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Title: Hitler: A Side We Never See
Source:
Down With Jugears
URL Source: http://downwithjugears.blogspot.com ... /hitler-side-we-never-see.html
Published: Jan 19, 2007
Author: The Old Man
Post Date: 2008-05-06 14:01:52 by X-15
Keywords: None
Views: 153
Comments: 5
It seems we owe Hitler for many of our "labor" comforts we enjoy today. i.e. a 40 hour week, overtime, holiday pay and so on. Never learned this in school, did you? The substantial tariffs imposed on the sale of German goods abroad had sharply curtailed the nation's ability to export her products. Under obligation to pay gigantic sums to their conquerors, the Germans had paid out billions upon billions. Then, bled dry, they were forced to seek recourse to enormous loans from abroad, from the United States in particular. This indebtedness had completed their destruction and, in 1929, precipitated Germany into a terrifying financial crisis. Yet the Reich wasn't a factory of 100 or 200 workers, but a nation of 65 million citizens crushed under the imposed burdens of the Treaty of Versailles, by industrial stagnation, by frightful unemployment, and by a gut-wrenching misery shared by the entire people. To accomplish his great goal, he (Hitler) would need to reestablish the equilibrium of the social classes within the context of a regenerated community, free his nation from foreign hegemony, and restructure its geographic unity. In the eyes of the capitalists, money was the sole active element in the flourishing of a country's economy. To Hitler's way of thinking, that conception was radically wrong: capital, on the contrary, was only an instrument. Work was the essential element: man's endeavor, man's honor, blood, muscles and soul. Hitler wanted not just to put an end to the class struggle, but to reestablish the priority of the human being, in justice and respect, as the principal factor in production. "The people," Hitler declared, "were not put here on earth for the sake of the economy, and the economy doesn't exist for the sake of capital. On the contrary, capital is meant to serve the economy, and the economy in turn to serve the people." Stresemann, even as he was dying, was the only Weimar leader who had seriously attempted to pry away the foreign talons from the flesh of the German people. No politician had ever spoken of the rights of workers with such faith and such force, or had laid out in such clear terms the social plan he pledged to carry out on behalf of the common people. Hitler regarded labor as the true source of national wealth. Hitler's tremendous social achievement in putting Germany's six million unemployed back to work is seldom acknowledged today. Although it was much more than a transitory achievement, "democratic" historians routinely dismiss it in just a few lines. Since 1945, not a single objective scholarly study has been devoted to this highly significant, indeed unprecedented, historical phenomenon. Similarly neglected is the body of sweeping reforms that dramatically changed the condition of the worker in Germany. Factories were transformed from gloomy caverns to spacious and healthy work centers, with natural lighting, surrounded by gardens and playing fields. Hundreds of thousands of attractive houses were built for working class families. A policy of several weeks of paid vacation was introduced, along with week and holiday trips by land and sea. A wide-ranging program of physical and cultural education for young workers was established, with the world's best system of technical training. The Third Reich's social security and workers' health insurance system was the world's most modern and complete. This remarkable record of social achievement is routinely hushed up today because it is embarrasses those who uphold the orthodox view of the Third Reich. Otherwise, readers might begin to think that perhaps Hitler was the greatest social builder of the twentieth century. Because Hitler's program of social reform was a crucially important - indeed, essential -- part of his life work, a realization of this fact might induce people to view Hitler with new eyes. Not surprisingly, therefore, all this is passed over in silence. Most historians insist on treating Hitler and the Third Reich simplistically, as part of a Manichaean morality play of good versus evil. Nevertheless, restoring work and bread to millions of unemployed who had been living in misery for years; restructuring industrial life; conceiving and establishing an organization for the effective defense and betterment of the nation's millions of wage earners; creating a new bureaucracy and judicial system that guaranteed the civic rights of each member of the national community, while simultaneously holding each person to his or her responsibilities as a German citizen: this organic body of reforms was part of a single, comprehensive plan, which Hitler had conceived and worked out years earlier. Generous loans, amortizable in ten years, were granted to newly married couples so they could buy their own homes. At the birth of each child, a fourth of the debt was cancelled. Four children, at the normal rate of a new arrival every two and a half years, sufficed to cancel the entire loan debt. Equally effective social measures were taken in behalf of farmers, who had the lowest incomes. In 1933 alone 17,611 new farm houses were built, each of them surrounded by a parcel of land one thousand square meters in size. Within three years, Hitler would build 91,000 such farmhouses. The rental for such dwellings could not legally exceed a modest share of the farmer's income. This unprecedented endowment of land and housing was only one feature of a revolution that soon dramatically improved the living standards of the Reich's rural population. Under Hitler, every factory employee had the legal right to paid vacation. Previously, paid vacations had not normally exceed four or five days, and nearly half of the younger workers had no vacation time at all. If anything, Hitler favored younger workers; the youngest workers received more generous vacations. This was humane and made sense: a young person has more need of rest and fresh air to develop his maturing strength and vigor. Thus, they enjoyed a full 18 days of paid vacation per year Hitler introduced the standard forty-hour work week in Europe. As for overtime work, it was now compensated, as nowhere else in the continent at the time, at an increased pay rate. And with the eight-hour work day now the norm, overtime work became more readily available. In another innovation, work breaks were made longer: two hours each day, allowing greater opportunity for workers to relax, and to make use of the playing fields that large industries were now required to provide. Whereas a worker's right to job security had been virtually non-existent, now an employee could no longer be dismissed at the sole discretion of the employer. Hitler saw to it that workers' rights were spelled out and enforced. Henceforth, an employer had to give four weeks notice before firing an employee, who then had up to two months to appeal the dismissal. Dismissals could also be annulled by the "Courts of Social Honor" (Ehrengerichte). By the end of 1933, the first effects of Hitler's revolution in the workplace were being felt. Germany had already come a long way from the time when grimy bathrooms and squalid courtyards were the sole sanitary and recreational facilities available to workers. Factories and shops, large and small, were altered or transformed to conform to the strictest standards of cleanliness and hygiene: interiors, so often dark and stifling, were opened up to light; playing fields were constructed; rest areas where workers could unbend during break, were set aside; employee cafeterias and respectable locker rooms were opened. The larger industrial establishments, in addition to providing the normally required conventional sports facilities, were obliged to put in swimming pools! In just three years, these achievements would reach unimagined heights: more than two thousand factories refitted and beautified; 23,000 work premises modernized; 800 buildings designed exclusively for meetings; 1,200 playing fields; 13,000 sanitary facilities; 17,000 cafeterias. To provide affordable vacations for German workers on a hitherto unprecedented scale, Hitler established the "Strength through Joy" program. As a result, hundreds of thousands of workers were now able to make relaxing vacation trips on land and sea each summer. Magnificent cruise ships were built, and special trains brought vacationers to the mountains and the seashore. In just a few years, Germany's working-class tourists would log a distance equivalent to 54 times the circumference of the earth! And thanks to generous state subsidies, the cost to workers of these popular vacation excursions was nearly insignificant. Hitler created the National Labor Service not only to alleviate unemployment, but to bring together, in absolute equality, and in the same uniform, both the sons of millionaires and the sons of the poorest families for several months' common labor and living. All performed the same work, all were subject to the same discipline; they enjoyed the same pleasures and benefited from the same physical and moral development. At the same construction sites and in the same barracks, Germans became conscious of what they had in common, grew to understand one another, and discarded their old prejudices of class and caste. After a hitch in the National Labor Service, a young worker knew that the rich man's son was not a pampered monster, while the young lad of wealthy family knew that the worker's son had no less honor than a nobleman or an heir to riches; they had lived and worked together as comrades. Social hatred was vanishing, and a socially united people was being born. To enable the German public to express its opinion on the occasion of important events of social, national, or international significance, Hitler provided the people a new means of approving or rejecting his own actions as Chancellor: the plebiscite. The articles of the "Plebiscite Law" were brief and clear: The Reich government may ask the people whether or not it approves of a measure planned by or taken by the government. This may also apply to a law. A measure submitted to plebiscite will be considered as established when it receives a simple majority of the votes. This will apply as well to a law modifying the Constitution. If the people approves the measure in question, it will be applied in conformity with article III of the Law for Overcoming the Distress of the People and the Reich. The Reich Interior Ministry is authorized to take all legal and administrative measures necessary to carry out this law. - Berlin, July 14, 1933. The ballot was secret, and the voter was not constrained. No one could have prevented a German from voting no if he wished. And, in fact, a certain number did vote no in every plebiscite. Millions of others could just as easily have done the same. However, the percentage of "No" votes remained remarkably low - usually under ten percent. In the Saar region, where the plebiscite of January 1935 was supervised from start to finish by the Allies, the result was the same as in the rest of the Reich: more than 90 percent voted "Yes" to unification with Hitler's Germany! Hitler had no fear of such secret ballot plebiscites because the German people invariably supported him. Poster's comment: published for interest in labor issues that confronted Germany after WWII and Hitler's approach to a broken nation.
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#1. To: X-15 (#0)
Do we have a *Things That We Were Not Taught in School* ping list?
An informative account of Hitler's treatment of German labor is to be found in Franz Neumann's Behemoth : the Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944. As a labor lawyer and trained economist, émigré Neumann was well qualified to write on the matter. The best recent book on the Nazi economy, Adam Tooze's, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy , confirms Neumann's view of how labor fared under the Nazis. Short conclusion: under the Nazis, labor got very much the shorter end of the stick.
To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.
Yeah, he exploited it for hate and empire and broke it far worse then WW I ever did. Hitler did zero good on this Earth. And even after all these decades, the only good Hitler loving Nazi is a dead one.
In late July and early August 1945, just weeks after the end of the war in Europe, the 28-year-old John F. Kennedy visited war-devastated Germany. Accompanying him on this tour was US Navy Secretary James Forrestal (whom President Truman later appointed as the first Secretary of Defense). Kennedy recorded his experiences and observations in a diary that was not made public until just a few years ago. (It was published under the title Prelude to Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy, Summer 1945 [Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995].) These diary entries show the youthful Kennedy's wide-ranging curiosity and eye for telling detail -- attributes that were also manifest in his two best- selling books, While England Slept (1940) and Profiles in Courage. Earlier in 1945, he had attended the opening session of the United Nations organization in San Francisco, and had visited Britain to view the parliamentary election campaign, covering both events as a journalist for the Hearst newspaper chain. In Berlin, Kennedy noted upon his arrival there on July 28, "The devastation is complete. Unter den Linden [boulevard] and the streets are relatively clear, but there is not a single building which is not gutted. On some of the streets the stench -- sweet and sickish from dead bodies -- is overwhelming." For the Berlin population, he reported, "The basic ration is 1 1/2 pounds a day -- approximately 1,200 calories (2,000 considered by the health authorities for normal diet -- the ration is only 900 calories in Vienna)." Kennedy made several diary references to the ferocity of the Soviet Russian occupation of Germany. "The Russians moved in with such violence at the beginning -- stripping factories and raping women -- that they alienated the German members of the Communistic Party, which had some strength in the factories." "Raping and looting" by Soviet troops "was general," Kennedy also reported. "What they didn't take, they destroyed." Elsewhere he wrote: "The Russians have pretty well plundered the country, have been living off it ... The Russians have been taking all the able-bodied men and women and shipping them away." He also took note of the impact of the devastating British-American air attacks: "According to our naval experts, the bombing of Germany was not effective in stopping their production, and production increased three-fold during 1942-1944." Right until the end, Kennedy also reported, an adequate food distribution was maintained in the German capital: "The feeding in Berlin was extremely well organized, even in the most severe blitz." Ordinary Germans, he reported at another point, "did not realize what was going on in the concentration camps." Kennedy and Forrestal also visited Bremen, an important north German industrial and commercial center, and a major port city. As Kennedy reported, the Russians were not the only occupation forces to carry out wide-scale looting in Germany: "The British had gone into Bremen ahead of us -- and everyone was unanimous in their description of British looting and destruction, which had been very heavy. They had taken everything which at all related to the sea -- ships, small boats, lubricants, machinery, etc." He also noted misdeeds of US troops. "Americans looted town [Bremen] heavily on arrival," he wrote. "People do not seem to realize," he added, "how fortunate they have been in escaping the Russians. As far as looting the homes and the towns, however, the British and Americans have been very guilty." In Bremen, Kennedy wrote, the Germans' diet "is about 1,200 calories -- ours being 4,000." In spite of everything, "none of the [American] officers and men here seem to have any particular hate for the Germans." Kennedy met and spoke with US Navy officials in Bremen. Because he had been commander of an American torpedo boat in the Pacific -- the famous PT-109 -- he had a special interest in the German counterpart -- the Schnellboot or "E boat." After looking into the matter in some detail, Kennedy concluded that the German version was "far superior to our PT boat." Hitler's Place in History After Bremen and Bremerhaven, Kennedy and Forrestal flew to Bavaria, where they visited the town of Berchtesgaden and then drove up to Hitler's mountain retreat, which was "completely gutted, the result of an air attack from 12,000 pound bombs by the R.A.F. [British air force] in an attempt on Hitler's life." They then ascended to Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" lair high in the mountains. Just after this visit, Kennedy wrote a remarkable commentary in his diary, dated August 1, 1945, about Hitler and his place in history: After visiting these places, you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made. Less than a year after this European tour, Kennedy was elected to Congress in Massachusetts, beginning a political career that took him to the White House, and which ended suddenly with his death on November 22, 1963.
And, so did Kennedy ! [Takes one to know one].
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." "the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." Thomas Jefferson
Fascinating information - thanks.
#2. To: X-15 (#0)
#3. To: X-15 (#0)
"Poster's comment: published for interest in labor issues that confronted Germany after WWII and Hitler's approach to a broken nation."
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." Robert F. Kennedy
#4. To: Ferret Mike (#3)
#5. To: Rube Goldberg (#4)
He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.
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