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The perception of the Nazi regime as one of totalitarian perfection, reaching ionto and controlling every aspect of the nation's life is one which, I would claim, still has popular currency. The acceptance of such a premise can create a mindset where the behaviour of the disparate groups that that make up society can be obscured: it is simpler, and in many ways more comforting, to rationalise unacceptable behaviour if we can argue that `they were forced to do it' or `they had no other choice'. However, as Daniel Goldhagen has suggested, the coercion argument has been overplayed [1]. If this is true of the state's armed forces and security services, how much more so of civilians who did not operate under direct military discipline? The notions of choice, acceptance, and personal agency inform the discussion below. Here, after giving some definitions and caveats, I will discuss: firstly, the kind of behaviours that would demonstrate the acceptance or rejection of the regime by the working class; secondly, the kind of factors that might condition the working class's attitudes towards the regime; and, thirdly, some possible interpretations.
The phrase `working class' is a phrase with a variety of definitions and brings with it some value-laden assumptions. Here, the discussion will centre around two complementary usages of the term. Firstly, a usage based on occupational criteria. This usage is derived from my reading of some of the literature, which takes the `working class' to be the group of urban workers employed in blue-collar jobs: factory work, production, labouring, outwork. Secondly, a usage derived from self-identification, where the expression of class-consciousness is revealed in the wider social world through the membership of clubs and societies, and through shared experiences and activities both inside and outside the workplace. The first usage is particularly useful when discussing expressions of acceptance or rejection of the regime, and the second in analysing what conditioned acceptance and rejection. `Acceptance' itself also needs some qualification: it could range from active approbation to merely the absence of dissent. The range of possible interpretations of this ambiguous term will be alluded to in the discussion that follows. Finally, it is recognised that the working class was not a homogeneous group, comprised as it was of different ethnic groups, genders, and ages, and divided as it was geographically and in terms of jobs, and stratified as it was by skill, income, and status. These qualifications made, I will now turn to the kind of behaviours that might demonstrate the working class's acceptance or rejection of the regime.
At the most obvious level, we might expect to see dissent expressed in the forms that had become familiar in early twentieth century Europe - street demonstrations, mass-strikes, riots. There is a paucity of evidence for any significant manifestation of these activities in the years under Nazism. Indeed, it is apparent that although the regime was itself concerned about the working class's willingness to tolerate the necessary sacrifices required to organise the economy war-production lines, there was no fear of a popular revolt [2].
Voting patterns might provide another area where acceptance/dissent can be gauged. The working class's traditional loyalties lay with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KDP). In the 1930 and (second) 1932 elections, the SPD/KDP share of the vote averaged 36.8%, compared to the Nazi's average of 26.5% [3]: the left's vote held up, although the internal divisions within the parties and their supporters precluded their effective electoral opposition to the Nazis [4]. After 1933, although elections were still held, the figures are rendered meaningless through manipulation by the Nazis.
Nazi Party membership figures also indicate that the working class was the least penetrable group for the Nazis, especially amongst older workers: the working class represented 46% of the German population, but occupied only 32.5% of the party membership [5]. Even allowing for the varied reasons that people become party members - enthusiasm, self-interest, compulsion - this disparity is significant, representing perhaps the relative disinclination of the working-class to identify actively with the Nazis. Paradoxically, the same figures demonstrate that some at least embraced the Nazi Party [6].
Likewise, the involvement of workers with the DAF - the ersatz Trades Union created by the Nazis, may indicate nothing more than a recognition that any officially-recognised collective bargaining machinery was better than none, as well as representing their recognition of the de facto status of workers, employers, party officials and the DAF. The relative lack of penetration of the Nazi's shop-floor Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO) may also indicate the workers' lack of overt enthusiasm for the Nazi regime [7]. Here, it is useful to draw a distinction between collective action taken for political reasons and that taken for reasons of class solidarity, or for reasons of economic interest, or over working conditions [8].
Although the regime itself may have interpreted all collective action as `political' in nature, it can be argued that expressions of dissent generally fell into two distinct categories: political resistance and workers' opposition [9]. Political resistance was actively hostile to Nazism and sought to bring about a non-Nazi political system. This resistance was secret, underground, and organised around a nucleus of political activists. It was not a mass-grouping. The workers' opposition, in contrast, was public in nature, but was not overtly or avowedly political. It was only organised at a local level, and can be seen as taking a variety of active and passive forms: spontaneous strikes, collective pressure on employers and party officials, absenteeism, and sick-leave. There are different ways of interpreting these activities. For example, they can be seen as discrete manifestations of workers' dissent, dissent channelled into alternative forms of expression in the absence of the old Trades Union structures, or perhaps as expressions of workers' awareness that the regime's rhetoric differed from lived reality: "when asked, workers made it clear that they knew they were being lied to the whole time. They responded in kind [by reducing their efforts in the workplace - cheating the system]" [10].
The picture that emerges is of a working class whose overtly political expressions of dissent were minimal, whose industrial protests were small-scale and politically ineffective [11], and whose character - given the absence of any active, concerted, mass-opposition - can be described as "neutralised, contained, resigned, demoralised, non-rebellious, and [as posing] no threat" [12]. Given this, I will now turn to some of the factors which may have conditioned this level of tacit acceptance of the Nazi regime.
The kinds of influences that acted upon the working class can be subsumed under three headings: the material, the spiritual (or aspirational), and the coercive [13].
Materially, the Nazi regime came to power in the wake of a colossal dislocation of German economic life which brought with it massive unemployment and insecurity. In the Nazi era, the combination of economic upturn, public-spending, job-creation measures and rearmament all contributed to a fall inslashing unemployment from six million in 1933 to one million in 1936, which effectively constituted a situation which reflects full employment [14]. The subsequent labour deficit in Germany meant that the bargaining power of workers - and especially of skilled workers - was increased in what had now become a sellers' market.
The Nazi regime brought other material benefits that may have acted to militate against dissent: legislation to improve working conditions, housing regulation and building programmes, rent controls, and lower costs for heating and lighting. Although these measures had differential effects on different sections of the working class, and were offset by wage controls - themselves often bypassed through benefits packages - it is difficult not to conclude that these material factors must have contributed to the sense of well-being of a working class whose recent history had been mired in insecurity [15].
In the spiritual or Aspirational sphere, the Nazi regime's emphasis on increasing social mobility and the chances of individual economic improvement converged in the classless Volkgemeinschaft. The rhetoric proclaimed equality of status for all in the common cause of the Nation. This was reinforced by the provision of an array of state-funded social and cultural organisations and programmes which would minister to the needs of the Reich's citizens: holiday schemes, cultural groups, sports and gymnastics, all unified under the `Strength Through Joy' (KDF) banner. The KDF movement, as well as being a means to channel the masses' energies into productive service of the Fatherland [16], can be seen in part as an attempt to replace the class or Trades Union-based cultural structures that had dominated working class life before their criminalisation or repression in 1933. This was to be achieved by the creation of a state-sponsored and crafted replacement for the civil society that had existed before 1933, when working class identity had been largely predicated on the existence of a series of substructures that penetrated all aspects of the working class experience: Trades Unions, sports clubs, co-operatives, cultural organisations, insurance and burial schemes [17].
These substructures, and the working class's allegiance to them, were hugely disrupted by the repressive measures carried out against them in the Gleichschaltung (`co-ordination') after 1933, measures which formed part of the matrix of coercive pressures that influenced working class acceptance of the regime, and which undermined the cultural status quo that had predominated in working class districts. One socialist activist speaks of his incredulity at returning to his home town to find the `red' streets that had been so stubbornly fought over before 1933 emblazoned with Nazi flags [18]. The monopoly of state power and the threats of violence and repression were critical here, since they had been made tangible through repeated raids, prosecutions, and beatings [19]. Once the structures of working class life - which had affected "the whole of everyday life in the working class social environment" [20] - had been destroyed or made prohibitively dangerous, it becomes questionable to what extent the further deployment of state repression and violence was necessary to enforce consent, or at least conformity.
One conditioning factor which overarches all of those discussed above relates to the uniformity or diversity of attitudes that inhere within a social group and within the individual consciousness. Each member of the working class was an individual and as such would hold a variety of beliefs which they adhered to to a greater or lesser extent. Similarly, when we consider behaviour - in this case, acceptance or rejection of the regime - we must bear in mind the issue of compartmentalisation, whereby attitudes regarding one aspect of our lives can be dissonant from or contradictory to attitudes that are held in relation to other spheres of our existence. Thus it would be quite conceivable for somebody to generally disapprove of the Nazi regime whilst embracing some facets of its ideas or practices. Likewise, people could generally approve of the regime whilst dissenting from specific policies. In assuming that disapproval in one sphere implies disapproval in all others we ride roughshod over the complexities of identity and of our roles as social actors. Here we should rather speak of "the splitting of life into distinct separate realms. Partial dissent vis a vis Nazi policies is quite compatible with consent in other areas" [21].
What interpretations of the apparent acceptance of the Nazi regime are possible?
At the crudest materialist level, we might argue that the lack of resistance to the regime is indicative of the working class being `bought off' by the relative material gains from the economic resurgence after 1932. Another monocausal interpretation would be that the working class was cowed into submission by state repression and officially-sanctioned terror.
A third view could be that dissent and opposition was channelled into alternative forms of protest, since the mechanisms by which industrial unrest and class conflict had previously been managed had been removed. In this view, the working class need not necessarily have accepted the regime - they just had no viable way of making their opposition overt. A parallel explanation is one of `depoliticisation' where, given the repressive regime and the inability to express dissent in traditional forms, individuals retreated into an apolitical world centred on the family and the self.
Even the exponent of multi-causal explanations must commit themselves on the relative merits of the various factors that they invoke. I would suggest that, despite the disorienting and unpalatable effects of anti-working class legislation and activity, enough members of the working class did sufficiently well under the Nazis - especially in comparison with what came before - to make the judgement that the status quo was preferable to the hazards and uncertainties of active dissent or resistance. The manner in which dissent was channelled into a grumbling undertone, and the "retreat into the atmosphere of solidarity in small, intimate groups within the working class environment" [22], indicate to this writer that where the working class did not embrace Nazism - and some clearly did - there was a broad-based general acceptance of the regime, however grudging and unenthusiastic that acceptance may have been.
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Craig, Gordon A. Germany 1866 - 1945 OUP, 1981
Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler's Willing Execuioners Little, Brown,
Grunberger, Richard A Social History of the Third Reich Pelican, 1971
Herbert, Ulrich Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of the Third Reich, in
Life in the Third Reich, ed. Richard Bessell OUP, 1987
Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship Edward Arnold, 1993
Mason, Tim The Worker's Opposition in Nazi Germany, in
History Workshop Journal #11 (Spring 1981)
Noakes, J.
and
Pridham, G. Nazism 1919 - 1945: Volume 1 -
The Rise to Power 1919 - 1934 Exeter UP, 1984
Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany Penguin, 1989
[1] Daniel J Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Little Brown, 1996), passim, and esp. Chh. 6 - 9
[2] see Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866 - 1945 (OUP, 1981), pp.619 - 625
[3] figures derived from Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany (Penguin, 1989), p. 101
[4] ibid., p. 103
[5] 1935 figures, from J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism 1919 - 1945 Volume 1: The Rise to Power 1919 - 1934, pp. 81 - 87
[6] This `glass half-full or half-empty?' conundrum highlights an important methodological issue: in expecting or even desiring to find dissent we reveal our conscious or unconscious bias.
[7] Noakes and Pridham, p. 81; Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich (Pelican, 1971), p. 250
[8] see Tim Mason, The Workers' Opposition in Nazi Germany, in History Workshop Journal #11, passim
[9] this account is derived from Mason, passim
[10] Mason, p. 128
[11] Kershaw, pp. 165 - 6
[12] ibid., p. 166
[13] these analytical categories are from Grunberger, p. 239
[14] Craig, p. 620
[15] ibid., Part XVIII, Ch. III; Ulrich Herbert, Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of the Third Reich, in Richard Bessell (ed.), Life in the Third Reich (OUP, 1987), passim
[16] One of the KDF ideologues, Ingenieur Arnhold, said: "The problem of modern human efficiency is to make the tremendous… [amount of physical and mental energy that people have in their free time] available for the production of goods." (In Grunberger, p. 254)
[17] Peukert, Ch. 7, passim
[18] Peukert, p. 105
[19] ibid., Ch. 7, passim
[20] ibid., p. 102
[21] Herbert, p. 108
[22] Peukert, p. 110