Lecture notes (week three): NS Propaganda and Popular Opinion
Power Point lecture NS-Propaganda
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