human resources on developing social programs for his people rather than on correcting the military disparity. In January 1933, the German army and navy totaled 113,523 personnel. By the end of the year, the roster rose to just 122,000. On March 21, 1935, Hitler reinstituted compulsory military service. The draft did not actually begin until October. The army added 200,000 more men, the navy 10,000. Another 20,000 joined the new air force, the Luftwaffe. The German economy had created 3.6 million new jobs by 1935. Military recruitment therefore made a small contribution to alleviating unemployment. The government in fact began increasing troop strength by transferring 56,000 policemen to the army.

Historian Ralf Wittrich observed:

“The frequent argument that Hitler found the unemployed population work and bread solely through a massive build-up of the armed forces is untenable, when the actual statistics are examined.”[127]

Schacht confirmed this when he stated:

“The elimination of unemployment in Germany… succeeded without rearmament.”[128]

The American historian David Schoenbaum concluded:

“In many respects…the National Socialists went to war with a peacetime economy rather than having created a war-based economy in peacetime.”[129]

An in-depth study by professors William Langer and Everett Gleason stated:

“Postwar studies of German capabilities, based on Nazi records, show that Nazi military power and war production in 1939 were greatly overestimated by the democracies. There can now be little doubt that the Germans in 1939 were far from prepared for a long war on a large scale. Their current war production was inferior to that of the combined British and French and they had very little in the way of reserves… They were by no means ready for the type of war in which they became involved.”[130]

Despite comparative unpreparedness, the German armed forces would conquer larger, better equipped armies during the early war years. The German army’s custom of training junior officers, down to squad leader, to exercise independent initiative in combat gave Hitler’s troops a decisive tactical advantage over the French, British and Soviet armies with their inflexible command structure. Adjutant Julius Schaub later wrote that he often heard the Führer complain to his closest associates:

“This damned war has ruined all my plans…it’s wrecked everything, all of my grand plans for rebuilding.”[131]

Hitler served in the infantry throughout World War I, and he was seriously wounded. His military service record states that he participated in 84 battles.[132] It seems unlikely that a man who experienced first-hand the devastation, privations and pointlessness of war in such measure, could aggressively prepare the nation he fought for to precipitate a similar carnage, especially considering the secondary role he historically assigned to rearmament.

The Adolf Hitler Schools

Hitler considered education of the young the key to the nation’s progressive development beyond his lifetime. In a 1937 article, SS Colonel Otto Heidler wrote that schools must now advance students “without attention to social ties, education or assessment of intellect, but according to the merits of their character.” As far as the NSDAP was concerned, universities were graduating young adults who were unfit to assume leadership positions in Germany. They largely comprised what Hitler labeled “stay-at-home types”: individuals who had selfishly pursued scholastic and career objectives during the years of the party’s struggle for power. In the words of Heidler, they were

 “self-centered elements lacking every quality of a fighter, living their private academic life while a struggle for survival was going on throughout the entire nation.”[133]

The NSDAP rejected any arrangement that prevented men who gave up personal ambition for the good of their country, often risking their lives, from attaining positions of leadership. During the years 1920-1933, many universities banned SA men, Hitler Youth leaders and NSDAP members, a substantial percentage of whom were combat veterans of World War I, from enrolling or teaching.

“While they all supported the movement, others sat in their seminars and institutions, devoting themselves to learning their special field and profession. By their own moral code they were the proficient ones…. Now they want to impress us with their knowledge. And we reply to them, you lack the basis for any sort of wisdom, and that is character.”[134]

Hitler himself wrote:

“It’s terrible to think how every year, hundreds of thousands of completely untalented persons are blessed with a higher education, while hundreds of thousands of others with superior ability remain without any advanced schooling. The loss to the nation cannot be overestimated.”[135]

The Führer argued that it was not the function of the state

“to preserve the controlling influence of an existing class of society. Instead, it is the state’s duty to draw the most capable minds from the sum of all the citizens and bring them to public office and rank.”

He noted that the United States enjoys success in science and technology

“because a greater number of talented individuals from among the lower strata there find possibilities for a higher education than is the case in Europe.”[136]

By National-Socialist perception, a primary task of education was to train every young adult in an occupation. The class of unskilled labor was to disappear because members of the younger generation without a trade or profession lack character.

The German Labor Front launched the annual Reich’s Career Competition in 1934. Half a million boys and girls, 80 percent of whom possessed but a rudimentary education, displayed their skills in trades and crafts. The best-scoring contestants received financial grants to pursue higher learning. An awards ceremony took place in Berlin, where national winners posed for photographs with Ley and Hitler. Schacht, who opposed the allotment of state funds to advance the lower classes, demonstratively declined Hitler’s invitation to attend the function. Local and regional competitions broadened the percentage of winners and further publicized the program. The number of children taking part grew annually. In 1938, 949,120 girls and 1,537,373 boys competed. The DAF awarded RM 527,000 in scholarships that year.[137]

To further develop the trade knowledge of the younger generation, the government sponsored Langemarck Schools. These institutions admitted youngsters from labor and rural backgrounds. The academies initially suffered a shortage of qualified instructors. They were nonetheless another step toward Hitler’s ambition, “that in this realm we are paving the way for every single able mind toward the loftiest station in life he wants to aim for, just so long as he is capable, energetic and determined.”[138] Years before assuming power, Hitler had advocated building a leadership cadre for the future of Germany. Devotion to one’s nation was as important as the ability to command. He wanted to prevent aloofness or any elitist tendency from forming among those trained to be tomorrow’s leaders. The challenge of developing a program to select and prepare candidates fell to Ley. He first proposed establishing boarding schools with a three-year curriculum in several German townships. Upon graduation, students demonstrating the desired qualities would advance to regional boarding schools for another three years. From here, “the most capable, racially best and physically healthiest” students would enroll in the NSDAP’s prestigious Ordensburg academies.[139] In October 1936, Ley signed an agreement with the minister of education, Dr. Bernhard Rust, authorizing the party’s direct involvement in the national school system. The contract allowed the NSDAP to establish boarding schools, the Reich’s Ministry of Education reserving the right to select faculty.

Ley finalized the form of the future boarding schools after deliberations with Reich’s Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach. Violating the contract with Rust, Ley excluded the unprogressive minister from further involvement. The labor leader enjoyed sufficient influence – and the DAF ample funds – to fashion a collateral school system that became virtually autonomous. It developed an independent curriculum and graduation requirements not conforming to state standards, and it established its own academy for training faculty. With the Führer’s permission, Ley named the ten institutions planned for Germany the Adolf Hitler Schools (AHS). Supplemental funding from the Reich’s treasury eventually allowed the addition of two more schools. The AHS boarding schools tested twelve-year-olds nominated by the NSDAP district leadership. Candidates passing the entrance exam entered a six-year course. The operation of the Adolf Hitler Schools offers insight into the personal qualities National Socialism sought to cultivate in Germany’s future leaders.

In December 1936, Schirach announced the founding of the new boarding schools. He appointed the 25-year-old Kurt Petter inspector of the academies. Max Klüver, also 25, designed the curriculum. The policy of recruiting young Hitler Youth leaders as instructors bypassed the Reich’s Ministry of Education’s technical authority to fill teaching positions. Accepting input from colleagues, Klüver developed a program free of official influence. The tight target date for opening the first Adolf Hitler School – April 15, 1937 – precluded a thorough selection process for choosing students.

Unlike conventional universities, the recruitment process, reflected in the content of the entrance exam, did not focus primarily on mental aptitude. As Klüver explained:

“We were not against intellect or intelligence, but against the one-sided intellectual person who had neglected character and physical prowess, who lacked will power, decisiveness and a sense of responsibility. The colorless, indecisive and weak, the poorly grounded and irresponsible intellectual type we didn’t want. Against overvalue of the intellect we set the total person, of which intellect was of course an integral component.”[140]

In designing the AHS entrance exam, the faculty hoped to assess independence of judgment, ingenuity, rapid comprehension, retention, improvisation, ability to concentrate, and imagination rather than pure knowledge. They sought the most talented youngsters from throughout Germany without Hitler’s usual preference for working-class families. One brochure stated:

“It is a popular misconception that the Adolf Hitler Schools are schools for the poor, for people of lesser means who would otherwise never be able to send their sons to institutions of higher learning. It should be emphasized that the Adolf Hitler Schools were not developed for a particular class in society. They are schools for the best, worthiest and most capable boys from among the German nation.”[141]

Teachers were aware, however, that the quality of education among the poorer sections of the population left some young talent undiscovered. Grading of the entrance exam took this into account. It permitted a relatively greater proportion of sons of artisans, laborers and farmers in the boarding schools than was the case in other institutions.

Instructors seldom allowed political considerations to compromise the selection of students. Despite considerable pressure and an intense confrontation with the district NSDAP leadership, Klüver himself refused to induct the son of a senior party official into an Adolf Hitler School because the boy had low test scores. By contrast, Werner Lamberz, enrolled at the Weimar AHS, was the son of the Communist Peter Lamberz, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp.[142]

The curriculum of the AHS cultivated leadership qualities among students as its goal. It avoided courses designed to pile up knowledge that required substantial study time and was soon forgotten. This conformed to Hitler’s definition of education’s objective, which should be “to train young minds to be receptive to new ideas, and to develop powers of reasoning and observation.”[143] History classes focused on a selection of more significant events that had a decisive influence on the advance of civilization rather than on a detailed chronology of the past.

The program required students to work together in study groups. Each assigned one participant as a devil’s advocate to stimulate the discussions. Teachers circulated among the groups taking part in debates. The group grade influenced the scores of individual students. This practice promoted teamwork. It prevented conceit and helped pupils learn to evaluate opposing arguments, prioritize group performance over personal advancement, and work systematically to realize common objectives.

Though sanctioning customary patriotism, Adolf Hitler Schools did not indoctrinate those enrolled in excessive, dogmatic nationalism. Students broadened their understanding and tolerance of other cultures through the course, “A Look at the World.” The purpose was to explore the political and economic circumstances of other countries, their current events and the mentality of their people. Foreign language studies and class field trips abroad supplemented the instruction. Teachers assigned each student a country that he had to become thoroughly knowledgeable about. He then shared his expertise in classroom discussion.

The open-minded attitude nurtured in AHS students contradicted the chauvinistic tendency prevalent among much of the NSDAP hierarchy. Reviewing essays by members of the first graduating class, Schirach and Ley were shocked to discover the seniors’ ignorance of the National-Socialist Party program. Racial hygiene also played no role in the study plan.[144] This circumstance contradicted Hitler’s order:

“No boy or girl shall leave school without being basically instructed in the practical necessity of maintaining the purity of our blood.”[145]

The training academy for AHS faculty also remained largely free from the influence of the NSDAP. The practice of filling teaching positions with young men eliminated the type of career educator who gradually distanced himself from the vitality and spirit of the younger generation after decades of academic routine. AHS directives required the instructor to arrange social and recreational activities for individual student groups in his charge during free time.

“He must energetically urge them to learn to shrug off mistakes and overcome weaknesses. But he must also remain cheerful and always ready to be at their side with friendly advice and help…. He must be a model companion, selfless, sincere and fair. Only then will he be able to acquire the necessary authority without which no leader can exist.”[146]

Once a week, instructors worked with their class on assignments. One afternoon each week, teachers and pupils participated in a sporting competition together as well as singing. Conventional precepts governing student-faculty relations were not in evidence at the Adolf Hitler Schools. Instructors relied on the standard they set, rather than on the pupil’s constrained respect for the office, to maintain authority. Klüver wrote later:

“There were few boarding schools in which such camaraderie and mutual trust existed between educator and student as in the AHS, not the least of which was due to the example of the instructor.”[147]

Physical education played a significant role in the AHS. Hitler had often stressed fitness as necessary for young people to become decisive, responsible and determined. The AHS program stated:

“Competitive sports … (and) skiing or flying in gliders are most important for strengthening the will and learning to endure hardships.”[148]

During the first years, students devoted approximately ten hours per week to physical education and sports. For fifth-year students, it was eight hours. Even during wartime, there was minimal paramilitary or weapons training in the curriculum. Instead, the schools strove to cultivate a soldierly bearing in the pupils using the military values of inner confidence, facing adversity, enduring privation and summoning courage. Natural athletes did not necessarily receive the highest marks. Students whom instructors felt achieved the most within the framework of their estimated abilities – hence attained the higher level of self-mastery – better satisfied school objectives.

Most AHS instructors identified National Socialism’s “one people, one leader” concept with the person of Hitler himself. None of his potential successors in the party and state hierarchy possessed the Führer’s commanding, charismatic presence. Germany’s future political structure, in the opinion of the AHS faculty, should therefore be an oligarchy: a select stratum where membership would be determined not by social, economic or intellectual standing, but by personal leadership qualities and devotion to country. The schools did not want to graduate automatons that blindly conformed to the party line. One period newspaper article stated:

“At the Adolf Hitler Schools, those character-forming forces are at work which we need for our times. They do not however, suppress the particular nature of the individual… but nurture and strengthen it, in this way enabling the boys to mature into independent-thinking, decisive personalities.”[149]

While designed to help students develop self-confidence and realize their potential, lesson plans incorporated elements intended to preclude feelings of self-importance. Difficult classroom assignments with weekly due dates required close cooperation and mutual dependency among members of individual study groups. The AHS athletic program’s emphasis on team competition taught the boys that no one person matters more than the whole. On the sports field as well as in the classroom, individual pupils alternately assumed the roles of team and study captains. They then rejoined the group in subordinate roles after temporary command. Field trips to mines, factories and farms combated isolation or aloofness, reminding students that the exclusive boarding-school status does not divide them from the German people and the realities of their daily existence. In contrast to other boarding schools, the AHS provided no distinctive uniform for its pupils. This measure also prevented feelings of superiority.

Another departure from what was customary at similar institutions was the attention to family ties during the school year. An AHS brochure described how student-parent relations are “arranged by the school to remain as intimate as possible, to instill in the boy values that may be realized only through family life.”[150] The AHS Tilsit newsletter described parents as belonging to an expanded circle of those empowered to educate the child.

“They have in no sense lost their boy when enrolling him the Adolf Hitler School. In full confidence in us, they instead entrust only a part of his education to the educator. It is our wish that the boy should remain rooted in his parents’ house and to his homeland. A youth who forgets his home is without roots and unsuitable for us as well.”

The article also defined “close cooperation between parents and instructors” as “absolutely essential for the education and evaluation of the individual lad.”[151] Instructors often visited the families of their students during holidays.

The AHS advocated ongoing parental influence as part of the policy to train its pupils to become wholesome, responsible young adults. The curriculum targeted development in three inter-related areas: mind, body and spirit. Regarding mental aptitude, it was the goal of the schools not to stuff the student’s head with information, but to accustom him to working hard, expediting assignments systematically, and practicing sound judgment. The AHS’s uncompromising commitment to physical education, conducive to general health and well-being, promoted self-confidence and taught classmates to subordinate self-interest and act as a team. The program’s spiritual element aimed at producing independent self-starters, prepared to accept and exercise authority, to feel responsible for their actions, and to nurture humility as well as reverence for their people and their country. All elements worked together to shape the individuals envisioned to become Germany’s future leadership caste. Though school officials hoped for graduates to choose a career in civil service, there was no pressure on them to do so. The Adolf Hitler Schools sought not to master Germany’s most promising young adults, but to teach them to master themselves.

This method of education represented a significant departure from liberalism’s practice. In order to provide equal opportunities for advancement for underachievers, the democratic state often devotes greater resources to their schooling than to that of those exhibiting superior ability. The leveling-off process corresponds to the liberal principle that rejects natural ranking among individuals based on talent and personal initiative. In National-Socialist Germany, by contrast, certain academic institutions assigned priority to developing the potential of more-gifted students. Parallel instruction in communal responsibility was supposed to ensure that training such personalities for leadership roles would be of service to all.

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Notes

[1] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 205
[2] Kaden, Ernst, Des Deutschen Volkes Heldenkampf, p. 113
[3] Fuller, J.F.C., The Second World War, p. 19
[4] Franz-Willing, Georg, Umsturz 1933, p. 28
[5] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, pp. 44-45
[6] Ibid., p. 45
[7] Schweiger, Helmut, Mythos Waffen-SS, p. 11
[8] Bainville, Jacques, Frankreichs Kriegsziel, p. 38
[9] Veale, Frederick, Advance to Barbarism, p. 147
[10] Ziegler, Wilhelm, Los von Versailles, p. 14
[11] Ponsonby, Arthur, Falsehood in Wartime, p. 59
[12] Schauwecker, Franz, So war der Krieg, p. 142
[13] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 75
[14] Ibid., 82, 13, 20
[15] Die braune Platte, “Appell an die Nation”
[16] Binding, Rudolf, Antwort eines Deutschen an die Welt, p. 6
[17] Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen , p. 193
[18] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 85
[19] Ibid., p. 40
[20] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 55
[21] Reinhardt, , Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 49
[22] Ibid., p. 54
[23] Ibid., p. 21
[24] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 204
[25] Ibid., pp. 204-205
[26] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 91
[27] Ibid., p. 87
[28] Ibid., p. 43
[29] Ibid., p. 56
[30] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 60
[31] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich p. 65
[32] Voss, Reimer, Steuern im Dritten Reich, p. 87
[33] Schweiger, Mythos Waffen-SS, p. 33
[34] Ibid., pp. 34-35
[35] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 60
[36] Reinhardt, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, pp. 62-63
[37] Ibid., p. 51
[38] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, pp. 59-60
[39] Bukey, Evan, Hitler’s Austria, p. 18
[40] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 89
[41] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 50
[42] Wistrich, Robert, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, p. 269
[43] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 51
[44] Ibid., p. 126
[45] Picker, Henry, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier, p. 501
[46] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 49
[47] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 122
[48] Albrecht, Karl, Der verratene Sozialismus, pp. 40-41
[49] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, pp. 83, 84
[50] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 61
[51] Ibid., p. 72
[52] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 148
[53] Ibid., p. 28
[54] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 91
[55] Ibid., p. 68
[56] Hitler, Adolf, Die Reden Hitlers am Reichsparteitag der Freiheit 1935, p. 43
[57] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, p. 262
[58] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 122
[59] Ibid., p. 287
[60] Leistritz, Hans, Der bolschewistische Weltbetrug, p. 34
[61] Leistritz, Hans, Der Schulungsbrief, 5/1938, p. 163
[62] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 287
[63] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 209
[64] Ibid., p. 211
[65] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 87
[66] Ibid., p. 250
[67] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 208
[68] Ibid., p. 206
[69] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, p. 694
[70] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 212
[71] Ibid., p. 206
[72] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 108
[73] Leistritz, Hans, Der bolschewistische Weltbetrug, p. 35
[74] Ibid.
[75] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 117
[76] Ibid.
[77] Ibid., pp. 119, 151
[78] Ibid., p. 104
[79] Picker, Henry, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier, p. 378
[80] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, pp. 111, 110
[81] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 220
[82] Hitler, Adolf, Die Reden Hitlers am Reichsparteitag der Freiheit 1935, p. 25
[83] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 219
[84] Ibid., p. 220
[85] Bouhler, Philipp, Der grossdeutsche Freiheitskampf, Band II, p. 94
[86] Hitler, Adolf, Die Reden des Führers am Parteitag 1938, p. 52
[87] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 218
[88] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 255
[89] Ibid.
[90] Ibid., p. 259
[91] Ibid., p. 260
[92] Ibid., p. 271
[93] Ibid., p. 73
[94] Ibid., p. 97
[95] Ibid., p. 166
[96] Schön, Heinz, SOS Wilhelm Gustloff, p. 12
[97] Ibid.
[98] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 169
[99] Ibid., p. 154
[100] Schön, Heinz, SOS Wilhelm Gustloff, p. 17
[101] Ibid., p. 21
[102] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 170
[103] Ibid., p. 172
[104] Ibid., p. 173
[105] Zitelmann, Rainer, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, p. 211
[106] Picker, Henry, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier, p. 41
[107] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 30
[108] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 246
[109] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 59
[110] Klüver, Max, Den Sieg verspielt, pp. 87, 88
[111] Klüver, Max, Den Sieg verspielt, p. 94
[112] Klapdor,Ewald, Der Ostfeldzug 1941, p. 140
[113] Liddell-Hart, Basil, Deutsche Generale des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 90
[114] Klüver, Max, Den Sieg verspielt, p. 113
[115] Bagel-Bohlen, Anja, Hitlers industrielle Kriegsvorbereitungen, p. 122
[116] Ibid., p. 116
[117] Klüver, Max, Den Sieg verspielt, p. 107
[118] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 271
[119] Klüver, Max, Den Sieg verspielt, p. 95
[120] Bagel-Bohlen, Anja, Hitlers industrielle Kriegsvorbereitungen, p. 105
[121] Schustereit, Hartmut, Vabanque, p. 74
[122] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 32
[123] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 70
[124] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 183
[125] Bagel-Bohlen, Anja, Hitlers industrielle Kriegsvorbereitungen, pp. 134, 135
[126] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 252
[127] Reinhardt, Fritz, Die Beseitigung der Arbeitslosigkeit im Dritten Reich, p. 70
[128] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 58
[129] Schoenbaum, David, Die braune Revolution, p. 138
[130] Langer, William and Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, p. 166
[131] Schaub, Julius, In Hitlers Schatten, pp. 15-16
[132] Kern, Erich, Adolf Hitler und seine Bewegung, p. 48
[133] Der Schulungsbrief, 1/1937, pp. 6, 7
[134] Der Schulungsbrief, 1/1937, p. 7
[135] Der Schulungsbrief, 5/1937, pp. 188-189
[136] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 33
[137] Ibid., p. 90
[138] Ibid., p. 95
[139] Ley, Robert, Wir alle helfen dem Führer, p. 139
[140] Klüver, Max, Die Adolf-Hitler Schulen, p. 32
[141] AHS Weimar-Thüringen, Arbeitsbericht und Elternbriefe 1940-41, p. 11
[142] Klüver, Max, Die Adolf-Hitler Schulen, p. 132
[143] Ibid., p. 33
[144] Ibid., pp. 159, 181, 82
[145] Jörns, Emil, and Julius Schwab, Rassenhygienische Fibel
[146] Klüver, Max, Die Adolf-Hitler Schulen, p. 152
[147] Ibid., p. 196
[148] Ibid., p. 104
[149] Ibid., p. 146
[150] Ibid., p. 185
[151] Ibid., p. 184