#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy, FDCA, IL Cantiere #14: SOCIAL AND WORK RENITEENTS IN NAZI GERMANY by Marco Rossi (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Subversive is anyone who opposes the People, the Party and the State, their

ideological principles and their political actions. ---- ( R. Heydrich, speech to
the SS) ---- In some "primitive" tribal cultures, through anthropophagy the
victors took possession of the strength of the enemies; similarly, Nazism, a
contraction of National Socialism, fed on the anti-bourgeois and revolutionary
identity of the proletarian left, cannibalizing the symbols, cultures and
watchwords of the workers' movement. ---- Once it became a regime as happened
with Italian fascism, the reactionary role of Nazism went instead to materialize
through a policy that saved the existing class structure so much as to reveal
itself as a decisive step in the struggle between capital and labor in an
advanced industrial.

And indeed the Nazis in power was the most ruthless and exploitative classist
industrial society ever seen.(1)

The debt contracted with the industrialists, landowners and bankers who had
supported and favored the rise of Hitler, was paid by Nazism guaranteeing the
growth of profits and establishing order and discipline in the nation and in the
workplaces, up to supplying manpower almost at no cost through the extreme
exploitation of the camp inmates, reduced to producing for the German industry in
conditions of inhuman slavery.

In fact, even if the concentration camp was not a slave company, the comparison
with the social form of slavery retains a heuristic value, because it helps to
focus on the transformation of human work into work for the purpose of terror.
Slavery is always a social form of domination and production.(2)

Despite this, even after the physical and political liquidation of the most
radical components of the Nazi movement, such as Roehm's Sturmabteilung (SA) and
the National-Boshevik current headed by the Strasser brothers,(3) the Hitler
regime did not give up, at least on the facade level , to its vaunted
working-class origins, so as to create the powerful German Labor Front which was
entrusted with the resolution of class conflicts.(4)

May 1st in Nazi Germany, unlike Mussolini's fascist Italy where it was considered
an outlawed anniversary, became since 1933 the Day of the community of the people
(Volkgemeinshaft), a holiday consecrated by the regime to solemnly celebrate the
figure of the Worker with great demonstrations German, heroic figure echoing
Ernst Jünger's Arbeiter in its militaristic meaning, as a product of the fusion
of Proletarich with Soldatich.(5)

The aesthetic exaltation of work as a source not so much of individual well-being
or profit, but of collective virtue and strength, was in fact a constant of Nazi
propaganda which in this way aimed to organize workers' consensus around the
effective policy of compression of wages and consumption. This heroic vision
implied the militarization of work relationships and, in this sense, the spades
held like rifles by the soldier-workers of the Arbeiterfront during the parades
were functional to the representation of the idea of military strength achieved
through work, and at the same time, of work as a militia.

The regime also became the promoter of the propaganda campaign Schönheit der
Arbeit (Beauty of work) aimed at the working class to increase productivity,
while in the art painters and sculptors such as Arthur Kampf, Fritz Kölle,
Ferdinand Staeger, Fried Heuler and Lothar Sperl, in their works represented the
manual worker describing his tasks as monumental and heroic facts and emphasizing
his physical prowess, without any allusion to the suffering or fatigue caused by
the working conditions; the title of one of these works is emblematic: We are the
soldiers of work.(6)

Simultaneously, accrediting National Socialism as a theory of production in the
context of a planned economy, in exchange for the re-establishment of social
order, the Nazi leaders forced the industrialists to modernize the factories.
Thus even if the German workers did not obtain any increase in real wages, the
Nazi propaganda machine could boast of an improvement in the hygiene of the
working environments, a consequence of the rationalization of the production
cycles, and the management by the leisure regime which allowed the workers the
access to sport and culture through the Nazi after-work organization Kraft durch
Freude (Strength through joy).

Every large company had internal regulations; emblematic is that of the Krupp
steelworks, the most important German industry: "I, Gustav Krupp, want to work
with modest people who show me that they want to and know how to make themselves
from nothing, without makeshift means. Loyalty, that's the supreme commandment.
Therefore I want to have only workers faithful who are grateful to me, in heart
and in deed, for the bread that I offer them. For my part, I intend to treat them
with all the love, providing for them and for their families".(9)

The Nazi vision of work had also been outlined, with "Soviet" accents, as early
as the Program of the National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(Nsdap),(10) or rather in the famous Twenty-five points presented by Hitler in
Munich on February 24, 1920, which established:

10. The first duty of every citizen is work, physical or intellectual. The
activity of the individual must not harm the interests of the community, but fit
into its framework and for the common good. For this we ask:

11. The suppression of the income of those who do not work and do not toil, the
suppression of interest slavery.(11)

In line with this programme, in the spring of 1920 the party flag made its
appearance, personally designed by Hitler, taking up the ancient symbol of the
swastika already used by nationalist and anti-Semitic groups in Austria before
the 1914-18 world war and then in post-war Germany by the Erhardt brigades and
völkish circles,(12) as a symbol of Aryan Germanism. It kept the colors of the
old imperial flag (black, white and red), but the red background, in imitation of
the social-communist one, was supposed to represent the social idea of the
movement in Hitler's intentions.(13)

By virtue of the agitation and propaganda work carried out with extremist and
anti-bourgeois accents above all by the strasserian component in the industrial
centers of Northern Germany and in Berlin, National Socialism succeeded in the
decade preceding 1933 in making inroads also in proletarian and sub-proletarian
sectors, during the very serious economic and political crisis experienced by the
Weimar Republic.

Those were years of very hard clashes, of civil war and also of war of symbols,
during which the organizations of the labor movement contested the control of
neighbourhoods, streets and breweries with the Nazi paramilitary squads; this
battle in Berlin lasted three years.(14) A photo dates back to that period in
which, from the windows of the houses on the same street in a working-class
neighborhood, numerous red flags can be seen hanging, some with the swastika and
others with the sickle and hammer.(15)

To mow the grass under the left's feet, the Nazis relied on the activists of the
extreme "left wing" of the National Socialist movement: they carried out and
combined a very radical "workerist" and trade union propaganda, entrusted to the
"National Socialist factory cells" (Nsbo), with a systematic terrorist action
entrusted to the militias and action teams. (16) After the conquest of power, the
Nazi regime's employment policy was directly linked to the welfare system which
arose in the 1920s under the previous social democratic government, when due to
the various economic crises which struck German society after the war, millions
of people from different social backgrounds were reduced to poverty,

The Nazis almost entirely took over the pre-existing welfare bureaucratic
apparatus, asking officials to continue to exercise the function of surveillance,
control and filing while, in parallel, they instituted a specific structure for
the selection of the marginalized, on biological and racial grounds. The welfare
structure, made up of social and health workers and administrative personnel,
collected information on single individuals and passed it on to the structure
which was to intervene on the level of segregation, and later also for the
physical annihilation, of the persons destined to be interned in the labor camps
or in the infamous psychiatric clinics.

These subjects, defined as Asocials (Asoziale) and subsequently as Extraneous to
the community (Gemeinshaft-sfrede) in the first concentration camps represented
the majority of the inmates followed by the anti-Nazi political opponents and
still in 1941 there were 110,000 German Aso prisoners in the concentration camps,
marked black triangle.

Already in 1934 there were around 350 work dodgers (Arbeitsscheune) imprisoned in
Dachau; in March 1937 about 2,000 habitual and professional criminals and
anti-social criminals corrupting public morality were incarcerated and in April
1938 it was the turn of at least 1,500 Asocials.

All marginalized subjects were considered Asocial (beggars, prostitutes, the
homeless, nomads, tightrope walkers, alcoholics, drug addicts, petty thieves,
charlatans ...), as well as those who had been unemployed for too long, social
rebels guilty of spreading disorder in places of work perhaps with wage claims or
hostility against representatives of the institutions.

To these were added individuals guilty of the crime of trespassing (i.e.
squatters of houses), alimony payers in default (i.e. those who did not have the
money to pay for the shopping), road traffic disruptors (i.e. those who
implemented roadblocks ) and those guilty of resisting the forces of order (ie
those who reacted to Nazi violence). Also included were people accused of
"irregular" marital or sexual behavior, as was the case for lesbians who were not
even recognized the "right" to be included in the category of Homo distinguished
by the pink triangle(18)

On the other hand, the certainly very high number of anarchists and communists
remains to be investigated who, due to their actions, were included among the
Asocials and marked with the black triangle, instead of being classified with the
red triangle of political opponents, given that "in fact one can easily observe
that the destruction of the left, especially the communist one, constituted
during the first year and a half of the regime almost the sole purpose of Nazi
terror". (19)

On the basis of the law of '24, establishing assistance to the poor, "voluntary"
work was also introduced by law and the creation of special work houses
(Arbeitsdienst), very similar to concentration camps, in which those that, in
exchange for the assistance subsidy of 10 cents a day, they had to carry out a
work service (a sort of socially useful work). Thus in 1933 Hitler, by launching
the Law for the reduction of unemployment, was able to start the construction of
the concentration camp system by taking up these welfare regulations and adding
to them the systematic application of protective detention (Schutzhaft) against
Asocials, a security measure inherited from the legislation Prussian criminal.

 From a legal point of view, according to what was established by the law of
1924, the assisted worker had no right to a salary as the work he performed was
part of an assistance provision, outside the civil law rules governing the
employment relationships, while board and lodging were part of the benefit
granted by the state.

The Nazi regime claimed to have reabsorbed about 8 million unemployed in two
years, thanks to its program of large public works, such as highways, implemented
through compulsory work (Pflicharbeit). The concrete effects of Nazi welfare were
instead completely laughable: "the main beneficiary of the emergency works, which
in the winter of 1933-1934 increased sevenfold compared to the 1932 level, was
not so much the circle of those who were employed in them or the national economy
as a whole, but rather the statistics. It is also doubtful whether the work of
the Reich Labor Service and of the agricultural helpers had a consistent economic
utility". (20)

 From the time the National Socialists took over the government in January 1933
to the following March, when the Dachau concentration camp was officially
"inaugurated", about forty preventive custody camps (Schutzhaftlager) were set
up, under the control of the SA, set up essentially for policies, i.e. for the
internment of opponents of the National Socialist regime, anarchists and
so-called Asocial elements, the majority of these places of detention were
located in Berlin or its immediate surroundings.(21)

In a second time these temporary prisons such as the one in a powder factory in
the Porz-Hochkreuz district of Cologne and the informal concentration camps
(wilde Konzentrationslager) controlled by the SA were then progressively closed
between the summer of '33 and the winter of '34; these places of torture against
"subversive" prisoners had prefigured the horror of the subsequent extermination
camps to such an extent that the head of the Gestapo, after visiting an
underground prison of the Wuppertal SA, had to declare that Hieronymus Bosch and
Pieter Bruegel never seen a similar horror.(22) With the opening of the new
structures, starting from that of Dachau, their management therefore passed to
the SS and on 4 July 1934 it was established within the Central Office of the SS
organization,

The famous inscription Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) was placed at the
entrance to the first concentration camps, which took up the slogan of the
"welfare" program launched by the social democratic government. (23)

Inside the camps, the black triangle marked, in addition to antisocials generally
of German nationality (in 1941 there were 110,000 internees), also Russian
prisoners who did not fall into the category of prisoners of war.

Instead, for Roma and Sinti, between 1937 and '38, when their discrimination was
specified on the basis of mainly racial criteria, the specific category of
Zigeuner was introduced, indicated by the brown triangle, to which blacks and
mestizos were also assimilated , while non-Gypsy nomads were presumably
distinguished by the gray triangle.

The coercive measures were therefore accompanied by the hammering Nazi propaganda
according to which the enemy is always characterized as one who does not work,
who does not know the dignity of work, who hinders production.(24)

In the third phase, between 1936 and 1939, there was the transition from a
conception linked to the more or less traditional vision of political opponents
and more or less traditionally punitive to a völkish-rassistich and social
hygiene conception which allowed to include in the categories to be subjected to
Schutzhaft all those who were suspected from the point of view of National
Socialist ideology of practicing deviant behavior with respect to categories of
order and normality such as for example the indefinite and indefinable categories
of 'asocials' or arbeitsscheune, up to encroaching ( for the case of gypsies) in
real biological selection.(25)

As far as the Jews are concerned, their persecution and extermination saw the
addition of racial, socio-political and war motivations.

With these premises, compulsory work was gradually transformed into forced
labour, while assistance became, legally, the alibi and antechamber of annihilation.

On 14 December 1937, with an order from the Minister of the Interior on
preventive control of crimes, it was officially established that the
concentration camps had to be considered in all respects State Reformers and
Labor Camps (Staat Besserungsanstalt und Arbeitslager).

In the summer of 1938, a large part of the strict labor legislation was
transferred to the penal code, so that the Gestapo was able to intervene directly
with its apparatus of terror against the "unproductive and antisocial" elements
and, immediately after the invasion of Poland, Himmler announced the
demonstrative execution of a Communist for refusing to work. From that point on,
maintaining discipline gradually became a new core area of the Gestapo's remit.
Alongside the original tasks of the Gestapo, the repression of political
resistance and of the working class necessarily expanded.(26)

The situation worsened further on the eve of the Second World War when the regime
introduced civil conscription, with which it could force workers to carry out
particular jobs, tightening the repressive measures against persistent strikes,
clandestine union organization and widespread absenteeism defined by a senior
state official as behavior that formally amounts to sabotage.(27)

The contingencies of war which led to the internment of about 5 million forced
foreign workers coincided with the last transformation of the concentration camp.(28)

If until 1939 the concentration camp system had had specific purposes to
liquidate all internal opposition, isolate the marginalized and terrorize the
community, with the outbreak of the Second World War, the concentration camp
became a sort of rental agency, inside of which the mother-camp constituted the
center of an organization endowed with numerous branches and external offices
connected to the war industry, where the extreme and systematic exploitation of
millions of dead-living last among the proletarians condemned to produce surplus
value up to at the last breath:? there was never a real contrast between work and
extermination, between the economy, racist ideology and the regime of terror. By
making prisoners work harder, power did nothing but equip itself with a new
instrument of terror.(29)

Nazism, having left behind its socialist programmatic intentions, no longer
needed to wear masks.

Note:

1) Ian Kershaw, What is Nazism? Interpretative problems and research
perspectives, Bollati Boringhieri, 1995, pp. 211-212.

2) Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror. The concentration camp, Laterza, 1995,
p. 254.

3) See Marco Rossi, The ghosts of Weimar. Origins and masks of the revolutionary
right, ZIC, 2001; David Bernardini, National Bolshevism. A little history of
rossobrunismo in Europe, Shake, 2020.

4) On April 4, 1933, the minister of labour, Robert Ley, a Nazi of the first
hour, was charged with creating the Nazi corporate organization which would take
the name of Deutsche Arbeiter Front, intended to govern wages, social insurance,
cooperatives, workers' credit banks, etc. The Front involved not only employees,
but also employers and professionals, in order to "create a true social and
productive community of all Germans" and each company constituted a cell. By law,
its officials had to come from the cadres of the SA, the SS or the Nazi party and
at the end of 1939 it was incorporated into the Central Office for the Reich
Security (see Gustavo Ottolenghi, Arbeit Macht Frei. The industries of the Third
Reich who exploited the hand of forced labor of concentration camp prisoners
(1933-1945), Sugarco, 1995, pp. 14-

16).

5) On May 1, 1933 massive demonstrations were organized by the Nazis. In Berlin,
100,000 attended a meeting at Tempelhof airport, where Hitler paid homage to
German workers; Also listening to him were the shocked union leaders Theodor
Leipart, Peter Grossmann and Karl Edelmann who, the following day, along with
hundreds of worker leaders and union officials were arrested by the Gestapo while
the union organizations were dissolved by law.

1)

6) See Adelin Guyot and Patrick Restellini, Nazi art. An art of propaganda,
Mondatori, 1992, pp. 198-206.

7) This section of the Labor Front, from which it was financed, was created in
November '33 and will organize theatrical performances, cheap holidays and even
cruises abroad for the workers, expertly exploited for propaganda purposes; sport
will also be developed with systematic and mass criteria.

8) The Arbeitskarte was issued on 20 January '34; it reaffirmed that the German
Labor Front, an emanation of the National Socialist Party, was the single
organization that replaced the trade unions and business associations. The
Charter established the hierarchical relationships (Führer-prinzip) that had to
exist between employers and employees; in particular, it provided that "the head
of the enterprise will make the decisions for the employees and workers in all
matters concerning the enterprise itself", while the employer was made
"responsible for the well-being of his employees and workers" who in return they
owed him loyalty and obedience.

9) Quoted in Vincenzo Pappalettera, From democracy to dictatorship. Nazism and
the Holocaust, Mursia, 1996, p. 70.

10) The first party that used the term "National Socialist" dates back to 1898,
born in Bohemia from a split between the union of workers of Czech nationality
and those of German nationality; the latter in turn formed the German Workers'
Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in 1904, which in the summer of 1918 would assume
the name of National Socialist German Workers' Party; in Germany, on the other
hand, the German Workers' Party was founded in Munich on 5 January 1919. At its
foundation in 1920, the National Socialist German Workers' Party therefore
resumed these previous denominations.

11) See Pappalettera, From democracy to dictatorship, cit., pp. 211-214.

12) From Volk, people; in the German cultural context the term völkish indicated
the traditional elements,

nationalists, mystics, etc. linked to the Germanic past and "characterizing" the
German people.

13) On the origins of the Nazi flag, see FL Carsten, The genesis of fascism,
Edizioni Accademia, 1979, pp. 134-135; V. Pappalettera, From democracy to
dictatorship, cit., pp.16-17; Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Before Hitler Came,
Delta-Arktos Editions, 1987, p. 139.

14) The Reichbanner was the defense organization of the Social Democratic Party
(SPD), strong of about

250,000 adherents; the paramilitary structure of the Communist Party (Kpd) was
instead divided into various organizations, including the Kampfbund gegen den
Faschismus and the Rotkämpferbund. In addition to the KPD there were, on more
radical positions, the Kommunistische Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands (Kapd) and
other minor communist parties. In the trade union sphere, however, in addition to
the social democratic unions, the most important class organizations were the
anarcho-syndicalist Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (Faud), the Allgemeine
Arbeiter Union Einhesorganisation (Aau-E) and the Allgemeine Arbeiter Union
Deutschlands (Aaud). On the anti-Nazi armed struggle see: Various Authors, Bend
over means lying. Germany: The Libertarian Resistance to Nazism in the Ruhr and
the Rhineland (1933-1945), ZIC, 2005; Valerio Gentili, Bastards without history.
 From the Arditi del popolo to the red fighters of Front Line: the removed
history of European anti-fascism, Castelvecchi, 2011; T. Derbent, Communist
resistance in Germany 1933-1945, Zambon, 2011; David Bernardini, The barometer
marks storm. The Black Lines against Nazism, La Fiaccola, 2014; Leonhard Schafer,
Against Hitler. Anarchists and the forgotten German resistance, ZIC, 2015.

15) The photo is visible in Laurence Ress, Nazis. "One People, One Führer, One
Reich", Newton & Compton, 1998.

16) Sergio Bologna, Nazism and the Working Class 1933-1993, Cox 18Calusca City
Lights, 1994, p. 54.

17) Ibid., p. 45.

18) On the various classifications and related symbols, see Gustavo Ottolenghi,
La mappa dell'inferno. All Nazi places of detention 1933-1945, Sugarco, 1993, pp.
23-25, and (Edited by the same author) Dictionary of Nazism, Sugarco, 1995, pp.
18-19. See also Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler's Prisons. The prison system of the
Third Reich, Mondadori, 2007.

19) Eric A. Johnson, The Nazi Terror. The Gestapo, the Jews and the Germans,
Mondadori, 2002, p. 162.

20) Timothy W. Mason, The social policy of the III Reich, Bruno Mondatori, 2003,
p. 118.

21) G. Ottolenghi, The map of hell, cit., p. 20.

22) The episode is taken up again in EA Johnson, The Nazi Terror, cit., p.

170. On the institutionalization of the first camps, see Reinhard Rürup (ed.),
Topography of Terror, Arenhövel, 1994.

23) Other mottos were Jedem das seine (To each his own), Wahrhaftigheit Opfersinn
un Liebe (Sacrifice and love for the country), Recht oder Unrecht, mein Vaterland
(Rightly or wrongly, it is my country).

24 George L. Mosse, Interview on Nazism (edited by Michael A. Leeden), Laterza,
1977, p. 97.

25) Enzo Collotti, Nazi Europe. The project of a new European order (1939-1945),
Giunti, 2002, p. 313.

26) Timothy W. Mason, The workers' opposition in Nazi Germany,
"Collegamenti-Quaderno 1", 1979, p. 59.

27) Ibid., p. 57.

28) On these conditions, see: Brunello Mantelli, Camerati del Lavoro. The
enlistment of Italian workers for the Third Reich in the Axis period 1938-1943,
La Nuova Italia, 1992; Ricciotti Lazzero, Hitler's slaves, Mondadori, 1996;
Cesare Bermani, At work in Hitler's Germany. Stories and memories of Italian
emigration 1937-1945, Bollati Boringhieri, 1998.

29) W. Sofsky, The order of terror, cit, p. 253.

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