excerpted from "Nazism and the Working Class, 1933-93" Sergio Bologna
"... 3. Forced labour in the Nazi period: examples of research
An early example of this research is an article by Ulrich Herbert, director of the Centre for Studies of the Nazi Period, in Hamburg. This was published in the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft in 1979, under the title "Workers and National Socialism. A historical assessment. Some unresolved questions". Ulrich Herbert is a well-known historian, particularly known in Italy because of his work on an overlooked comer of historical research - the use of foreign labour-power within the German war economy from 1938 onwards.
...the question of forced labour was also one of the main points of the research carried out by Karl Heinz Roth on the history of the Daimler Benz company...
...it is worth mentioning two important recent works by Italians - the study by Gustavo Corni entitled "The agrarian policies of National Socialism, 1930-1939", and Brunello Mantelli's piece entitled "Camerati del Lavoro", on the use of Italian forced labour within the German war economy.
Mantelli's studies have been proceeding in parallel with a study by our own Foundation, on the transfer of Italian workers to Nazi Germany, an oral-history project which has been largely in the hands of Cesare Bermani. Bermani's work has opened new understandings of everyday life in Nazi Germany on the basis of a little-studied episode in relations between the Third Reich and the fascist government in It4y: the handing over of some half a million workers in return for supplies of fuel. This was an anomalous episode in the history of Italian emigration. Before the Second World War, emigration was spontaneous and uncontrolled, whereas in the case studied by Bermani and Mantelli the exchange of labour power was formally contracted between two nation states.
...the composition of the workforce was multinational, the ethnic stratification was extremely rigid, and 80 per cent of this workforce was working under conditions of forced labour.
This element of forced labour has been one of the new areas of research which has been pursued during the past decade not only by our Foundation, but also by other researchers, and it provides a fundamental basis for understanding the relations between Nazism and the working class.
...A crucial work in the history of relations between Nazism and the working class is the book by Timothy W. Mason, Arbeiterklasse und Volksgememschaft ("Working Class and the 'National Community"' [published in English as Social Policy in the Third Reich, Berg, Providence and Oxford, 1993]), which revolutionised our view of working-class behaviour under Nazism. ...
Mason thus completely overturned the dominant view which claims that there was no resistance to the Nazi regime from within the working class except during the first few months of its rise. ...
...when we speak of the working class of the final period of Weimar, we are talking of a working class that was already extremely atomised, which inhabited a factory enviroriment that was fragmented and pulverised - as if they had been subjected to a decentralisation of production ante luteram.
...In the fourth quarter of 1930, the unemployed stood at 3,699,000; in the same period of 1931, the figure was 5,060,000; by one year later it stood at 5,353,000. The peak was reached when Hitler was already in power, in the first quarter of 1933, with 6,100,000 unemployed.
...The problem posed by the statistics is the following: what grip was it possible for the political organisations of the labour movement, and in particular the Social Democrats, and the Catholic and Socialist trade unions, to have over a workforce that was so fragmented, dispersed and mobile?
The main thrust of the Social Democratic union had concentrated on the component of the working class employed in the big factories, or in municipal workplaces, where trade union agreements were more or less respected. But this vast territory of the micro-factory, of micro-work, was a territory governed by unwritten rules and family-type relations of control. ...
Productivity in the capital goods industry rose by 30% in the period 1925-29, and by 25% in the consumer goods sector.
These were characterised as Weimar's "golden years": 1924-28. For some sections of the "new bourgeoisie" this was the case, but for the mass of workers it certainly was not. The average level of wages remained below that of 1913, and was only exceeded in a few categories. There was a strong degree of hierarchisation.
In this period, not only did the condition of the working class fail to improve, but there also began a systematic and selective expulsion from the factories of the militant trade-union cadres of the Communist Party, and of the more combative among the Social-Democratic worker militants. ...
In 1931, two years into-the Depression, the German Communist Party was a party with a membership made up of 80% unemployed workers. ...
But the years of the Great Depression were also the years of an impressive electoral advance by the Communist. Party. Electoral successes (or failures) are always to be measured against the "social power" of the party. We need to examine what strength the party might have had, given the social collocation of its members and supporters in terms of influence over the mechanisms of power within civil society.
Since it was made up principally of the unemployed, and thus mainly of ex-workers and young people in search of a first job, the Communist Party was not in a position to exercise any kind of trade-union power. It had to limit itself to trade-union propaganda, and to the hope that one or two of its militants still surviving in the workplaces might be able to act as the driving motors of particular conflicts. ...
Both the parties within the labour movement, the SPD and the KPD, were deeply affected by the unemployment, which undermined their ability to exercise real power in society. The Communist Party tended increasingly to tum to propaganda activities, whereas the Social Democrats increasingly focussed their energies on local municipal adinmistration, and on the administration of health and social security - in other words on that small amount of real power which enabled it to defend its members employed within public administration - and the management of public resources, given that trade-union activity in industrial workplaces had been effectively paralysed by the Depressio~ There was thus an enormous distance between the mentality of an average SPD cadre - who identified (and not just ideologically) with the bureaucracy of the Weimar Republic - and the mentality of the average KPD cadre. ...
Fromm and his collaborator, Hilde Weiss, the woman who actually did most of the work and must therefore be considered the true author of the [Workers'] Inquiry, were only finally able to publish their results in 1939, in exile in America at the time it appeared that they had been reluctant to publish in 1931, because they were alarrned by the authoritarian streak which was revealed in the answers from their respondents, who were mostly militants or sympathisers of the SPD. A reading of the replies to the questionnaires, which were republished in 1983, confiims this impression. ...
The spiralling rise of unemployment gave this apparatus huge powers during the final phase of the Republic. We could go so far as to say that, in the eyes of the ordinary citizen, the only identifiable face of the state was that of the welfare apparatus. The discretional powers of this apparatus steadily increased, and at the same time its function as a "benefit agency" was gradually replaced by a function of "gathering information about people". ...
The political Left did not exist; the SPD defended the Weimar regime as a democratic regime, as having been won by workers' victories; and the KPD wanted it to be abolished and replaced. ...
The relationship with a "social state" had been very important to social democracy and to the trade unions, in giving a sense of citizenship to the working class of the Weirnar Republic and in this way inculcating a loyalty to the Republic's institutions. This bond was now being shattered, and the result was a further sense of alienation among the unemployed working class in relation to the state and its institutions. Thus, when the working class is accused of not sufficiently defending the democratic Republic, one has to bear in mind that this democracy by now represented very little in the eyes of the central nucleus of the workforce. ..."
Angela