Power Point lecture NS-Propaganda 

Lecture 13

Social Revolution?

• egalitarianism of 1920 programme
• supports small business against big business cartels & department stores
• promises protection of farmers against banks
• promises workers heightened status but not raised wages
• but not socialist in terms of nationalisation of private property

Historians’ views

• Ralf Dahrendorf (1965): destruction by Nazis & war unwittingly modernises German society
• David Schoenbaum (1966): vocational schemes & upwards mobility explain NS popularity
• Lutz Niethammer (1980s): four-tier roots change:
• Depression (breaks up working-class milieu)
• NS policies (creates some upward mobility)
• war & postwar (1943-48)
• Americanisation

Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community)

• ‘society’ viewed as artificial product of industrial revolution; ‘community’ organic & positive
• Volksgemeinschaft designed to replace class divisions with racial belonging
• Aryan members of ‘in-group’ Volksgenossen (people’s comrades)
• non-Aryan ‘out-group’ of Gemeinschaftsfremde (community aliens), incl. Jews, gypsies, asocials

Workers: Carrot and Stick Policies

• Hitler’s fear of repeat of 1918 ‘stab in the back’ by militant working class
• but no strikes in Third Reich (unlike in Fascist Italy in March 1943 & 1944)
• 1933 smashing of trade unions, outlawing of leftist parties (KPD & SPD)
• 1934 authoritarian shopfloor relations (master-retinue, Gestapo informants, concentration camps)
• workers lose political power but retain some economistic power (job-switching, go-slows)
• 1939: outbreak of war overtime banned, but Nazis have to backtrack in face of worker discontent
• Discipline of Eastern Front; work of Alf Lüdtke on loyal, anti-semitic worker-soldiers
• Strength through Joy: incl package holidays, Rhine cruises & Black Forest; KdF-Wagen (Beetle)
• Beauty of Labour: superficial attempt to cheer up work surroundings, add sports facilities
• slave labour: by 1944 7 million foreign workers in Reich; upward mobility for German unskilled

Women: Between Production and Reproduction

• women’s organisations: NS-Frauenschaft for elite, but poor take-up of mass Frauenwerk
• girls’ membership of Bund deutscher Mädel not compulsory; no threat of draft
• positive eugenics (marriage allowances, Mother’s Cross); modest rise in birth-rate
• negative eugenics (sterilisation programme)
• initial drive from workplace, esp. of ‘double earners’
• wartime mobilisation, esp. with ‘Total War’ in 1943; relative failure
• women as social leaders (lone parents, black marketeering, rubble clearance)

War and Social Change

• does war speed up social changes (Trotsky: ‘war is the locomotive of social change’)?
• does war put on ice the ambitious social engineering projects?
• Is it the aftermath of war which sees most change
• cf standards of living under Third Reich & West Germany’s economic miracle (guns OR butter)

• cf standards of living under Third Reich & West Germany’s economic miracle (guns OR butter)

Religious Policy

• 63% of Germans nominally Protestant; 33% Catholic, but secularisation beginning
• Hitler believes in Providence, but despises Christianity, although not publicly anti-religious
• Paganism: NS cult of Wotan, runes & pre-Christian ritual
• 1933 Protestant Church leaders welcome Machtergreifung as part of spiritual re-awakening
• German Christians: believe in nationalism & popular church led by Ludwig Müller
• Confessional Church: authentic evangelicals, incl Niemöller & Bonhoeffer who oppose
• July 1933 Vatican signs Concordat (no political Catholicism, but state accepts church orgs.)
• Oldenburg crucifix struggle: control of public space in schools
• 1939 Catholic youth organisations dissolved; Hitler Youth has monopoly
• Euthanasia: bishop Galen of Westphalia opposes
• Wartime return to religiosity: fear of death & church as only non-Nazi social structure