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Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the 'National Community'
This book analyzes the attitudes and policies of the Nazi leadership towards the German working class. The author argues that the regime did not securely integrate the working class and was thus less successful in imposing mass economic sacrifices in the interests of forced rearmament. With a growing labour shortage in the late 1930s, industrial conflict re emerged. These two factors slowed down military preparations for war and may well, it is argued, have influenced Hitler's foreign policy in 1938/39.
The author has added a substantial epilogue to this edition in which he responds to the main criticisms, aroused by the German original, and assesses the relevance of more recent research to the arguments put forward.
The author has added a substantial epilogue to this edition in which he responds to the main criticisms, aroused by the German original, and assesses the relevance of more recent research to the arguments put forward.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
About the author
Timothy W. Mason
5 books3 followersTimothy Wright Mason was an English Marxist historian of Nazi Germany. He was one of the founders of the History Workshop Journal and specialised in the modern Germany social history. He argued for the "primacy of politics" and believed the Second World War had been caused by an economic crisis inside Germany.
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September 21, 2024
A ghost is haunting nazi Germany -- the ghost of the German revolution of 1918.
The war was lost on the home front before it was lost on the battlefield: hence Germany's generational national trauma came with faces and names (the traitorous labour movement, the untrustworthy social-democrats, the feckless conservative elites unwilling to knock the country into shape, the jews, the intellectuals). It also came with an embedded doomsday prophecy: lose the working class, lose the war. This is the framing story for Timothy Mason's work.
His most forceful and focused writings can be found in Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, and for anyone interested in getting his main arguments, I would strongly recommend getting that. This book, instead, is a 15-year series of snapshots, weaving between case studies in Nazi policymaking, labour institutions, and an engagement with the debate on both sides of the iron curtain. Mason, a marxist but intellectually honest and consistent, decries the neglect of class analysis in Western historiography, just as he takes the East to task for lazy copypasting of leninist instrumentalism that far predated nazism: a coterie of capitalist elites seduced petty businesses, bribed the unemployed, captured the state and terrorized the workers into submission, all for the greater glory of capital (see Dimitrov and to a lesser extent Togliatti). His own reading is so contingent it might be accused of empiricism, were it not for the overwhelming dominance of antisemitism and ideological factors in mainstream explanations of nazism.
In his 100-page postscript, Mason concedes a whole lot, too much in fact -- that finishing his story in 1939 and hence leaving out the Eastern Front and the holocaust betrays the victims of nazism, that he overestimated the rebelliousness of the German working class, that his study is only useful as a counterweight to academic assumptions that he doesn't explore in depth himself. But the reader shouldn't allow him to humiliate himself that much: 1) for the period studied, Mason provides a nuts 'n bolts story of the institutional development of nazism, second to none; 2) identifying nazism exclusively with its final genocidal combustion gives us no clue as to what social contract underlay the 8 years before. Mason pulls away the totalitarian façade of the dictatorship and lays bare the jumble of organizations propping it up, all with different allegiances and sensitivities, who sometimes governed forcefully and at other times wrought unintended consequences that they later claimed for themselves or disowned: thát's what he taught me, that I hadn't read about anywhere else.
A central episode Mason discusses is the May 1933 destruction of the independent trade unions: infrastructure was seized, functionaries molested, organisation finances stolen. The party at this point was badly organized and never gave a clear centralized command: the plan was to usurp the unions piecemeal, not to crush them and inadvertently shock civil society into revolt. But when retaliation failed to materialize, the nazis were all too happy to sanction the violence and annex the unions to its own Labour Front.
Which leads us to the book's main focus: Robert Ley and the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF): what does it mean to lead a party-aligned trade union in a Nazi Germany deathly afraid of labour discontent, which is simultaneously gearing up for a very costly war? The picture is of an extremely tense contradiction Mason calls "not a peacetime economy, not a war economy, but a war-and-peace-economy". In the immediate aftermath of the general crisis that brought the nazis to power, wage repression and labour hour extension stabilized the economy enough to free up funds and labour for industrial expansion. As long as there was major unemployment, the government could rearm on the cheap, scoring popular brownie points at the same time. But this condition was soon exhausted, full employment having been reached, after which the demand for workers put upwards pressure on wages, strengthened the position of organised labour and more than ever tied the popularity of the regime to the people's material advancement. Hitler daily received urgent warnings from every branch of industry but could do very little: resources and manpower were strictly limited inside Germany. After 1933, keeping living standards up was sacrosanct: leftist leaders and organisations might be fair game, but the people themselves would only tolerate nazism if they saw the benefits in their own lives. Ley capitalized on this potentially explosive factor by expanding DAF territory, making workplace safety and productivity bonuses its hallmarks, and in particular monopolizing leisure time activities through the Kraft durch Freude-programme: the first mass tourist pleasure cruises in Europe, movie screenings, sports associations and hobby clubs, all sponsored with membership fees, aimed to keep the populace satisfied. The consumer monopsony of the DAF succeeded in driving down the costs of bread and games, though membership remained skewed towards the upper class. The DAF never fulfilled its syndicalist functions, its members and leadership being deliberately admixed with businessmen to keep employers happy, but doubled down on mass culture — foreshadowing in all this the cross-class mass integration of postwar Europe, like the Belgian christian-democrat state or the Swedish SAP.
Hence while NSDAP anxieties about its economic options grew, the DAF happily climbed the ladder of the party-state. Mason points to Hitlers knack for "taking the flight ahead" to resolve this, on a surface level: the nazi leader was willing to gamble the whole game, when his core interests seemed threatened. The annexation of Austria and Czechia, the invasion of Poland, the unexpected resource exchanges with the soviet union and the massive employment of forced labour: all this served to safeguard the internal peace, while kicking up the external escalation to ever higher levels. Every conflict was to remain short and brutal, because men and material was in such short supply.
After 1941, the reality of a long and costly war establishing itself unambiguously, the nazi state had to throw out the playbook it followed from the outset. Mason hypothesizes that only the widely shared German perception of the Eastern front as a defensive war made the common people swallow cuts in wages and living standards. But this period is emphatically not studied here, so he doesn't go into detail.
The main lesson? No amount of ideological analysis can replace a proper history of political development. Fascism didn't "do away" with preceding political realities, but kept tackling the same challenges with similar tools, and had to establish some kind of social contract to remain in force. This goes as much for fascism as it does for any other political system — just as state socialism has to continue dealing with issues of productivity and budgeting, or liberal democracy with democratic legitimation.
The war was lost on the home front before it was lost on the battlefield: hence Germany's generational national trauma came with faces and names (the traitorous labour movement, the untrustworthy social-democrats, the feckless conservative elites unwilling to knock the country into shape, the jews, the intellectuals). It also came with an embedded doomsday prophecy: lose the working class, lose the war. This is the framing story for Timothy Mason's work.
His most forceful and focused writings can be found in Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, and for anyone interested in getting his main arguments, I would strongly recommend getting that. This book, instead, is a 15-year series of snapshots, weaving between case studies in Nazi policymaking, labour institutions, and an engagement with the debate on both sides of the iron curtain. Mason, a marxist but intellectually honest and consistent, decries the neglect of class analysis in Western historiography, just as he takes the East to task for lazy copypasting of leninist instrumentalism that far predated nazism: a coterie of capitalist elites seduced petty businesses, bribed the unemployed, captured the state and terrorized the workers into submission, all for the greater glory of capital (see Dimitrov and to a lesser extent Togliatti). His own reading is so contingent it might be accused of empiricism, were it not for the overwhelming dominance of antisemitism and ideological factors in mainstream explanations of nazism.
In his 100-page postscript, Mason concedes a whole lot, too much in fact -- that finishing his story in 1939 and hence leaving out the Eastern Front and the holocaust betrays the victims of nazism, that he overestimated the rebelliousness of the German working class, that his study is only useful as a counterweight to academic assumptions that he doesn't explore in depth himself. But the reader shouldn't allow him to humiliate himself that much: 1) for the period studied, Mason provides a nuts 'n bolts story of the institutional development of nazism, second to none; 2) identifying nazism exclusively with its final genocidal combustion gives us no clue as to what social contract underlay the 8 years before. Mason pulls away the totalitarian façade of the dictatorship and lays bare the jumble of organizations propping it up, all with different allegiances and sensitivities, who sometimes governed forcefully and at other times wrought unintended consequences that they later claimed for themselves or disowned: thát's what he taught me, that I hadn't read about anywhere else.
A central episode Mason discusses is the May 1933 destruction of the independent trade unions: infrastructure was seized, functionaries molested, organisation finances stolen. The party at this point was badly organized and never gave a clear centralized command: the plan was to usurp the unions piecemeal, not to crush them and inadvertently shock civil society into revolt. But when retaliation failed to materialize, the nazis were all too happy to sanction the violence and annex the unions to its own Labour Front.
Which leads us to the book's main focus: Robert Ley and the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF): what does it mean to lead a party-aligned trade union in a Nazi Germany deathly afraid of labour discontent, which is simultaneously gearing up for a very costly war? The picture is of an extremely tense contradiction Mason calls "not a peacetime economy, not a war economy, but a war-and-peace-economy". In the immediate aftermath of the general crisis that brought the nazis to power, wage repression and labour hour extension stabilized the economy enough to free up funds and labour for industrial expansion. As long as there was major unemployment, the government could rearm on the cheap, scoring popular brownie points at the same time. But this condition was soon exhausted, full employment having been reached, after which the demand for workers put upwards pressure on wages, strengthened the position of organised labour and more than ever tied the popularity of the regime to the people's material advancement. Hitler daily received urgent warnings from every branch of industry but could do very little: resources and manpower were strictly limited inside Germany. After 1933, keeping living standards up was sacrosanct: leftist leaders and organisations might be fair game, but the people themselves would only tolerate nazism if they saw the benefits in their own lives. Ley capitalized on this potentially explosive factor by expanding DAF territory, making workplace safety and productivity bonuses its hallmarks, and in particular monopolizing leisure time activities through the Kraft durch Freude-programme: the first mass tourist pleasure cruises in Europe, movie screenings, sports associations and hobby clubs, all sponsored with membership fees, aimed to keep the populace satisfied. The consumer monopsony of the DAF succeeded in driving down the costs of bread and games, though membership remained skewed towards the upper class. The DAF never fulfilled its syndicalist functions, its members and leadership being deliberately admixed with businessmen to keep employers happy, but doubled down on mass culture — foreshadowing in all this the cross-class mass integration of postwar Europe, like the Belgian christian-democrat state or the Swedish SAP.
Hence while NSDAP anxieties about its economic options grew, the DAF happily climbed the ladder of the party-state. Mason points to Hitlers knack for "taking the flight ahead" to resolve this, on a surface level: the nazi leader was willing to gamble the whole game, when his core interests seemed threatened. The annexation of Austria and Czechia, the invasion of Poland, the unexpected resource exchanges with the soviet union and the massive employment of forced labour: all this served to safeguard the internal peace, while kicking up the external escalation to ever higher levels. Every conflict was to remain short and brutal, because men and material was in such short supply.
After 1941, the reality of a long and costly war establishing itself unambiguously, the nazi state had to throw out the playbook it followed from the outset. Mason hypothesizes that only the widely shared German perception of the Eastern front as a defensive war made the common people swallow cuts in wages and living standards. But this period is emphatically not studied here, so he doesn't go into detail.
The main lesson? No amount of ideological analysis can replace a proper history of political development. Fascism didn't "do away" with preceding political realities, but kept tackling the same challenges with similar tools, and had to establish some kind of social contract to remain in force. This goes as much for fascism as it does for any other political system — just as state socialism has to continue dealing with issues of productivity and budgeting, or liberal democracy with democratic legitimation.
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September 21, 2024Library-of-Congress HD8450 M37213 1993 Memorial Library
author's wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy...
which as of 9/21/2024 includes a useful synopsis of his conclusions.
Big business served the state, not vice-versa.
author's wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy...
which as of 9/21/2024 includes a useful synopsis of his conclusions.
Big business served the state, not vice-versa.
March 7, 2011
Tim Mason was pretty cool.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews