Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (99 page)

Hitler never offered an opinion about television, whose development was encouraged after 1933, but as a gadget enthusiast, he is likely to have been interested in it. “I openly admit that I’m a fool for technology,” he said in February 1942. “Anyone who comes to me with some surprising technological innovation will have an advantage.”
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Goebbels, who recognised early on the potential of the new medium, kept him apprised about the progress being made in developing television. The propaganda minister repeatedly noted in his diary that television had a “great future” and that people were on the threshold of “revolutionary innovations.”
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In 1935, the first “television parlours” were established. But the technology was primitive, and there were not many programmes to watch. A mass-produced television comparable to the “people’s receiver” was a long way off, even if the
Westdeutscher Beobachter
newspaper prophesied in a report on the Radio Trade Fair in 1938 that television would soon be as commonplace as radio.
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The Nazis were less successful with another
Volksprodukt
, the Volkswagen. As an automobile fanatic, the mass motorisation of German society was an ideal close to Hitler’s heart. Just as the radio industry had succeeded in making an affordable “people’s receiver,” Hitler proclaimed at the International Motor Show in early March 1934, the automobile industry should do its part “to build a car that will attract a million new customers.”
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Hitler did not use the term, but the
Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten
was hardly putting words in his mouth when it ran the headline: “Create the German Volkswagen!”
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The price for the new vehicle was supposed to be less than 1,000 reichsmarks—a sum that most carmakers felt was far too low to be profitable. Ferdinand Porsche, whom Hitler greatly respected and defended against resistance from the automotive industry, was commissioned to design the vehicle. At the 1936 International Motor Show, Hitler told carmakers that the automobile had to go from being a “luxury item for the few to a practical item for all.” He would see the Volkswagen project through with “uncompromising determination,” Hitler announced, and he had no doubt that the ingenious Porsche would bring the “costs for procuring, running and maintaining the vehicle into an acceptable relation with the income of the broad masses of our people.”
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But the Reich Association of the Automobile Industry remained sceptical, so Hitler transferred responsibility for the project to Ley’s German Labour Front. In late May 1937, the “Society for the Preparation for the German Volkswagen” was founded, and that summer it was decided to base the main factory near the town of Fallersleben.
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When laying the foundation stone on 26 May 1938, Hitler once again aimed a barb at critics who had argued that it was impossible to produce an affordable motor vehicle for the masses. “I hate the word ‘impossible,’ ” Hitler declared. “It has always been a mark of cowardly people, who do not dare to realise great ambitions.” Hitler revealed that the new vehicle would be called the “Strength through Joy Car” and announced that he would build both “the most massive German automobile factory” and a “model German workers’ city.”
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The public response was extraordinary. Many Germans greeted the announcement of a car for the people as “a great, pleasant surprise,” an SPD observer reported in April 1939. “A veritable ‘Strength through Joy’ psychosis has arisen. For a long time, the ‘Strength through Joy Car’ was one of the main topics of conversation among all social classes in Germany.” The idea of an automobile for the masses temporarily pushed aside all domestic and international concerns. “The politician who promises everyone a car is, if the masses believe his promises, a man of the masses. As far as the ‘Strength through Joy Car’ is concerned, the German people believe Hitler’s announcements.”
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To help people purchase the car, the “Strength through Joy” organisation set up a savings plan that had potential customers putting aside a minimum of 5 reichsmarks a month towards the 990 reichsmark price of the car. By late 1939, 270,000 people had signed on, and by the end of the war that number had risen to 340,000. But only 5 per cent of them came from the working classes. And they never got their cars. During the war, the Volkswagen factory mainly produced jeeps for the Wehrmacht.
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The gap between propaganda and reality was even more marked in the social welfare institution the National Socialists considered the epitome of a functioning ethnic-popular community: the “Winter Relief.” In the summer of 1933, Hitler announced his intention to found a welfare programme for the needy. Private welfare organisations had already run a Winter Relief for those requiring help in the late Weimar Republic, but it had not been much of a success.
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The Nazi regime approached the project with far greater élan. Under the slogan “Fighting Hunger and Cold,” the government wanted to show that it was serious about its principle of “communal before individual benefit.” Erich Hilgenfeldt, the Reich administrator of the National Socialist People’s Welfare, the largest mass organisation after the German Labour Front, was charged with setting up the new entity. On 13 September 1933, Hitler and Goebbels opened the first Winter Relief agency to great fanfare. With this measure, Hitler announced, he wanted to prove “that this ethnic-popular community is not just an empty concept, but is truly something alive.” “International Marxist solidarity” had been broken, he added, so that it could be replaced with “the national solidarity of the German people.”
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A satisfied Goebbels later noted: “Our action against hunger and cold has made a huge impression.”
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The first call for donations succeeded in raising 358 million reichsmarks—a figure that would be bettered year on year until it reached 680 million reichsmarks in 1939–40. In a speech about the Winter Relief in 1937, Hitler called it the “largest social welfare organisation of all time.”
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Members of almost all Nazi organisations worked as volunteers, collecting money street to street and door to door and selling badges and pins. On the first Sunday in December, the Day of National Solidarity, prominent representatives of the regime also took part. For Goebbels, who collected money in front of the luxury Hotel Adlon in Berlin, these occasions were “popular festivals.” “Unbelievable,” he wrote.

Tens of thousands. A celebration and hullabaloo that was impossible to ignore. I was almost crushed to death. Twice I had to flee inside the hotel. The marvellous people of Berlin. They gave and gave. Most generously the poor. I got tears in my eyes…Reported to the Führer that evening…A huge triumph. I filled up 42 collection cans.
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On every first Sunday between October and March, the regime appealed to Germans to eat only stew and donate the money they saved to the Winter Relief. Hitler used his entire repertoire to make this sacrifice seem palatable to his “ethnic comrades”:

And even if others say: You know, I’d love to take part in Stew Sunday, but I have constant stomach trouble, and I don’t see the point, since I’ll donate ten pfennigs anyway. [We say:] no, my dear friend, we set it all up deliberately. On purpose. Especially for you who doesn’t see the point, it is useful for us to point you back at least once in the direction of your people, to the millions of your ethnic comrades, who would be happy to eat nothing all winter but the stew that you eat perhaps once a month.
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Only stews were served at Sunday lunches in the Chancellery, and those at the table were called upon to donate money as well. “The number of guests shrank to two or three,” Albert Speer recalled, “which led Hitler to talk sarcastically about some of his associates’ willingness to make sacrifices.”
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But the Winter Relief was a “voluntary” charity organisation in name only. Workers had to tolerate contributions—10 per cent of their income taxes from 1935—being directly deducted from their wages. Those who refused to donate could count on being sanctioned. In November 1935, a farmer in northern Bavaria who had declared that he had no extra money for the Winter Relief received a sharp rebuke from the local Nazi chapter, accusing him of being “unwilling to feel like a member of the German ethnic-popular community.” He was threatened, should he not change his behaviour, with being brought to “where enemies of the state and parasites on the people are usually taken.”
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In the long run, the public grew disgruntled with being constantly called upon to make sacrifices and approached by collectors. Charity drives in the streets and door to door, one SPD observer reported in December 1935, had taken on the character of “organised highway robbery.” By January 1938, another observer wrote, they had “practically become a levy that no one can avoid.”
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Rumours also began to circulate that donations were not truly going to the needy. People joked that the abbreviation for the Winter Relief, WHV (
Winterhilfswerk
) actually stood for
Wir hungen weiter
(we continue to starve) or
Waffenhilfswerk
(Weapons Assistance Fund).
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There was some justification for the idea that the Winter Relief helped finance Hitler’s plans for war. The putative charity helped the Nazi regime throttle its expenditures for social welfare programmes and invest the money saved in arms. The phrase “socialism in deeds,” which Hitler and his vassals used to describe the Winter Relief, could hardly be taken at face value.

The same applied to Hitler’s promise that within the ethnic-popular community every German would enjoy the same chances to better himself, so that in the end the best and brightest would rise to positions of leadership. The central task of government leadership, Hitler declared in his closing address at the Nuremberg rally in 1934, had to be to create the conditions for the “most gifted minds to be deservedly advantaged regardless of origin, titles, class and wealth.”
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In an interview with Louis P. Lochner, he said that he agreed with the American idea of not “reducing everyone to the same level,” but rather maintaining the “ladder principle.” “Everyone must get the chance to climb the ladder,” he declared.
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In early 1937, during an afternoon walk with Goebbels on the Obersalzberg, Hitler elaborated on his vision of the Nazi society of the future. Afterwards Goebbels noted: “The way to rise up must be available for everyone. Not bound to exams, but performance…The misery of testing must be done away with everywhere. A hierarchy of performance has to be created. Strictly organised. Wealth to be concentrated there. True socialism means clearing the way for the capable.”
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In his monologues in his military headquarters during the Second World War, Hitler would repeatedly revisit the idea of “a clear path for the capable.” The decisive thing, he asserted, was to ensure “that the gates were open for all gifted people.” In order to do that, Hitler added, Germany would have to eradicate its overdependence on “evaluations and pieces of paper.” He went on: “In my movement, I myself have had great experiences in the highest positions. I have the highest civil servants who are agricultural workers and have continued to prove themselves.” Performance, Hitler said, should be the only qualification for military promotion. “If a person has the stuff to excel, I don’t look at whether he comes from a proletarian background,” Hitler explained, “nor do I prevent children of military families from proving their worth once more.”
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But Hitler’s egalitarian rhetoric was one thing, and social reality in the Third Reich another. On the one hand, members of previously disadvantaged social classes had better chances to work their way up the social ladder. The NSDAP and its subordinate organisations in particular, with their gigantic apparatus and the rapidly expanding armed forces after the reintroduction of compulsory military service, offered a host of new, well-paid posts. The promise that performance would outweigh social background and class especially appealed to the younger generation, whose career prospects had looked so bleak prior to 1933. The chance for young university graduates to advance their careers quickly and even occupy leading positions stimulated their desire to achieve and unleashed considerable social energy. The opportunity for upward social mobility accounted for a large amount of the Nazi Party’s attractiveness as a “modernising” force.
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Still, none of that altered the basic structure of German society. Hitler was by no means the social revolutionary, as the odd historian has claimed.
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Class hurdles and barriers were lowered, but they still existed, and by no means was there full equality of opportunity in the Third Reich. Nazi propaganda, however, was remarkably successful in communicating a “feeling of social equality,” and this alone reinforced Hitler’s perceived role as a messianic saviour and strengthened Germans’ emotional attachment to his regime.
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