Ein Kampf - Ein Sieg! / One Fight - One Victory!

The Day of the Aryan Awakening

Source of the text: How Hitler Consolidated Power in Germany and Launched A Social Revolution by general Leon Degrellé

 

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„We have the power. Now our gigantic work begins.“

 

Those were Hitler’s words on the night of January 30, 1933, as cheering crowds surged past him, for five long hours, beneath the windows of the Chancellery in Berlin.

 

His political struggle had lasted 14 years. He himself was 43, that is, physically and intellectually at the peak of his powers. He had won over millions of Germans and organized them into Germany’s largest and most dynamic political party, a party girded by a human rampart of hundreds of thousands of storm troopers, three fourths of them members of the working class. He had been extremely shrewd. All but toying with his adversaries, Hitler had, one after another, vanquished them all.

 

Standing there at the window, his arm raised to the delirious throng, he must have known a feeling of triumph. But he seemed almost torpid, absorbed, as if lost in another world.

 

It was a world far removed from the delirium in the street, a world of 65 million citizens who loved him or hated him, but all of whom, from that night on, had become his responsibility. And as he knew - as almost all Germans knew at the of January 1933 - that this was a crushing, an almost desperate responsibility.

 

Seventy years later, few people understand the crisis Germany faced at that time. Today, it’s easy to assume that Germans have always been well-fed and even plump. But the Germans Hitler inherited were virtual skeletons.

 

During the preceding years, a score of „democratic“ governments had come and gone, often in utter confusion. Instead of alleviating the people’s misery, they had increased it, due to their own instability: it was impossible for them to pursue any given plan for more than a year or two. Germany had arrived at a dead end. In just a few years there had been 224,000 suicides - a horrifying figure, bespeaking a state of misery even more horrifying.

 

By the beginning of 1933, the misery of the German people was virtually universal. At least six million unemployed and hungry workers roamed aimlessly through the streets, receiving a pitiful unemployment benefit of less than 42 marks per month. Many of those out of work had families to feed, so that altogether some 20 million Germans, a third of the country’s population, were reduced to trying to survive on about 40 pfennigs per person per day.

 

Unemployment benefits, moreover, were limited to a period of six months. After that came only the meager misery allowance dispensed by the welfare offices.

 

Notwithstanding the gross inadequacy of this assistance, by trying to save the six million unemployed from total destruction, even for just six months, both the state and local branches of the German government saw themselves brought to ruin: in 1932 alone such aid had swallowed up four billion marks, 57 percent of the total tax revenues of the federal government and the regional states. A good many German municipalities were bankrupt.

 

Those still lucky enough to have some kind of job were not much better off. Workers and employees had taken a cut of 25 percent in their wages and salaries. Twenty-one percent of them were earning between 100 and 250 marks per month; 69.2 percent of them, in January of 1933, were being paid less than 1,200 marks annually. No more than about 100,000 Germans, it was estimated, were able to live without financial worries.

 

During the three years before Hitler came to power, total earnings had fallen by more than half, from 23 billion marks to 11 billion. The average per capita income had dropped from 1,187 marks in 1929 to 627 marks, a scarcely tolerable level, in 1932. By January 1933, when Hitler took office, 90 percent of the German people were destitute.

 

No one escaped the strangling effects of the unemployment. The intellectuals were hit as hard as the working class. Of the 135,000 university graduates, 60 percent were without jobs. Only a tiny minority was receiving unemployment benefits.

 

„The others,“ wrote one foreign observer, Marcel Laloire (in his book New Germany), „are dependent on their parents or are sleeping in flophouses. In the daytime they can be seen on the boulevards of Berlin wearing signs on their backs to the effect that they will accept any kind of work.“

 

But there was no longer any kind of work.

 

The same drastic fall-off had hit Germany’s cottage industry, which comprised some four million workers. Its turnover had declined 55 percent, with total sales plunging from 22 billion to 10 billion marks.

 

Hardest hit of all were construction workers; 90 percent of them were unemployed.

 

Farmers, too, had been ruined, crushed by losses amounting to 12 billion marks. Many had been forced to mortgage their homes and their land. In 1932 just the interest on the loans they had incurred due to the crash was equivalent to 20 percent of the value of the agricultural production of the entire country. Those who were no longer able to meet the interest payments saw their farms auctioned off in legal proceedings: in the years 1931-1932, 17,157 farms - with a combined total area of 462,485 hectares - were liquidated in this way.

 

The „democracy“ of Germany’s „Weimar Republic“ (1918 - 1933) had proven utterly ineffective in addressing such flagrant wrongs as this impoverishment of millions of farm workers, even though they were the nation’s most stable and hardest working citizens. Plundered, dispossessed, abandoned: small wonder they heeded Hitler’s call.

 

Their situation on January 30, 1933, was tragic. Like the rest of Germany’s working class, they had been betrayed by their political leaders, reduced to the alternatives of miserable wages, paltry and uncertain benefit payments, or the outright humiliation of begging.

 

Germany’s industries, once renowned everywhere in the world, were no longer prosperous, despite the millions of marks in gratuities that the financial magnates felt obliged to pour into the coffers of the parties in power before each election in order to secure their cooperation. For 14 years the well-blinkered conservatives and Christian democrats of the political center had been feeding at the trough just as greedily as their adversaries of the left.

 

Nor did the bribing of the political parties make them any more capable of coping with the exactions ordered by the Treaty of Versailles. France, in 1923, had effectively seized Germany by the throat with her occupation of the Ruhr industrial region, and in six months had brought the Weimar government to pitiable capitulation. But then, disunited, despising one another, how could these political birds of passage have offered resistance? In just a few months in 1923, seven German governments came and went in swift succession. They had no choice but to submit to the humiliation of Allied control, as well as to the separatist intrigues fomented by Poincaré’s paid agents.

 

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.

 

The big industrialists, for all their fat bribes to the politicians, now found themselves impotent: their factories empty, their workers now living as virtual vagrants, haggard of face, in the dismal nearby working-class districts.

 

Thousands of German factories lay silent, their smokestacks like a forest of dead trees. Many had gone under. Those which survived were operating on a limited basis. Germany’s gross industrial production had fallen by half: from seven billion marks in 1920 to three and a half billion in 1932.

 

The automobile industry provides a perfect example. Germany’s production in 1932 was proportionately only one twelfth that of the United States, and only one fourth that of France: 682,376 cars in Germany (one for each 100 inhabitants) as against 1,855,174 cars in France, even though the latter’s population was 20 million less than Germany’s.

 

Germany had experienced a similar collapse in exports. Her trade surplus had fallen from 2.872 billion marks in 1931 to only 667 millions in 1932 - nearly a 75 percent drop.

 

Overwhelmed by the cessation of payments and the number of current accounts in the red, even Germany’s central bank was disintegrating. Harried by demands for repayment of the foreign loans, on the day of Hitler’s accession to power the Reichsbank had in all only 83 million marks in foreign currency, 64 million of which had already been committed for disbursement on the following day.

 

The astronomical foreign debt, an amount exceeding that of the country’s total exports for three years, was like a lead weight on the back of every German. And there was no possibility of turning to Germany’s domestic financial resources for a solution: banking activities had come virtually to a standstill. That left only taxes.

 

Unfortunately, tax revenues had also fallen sharply. From nine billion marks in 1930, total revenue from taxes had fallen to 7.8 billion in 1931, and then to 6.65 billion in 1932 (with unemployment payments alone taking four billion of that amount).

 

The financial debt burden of regional and local authorities, amounting to billions, had likewise accumulated at a fearful pace. Beset as they were by millions of citizens in need, the municipalities alone owed 6.542 billion in 1928, an amount that had increased to 11.295 billion by 1932. Of this total, 1.668 billion was owed in short-term loans.

 

Any hope of paying off these deficits with new taxes was no longer even imaginable. Taxes had already been increased 45 percent from 1925 to 1931. During the years 1931-1932, under Chancellor Brüning, a Germany of unemployed workers and industrialists with half-dead factories had been hit with 23 „emergency“ decrees. This multiple overtaxing, moreover, had proven to be completely useless, as the „International Bank of Payments“ had clearly foreseen. The agency confirmed in a statement that the tax burden in Germany was already so enormous that it could not be further increased.

 

And so, in one pan of the financial scales: 19 billion in foreign debt plus the same amount in domestic debt. In the other, the Reichsbank’s 83 million marks in foreign currency. It was as if the average German, owing his banker a debt of 6,000 marks, had less than 14 marks in his pocket to pay it.

 

One inevitable consequence of this ever-increasing misery and uncertainty about the future was an abrupt decline in the birthrate. When your household savings are wiped out, and when you fear even greater calamities in the days ahead, you do not risk adding to the number of your dependents.

 

In those days the birth rate was a reliable barometer of a country’s prosperity. A child is a joy, unless you have nothing but a crust of bread to put in its little hand. And that’s just the way it was with hundreds of thousands of German families in 1932.

 

In 1905, during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the birthrate had been 33.4 per one thousand. In 1921 it was only 25.9, and in 1924 it was down to 15.1. By the of 1932, it had fallen to just 14.7 per one thousand.

 

It reached that figure, moreover, thanks only to the higher birth rate in rural areas. In the fifty largest cities of the Reich, there were more deaths than births. In 45 percent of working-class families, there were no births at all in the latter years. The fall in the birthrate was most pronounced in Berlin, which had less than one child per family and only 9.1 births per one thousand. Deaths exceeded the number of new births by 60 percent.

 

In contrast to the birthrate, politicians were flourishing as never before - about the only thing in Germany that was in those disastrous times. From 1919 to 1932, Germany had seen no less than 23 governments come and go, averaging a new one about every seven months. As any sensible person realizes, such constant upheaval in a country’s political leadership negates its power and authority. No one would imagine that any effective work could be carried out in a typical industrial enterprise if the board of directors, the management, management methods, and key personnel were all replaced every eight months. Failure would be certain.

 

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.

 

The many cabinet ministers who followed each other in swift succession for thirteen years - due to petty parliamentary squabbles, partisan demands, and personal ambitions - were unable to achieve anything other than the certain collapse of their chaotic regime of rival parties.

 

Germany’s situation was further aggravated by the unrestrained competition of the 25 regional states, which split up governmental authority into units often in direct opposition to Berlin, thereby incessantly sabotaging what limited power the central Reich government had at that time.

 

Even at the beginning of the First World War (1914-1918), the German Reich included four distinct kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria, Wurttemberg and Saxony), each with its own sovereign, army, flag, titles of nobility, and Great Cross in particolored enamel. In addition, there were six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, and three free cities.

 

Each regional state had its own separate government with parliament, prime minister and cabinet. Altogether they presented a lineup of 59 ministers who, added to the eleven Reich ministers and the 42 senators of the Free Cities, gave the Germans a collection of 112 ministers, each of whom viewed the other with a jaundiced eye at best.

 

In addition, there were between two and three thousand deputies - representing dozens of rival political parties - in the legislatures of the Reich, the 22 states and the three Free Cities.

 

In the Reichstag elections of November 1932 - held just months before Hitler become Chancellor - there were no less than 37 different political parties competing, with a total of 7,000 candidates (14 of them by proxy), all of them frantically seeking a piece of the parliamentary pie. It was most strange: the more discredited the party system became, the more democratic champions there were to be seen gesturing and jostling in their eagerness to climb aboard the gravy train.

 

Honest, dishonest, or piratical, these 112 cabinet ministers and thousands of legislative deputies had converted Germany into a country that was ungovernable. It is incontestable that, by January of 1933, the „system“ politicians had become completely discredited. Their successors would inherit a country in economic, social and political ruins.

 

Today, more than half a century later, in an era when so many are living in abundance, it is hard to believe that the Germany of January 1933 had fallen so low. But for anyone who studies the archives and the relevant documents of that time, there can be no doubt. Not a single figure cited here is invented. By January 1933, Germany was down and bleeding to death.

 

All the previous chancellors who had undertaken to get Germany back on her feet - including Brüning, Papen and Shleiher - had failed. Only a genius or, as some believed, a madman, could revive a nation that had fallen into such a state of complete disarray.

 

When President Franklin Roosevelt was called upon at that same time to resolve a similar crisis in the United States, he had at his disposal immense reserves of gold. Hitler, standing silently at the chancellery window on that evening of January 30, 1933, knew that, on the contrary, his nation’s treasury was empty. No great benefactor would appear to help him out. The elderly Reich President, Paul von Hindenburg, had given him a work sheet of appalling figures of indebtedness.

 

Hitler knew that he would be starting from zero. From less than zero. But he was also confident of his strength of will to create Germany anew - politically, socially, financially, and economically. Now legally and officially in power, he was sure that he could quickly convert that cipher into a Germany more powerful than ever before.

 

„It will be the pride of my life,“ Hitler said upon becoming Chancellor, „if I can say at the end of my days that I won back the German worker and restored him to his rightful place in the Reich.“ He meant that he intended not merely to put men back to work, but to make sure that the worker acquired not just rights, but prestige as well, within the national community.

 

The objective, then, was far greater than merely sing six million unemployed back to work. It was to achieve a total revolution.

 

„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.“

 

The Social Revolution

 

It took several years for a stable social structure to emerge from the French Revolution. The Soviets needed even more time: five years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, hundreds of thousands of Russians were still dying of hunger and disease. In Germany, by contrast, the great machinery was in motion within months, with organization and accomplishment quickly meshing together.

 

The single task of constructing a national highway system that was without parallel in the world might have occupied a government for years. First, the problem had to be studied and assessed. Then, with due consideration for the needs of the population and the economy, the highway system had to be carefully planned it all its particulars.

 

As usual, Hitler had been remarkably farsighted. The concrete highways would be 24 meters in width. They would be spanned by hundreds of bridges and overpasses. To make sure that the entire Autobahn network would be in harmony with the landscape, a great deal of natural rock would be utilized. The artistically planned roadways would come together and diverge as if they were large-scale works of art. The necessary service stations and motor inns would be thoughtfully integrated into the overall scheme, each facility built in harmony with the local landscape and architectural style.

 

The original plan called for 7,000 kilometers of roadway. This projection would later be increased to 10,000, and then, after Austria was reunited with Germany, to 11,000 kilometers.

 

The financial boldness equalled the technical vision. These expressways were toll free, which seemed foolhardy to conservative financiers. But the savings in time and labor, and the dramatic increase in traffic, brought increased tax revenues, notably from gasoline.

 

Germany was thus building for herself not only a vast highway network, but an avenue to economic prosperity.

 

These greatly expanded transport facilities encouraged the development of hundreds of new business enterprises along the new expressways. By eliminating congestion on secondary roads, the new highways stimulated travel by hundreds of thousands of tourists, and with it increased tourism commerce.

 

Even the wages paid out to the men who built the Reichsautobahn network brought considerable indirect benefits. First, they allowed a drastic cut in payments of unemployment benefits, or 25 percent of the total paid in wages. Second, the many workers employed in constructing the expressways - 100,000, and later 150,000 - spent much of the additional 75 percent, which in turn generated increased tax revenues.

 

Hitler’s plan to build thousands of low-cost homes also demanded a vast mobilization of manpower. He had envisioned housing that would be attractive, cozy, and affordable for millions of ordinary German working-class families. He had no intention of continuing to tolerate, as his predecessors had, cramped, ugly „rabbit warren“ housing for the German people. The great barracks-like housing projects on the outskirts of factory towns, packed with cramped families, disgusted him.

 

The greater part of the houses he would build were single story, detached dwellings, with small yards where children could romp, wives could grow vegetable and flower gardens, while the bread-winners could read their newspapers in peace after the day’s work. These single-family homes were built to conform to the architectural styles of the various German regions, retaining as much as possible the charming local variants.

 

Wherever there was no practical alternative to building large apartment complexes, Hitler saw to it that the individual apartments were spacious, airy and enhanced by surrounding lawns and gardens where the children could play safely.

 

The new housing was, of course, built in conformity with the highest standards of public health, a consideration notoriously neglected in previous working-class projects.

 

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.

 

Even before the year 1933 had ended, Hitler had succeeded in building 202,119 housing units. Within four years he would provide the German people with nearly a million and a half (1,458,128) new dwellings!

 

Moreover, workers would no longer be exploited as they had been. A month’s rent for a worker could not exceed 26 marks, or about an eighth of the average wage then. Employees with more substantial salaries paid monthly rents of up to 45 marks maximum.

 

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 owment of land and housing was only one feature of a revolution that soon dramatically improved the living standards of the Reich’s rural population.

 

The great work of national construction rolled along. An additional 100,000 workers quickly found employment in repairing the nation’s secondary roads. Many more were hired to work on canals, dams, drainage and irrigation projects, helping to make fertile some of nation’s most barren regions.

 

Everywhere industry was hiring again, with some firms - like Krupp, IG Farben and the large automobile manufacturers - taking on new workers on a very large scale. As the country became more prosperous, car sales increased by more than 80,000 units in 1933 alone. Employment in the auto industry doubled. Germany was gearing up for full production, with private industry leading the way.

 

The new government lavished every assistance on the private sector, the chief factor in employment as well as production. Hitler almost immediately made available 500 million marks in credits to private business.

 

This start-up assistance given to German industry would repay itself many times over. Soon enough, another two billion marks would be loaned to the most enterprising companies. Nearly half would go into new wages and salaries, saving the treasury an estimated three hundred million marks in unemployment benefits. Added to the hundreds of millions in tax receipts spurred by the business recovery, the state quickly recovered its investment, and more.

 

Hitler’s entire economic policy would be based on the following equation: risk large sums to undertake great public works and to spur the renewal and modernization of industry, then later recover the billions invested through invisible and painless tax revenues. It didn’t take long for Germany to see the results of Hitler’s recovery formula.

 

Economic recovery, as important as it was, nevertheless wasn’t Hitler’s only objective. As he strived to restore full employment, Hitler never lost sight of his goal of creating a organization powerful enough to stand up to capitalist owners and managers, who had shown little concern for the health and welfare of the entire national community.

One of the first labor reforms to benefit the German workers was the establishment of annual paid vacation. The Socialist French Popular Front, in 1936, would make a show of having invented the concept of paid vacation, and stingily at that, only one week per year. But Adolf Hitler originated the idea, and two or three times as generously, from the first month of his coming to power in 1933.

 

Every factory employee from then on would have the legal right to a paid vacation. Until then, in Germany paid holidays where they applied at all did not exceed four or five days, and nearly half the younger workers had no leave entitlement at all. Hitler, on the other hand, favored the younger workers. Vacations were not handed out blindly, and the youngest workers were granted time off more generously. It was a humane action; a young person has more need of rest and fresh air for the development of his strength and vigor just coming into maturity. Basic vacation time was twelve days, and then from age 25 on it went up to 18 days. After ten years with the company, workers got 21 days, three times what the French socialists would grant the workers of their country in 1936.

 

These figures may have been surpassed in the more than half a century since then, but in 1933 they far exceeded European norms. As for overtime hours, they no longer were paid, as they were everywhere else in Europe at that time, at just the regular hourly rate. The work day itself had been reduced to a tolerable norm of eight hours, since the forty-hour week as well, in Europe, was first initiated by Hitler. And beyond that legal limit, each additional hour had to be paid at a considerably increased rate. As another innovation, work breaks were made longer; two hours every day in order to let the worker relax and to make use of the playing fields that the large industries were required to provide.

Dismissal of an employee was no longer left as before the sole discretion of the employer. In that era, workers’ rights to job security were non-existent. Hitler saw to it that those rights were strictly spelled out. The employer had to announce any dismissal four weeks in advance. The employee then had a period of up to two months in which to lodge a protest. The dismissal could also be annulled by the Honor of Work Tribunal. What was the Honor of Work Tribunal? Also called the Tribunal of Social Honor, it was the third of the three great elements or layers of protection and defense that were to the benefit of every German worker. The first was the Council of Trust. The second was the Labor Commission.

 

The Council of Trust was charged with attending to the establishment and the development of a real community spirit between management and labor. „In any business enterprise“, the Reich law stated, „the employer and head of the enterprise, the employees and workers, personnel of the enterprise, shall work jointly towards the goal of the enterprise and the common good of the nation.“

 

Neither would any longer be the victim of the other-not the worker facing the arbitrariness of the employer nor the employer facing the blackmail of strikes for political purposes. Article 35 of the Reich labor law stated that: „Every member of an Aryan enterprise community shall assume the responsibilities required by his position in the said common enterprise.“ In other words, at the head of the company or the enterprise would be a living, breathing executive in charge, not a moneybags with unconditional power. „The interest of the community may require that an incapable or unworthy employer be relieved of his duties“

 

The employer would no longer be inaccessible and all-powerful, authoritatively determining the conditions of hiring and firing his staff. He, too, would be subject to the workshop regulations, which he would have to respect, exactly as the least of his employees. The law conferred honor and responsibility on the employer only insofar as he merited it.

 

Every business enterprise of 20 or more persons was to have its „Council of Trust“. The two to ten members of this council would be chosen from among the staff by the head of the enterprise. The ordinance of application of 10 March 1934 of the above law further stated: „The staff shall be called upon to decide for or against the established list in a secret vote, and all salaried employees, including apprentices of 21 years of age or older, will take part in the vote. Voting shall be done by putting a number before the names of the candidates in order of preference, or by striking out certain names.“

 

In contrast to the business councils of the preceding régime, the Council of Trust was no longer an instrument of class, but one of teamwork of the classes, composed of delegates of the staff as well as the head of the enterprise. The one could no longer act without the other. Compelled to coordinate their interests, though formerly rivals, they would now cooperate to establish by mutual consent the regulations which were to determine working conditions.

 

Every 30th of April, on the eve of the great national labor holiday, council duties ceased and the councils were renewed, pruning out conservatism or petrifaction and cutting short the arrogance of dignitaries who might have thought themselves beyond criticism.

 

It was up to the enterprise itself to pay a salary to members of the Council of Trust, just as if they were employed in the work area, and „to assume all costs resulting from the regular fulfillment of the duties of the Council“.

 

The second agency that would ensure the orderly development of the new German social system was the institution of the „Workers’ Commissioners“. They would essentially be conciliators and arbitrators. When gears were grinding, they were the ones who would have to apply the grease. They would see to it that the Councils of trust were functioning harmoniously to ensure that regulations of a given business enterprise were being carried out to the letter.

 

They were divided among 13 large districts covering the territory of the Reich. As arbitrators they were not dependent upon either owners or workers. They had total independence in the field. They were appointed by the state, which represented both the interests of everyone in the enterprise and the interests of society at large.

 

In order that their decisions should never be unfounded or arbitrary, they had to rely on the advice of a „Consulting Council of Experts“ which consisted of 18 members selected from various sections of the economy in a representation of sorts of the interests of each territorial district.

 

To ensure still further the objectivity of their arbitration decisions, a third agency was superimposed on the Councils of Trust and the 13 Commissioners, the Tribunal of Social Honor.

 

Thus from 1933 on, the German worker had a system of justice at his disposal that was created especially for him and would adjudicate all grave infractions of the social duties based on the idea of the Aryan enterprise community. Examples of these violations of social honor are cases where the employer, abusing his power, displayed ill will towards his staff or impugned the honor of his subordinates, cases where staff members threatened work harmony by spiteful agitation; the publication by members of the Council of confidential information regarding the enterprise which they became cognizant of in the course of discharging their duties. Thirteen „Tribunes of Social Honor“ were established, corresponding with the thirteen commissions.

 

The presiding judge was not a fanatic; he was a career judge who rose above disputes. Meanwhile the enterprise involved was not left out of the proceedings; the judge was seconded by two assistant judges, one representing the management, another a member of the Council of Trust.

 

This tribunal, the same as any other court of law, had the means of enforcing its decisions. But there were nuances. Decisions could be limited in mild cases to a remonstrance. They could also hit the guilty party with fines of up to 10,000 marks. Other very special sanctions were provided for that were precisely adapted to the social circumstances; change of employment, dismissal of the head of the enterprise or his agent who had failed in his duty. In case of a contested decision, the legal dispute could always be taken up to a Supreme Court seated in Berlin-a fourth level of protection.

 

This was only the end of 1933, and already the first effects could be felt. The factories and shops large and small were reformed or transformed in conformity with the strictest standards of cleanliness and hygiene; the interior areas, so often dilapidated, opened to light; playing fields constructed; rest areas made available where one could converse at one’s ease and relax during rest periods; employee cafeterias; proper dressing rooms.

 

With time, that is to say in three years, those achievements would take on dimensions never before imagined; more than 2,000 factories refitted and beautified; 23,000 work premises modernized; 800 buildings designed exclusively for meetings; 1,200 playing fields; 13,000 sanitary facilities with running water; 17,000 cafeterias. Eight hundred departmental inspectors and 17,300 local inspectors would foster and closely and continuously supervise these renovations and installations.

 

The large industrial establishments moreover had been given the obligation of preparing areas not only suitable for sports activities of all minds, but provided with swimming pools as well. Germany had come a long way from the sinks for washing one’s face and the dead tired workers, grown old before their time, crammed into squalid courtyards during work breaks.

 

In order to ensure the natural development of the working class, physical education courses were instituted for the younger workers; 8,000 such were organized. Technical training would be equally emphasized, with the creation of hundreds of work schools, technical courses and examinations of professional competence, and competitive examinations for the best workers for which large prizes were awarded.

 

To rejuvenate young and old alike, Hitler ordered that a gigantic vacation organization for workers be set up. Hundreds of thousands of workers would be able every summer to relax on and at the sea. Magnificent cruise ships would be built. Special trains would carry vacationers to the mountains and to the seashore. The locomotives that hauled the innumerable worker-tourists in just a few years of travel in Germany would log a distance equivalent to fifty-four times around the world!

 

The cost of these popular excursions was nearly insignificant, thanks to greatly reduced rates authorized by the Reichsbank.

 

The National Labor Service

 

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.

 

From the first months of 1933, his accomplishments were public fact, for all to see. Before end of the year, unemployment in Germany had fallen from more than 6,000,000 to 3,374,000. Thus, 2,627,000 jobs had been created since the previous February, when Hitler began his „gigantic task!“ A simple question: Who in Europe ever achieved similar results in so short a time?

 

Not without reason were the swastika banners waving proudly throughout the working-class districts where, just a year ago, they had been unceremoniously torn down.

Goebbels on the Jews

 

Edited, translated, and introduced by Thomas Dalton, PhD

 

DOWNLOAD THE BOOK IN PDF AND EPUB FORMAT.

 

From the age of 26 until his death in 1945, Joseph Goebbels kept a near-daily diary.  In it he recorded significant events of the day, along with his thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics, most notably the Jewish policy of the Third Reich.  Here we get a detailed and unprecedented look at the attitudes of one of the highest-ranking men in Nazi Germany. 

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As such, these entries have a profound effect on our understanding of the Holocaust.  Nowhere in the diary does Goebbels discuss any Hitler order to kill the Jews, nor is there any reference to extermination camps, gas chambers, or systematic mass-murder.  Goebbels acknowledges that Jews did indeed die by the thousands; but the range and scope of killings evidently fall far short of the claimed figure of 6 million.

 

This book contains, for the first time, every significant diary entry relating to the Jews or Jewish policy.  There are 178 such entries in all, in both English and German original.  Entries are covered in chronological order, along with additional commentary and contextual remarks.  Also included are partial or full citations of 10 major essays by Goebbels on the Jews, which bring important clarity to our understanding of his views.

 

What emerges is a picture of an intelligent and highly-educated man who wanted the best for his German people, and who therefore had to grapple with what he saw as the primary threat to their well-being – the Jews.

What Happened to Jews Not Gassed in the Aktion Reinhardt Camps?

Source: https://codoh.com/library/document/what-happened-jews-not-gassed-aktion-reinhardt-cam/en/

 

by John Wear

Published: 2023-01-20

 

Establishment historians state that all Jews sent to the Aktion Reinhardt camps of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor in Poland were exterminated. It is claimed that a handful of strong young Jews were temporarily spared to keep the camps running. All other Jews sent to the Aktion Reinhardt camps are claimed to have been immediately gassed upon arrival without registration.[1]

 

In his book Holocaust, historian Peter Longerich states that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the Aktion Reinhardt camps by the end of 1942. Longerich bases his statement on the fact that the Höfle telegram shows that this many Jews had been sent by then to the Aktion Reinhardt camps. Longerich assumes that every Jew sent to the Aktion Reinhardt camps was murdered.[2]

 

I have written an article explaining why the Aktion Reinhardt camps were transit camps rather than extermination camps.[3] I have been asked:

 

“If the Aktion Reinhardt camps were transit camps, where did the Jews go if they were not gassed at these camps? Why isn’t there a mass of documentation showing that Jews were shipped to other locations outside of the Aktion Reinhardt camps? Why haven’t any Jewish survivors of the Aktion Reinhardt camps testified that they survived these camps and were transported to the East? Why haven’t German perpetrators and witnesses testified that Jews were transited east from the Aktion Reinhardt camps?”

 

This article answers these questions.

 

Historical Context

 

The reason why documentation does not exist proving that Jews were transited out of the Aktion Reinhardt camps to the East can be explained by examining the historical context. The following questions and answers are relevant:

1.      Who won World War II? Answer: The Allies.

2.      Who controlled all of the documentation after the war? Answer: The Allies.

3.      Who claimed that Germany had a policy of genocide against the Jews? Answer: The Allies.

4.      Who could have destroyed the documentation relating to what happened to Jews after the war? Answer: The Allies.

 

The Soviet Union took control of Poland and the documentation related to the Aktion Reinhardt camps. We know that the Soviet Union engaged in many lies and deceptions concerning World War II. One of the best examples is the three witnesses at Nuremberg who testified that Germany was responsible for the mass execution of Polish officers at Katyn. Today everybody agrees that the Soviet Union and not Germany was responsible for the Katyn Forest massacres.[4]

 

Another example of Soviet deception is that the Soviets hid information that would enable an outsider to construct the reality of what was happening militarily in the Soviet Union at the beginning of Germany’s invasion on June 22, 1941. Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet military intelligence operative who defected to the United Kingdom in 1978, gained access to closed Soviet archives while doing a research paper at the Soviet Army Academy. Suvorov discovered that the Soviet version of World War II history is a lie, and that it conceals the Soviet Union’s responsibility for starting the war. The Red Army in June 1941 was, at the time, the largest and best equipped army in the history of the world. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was made to prevent the Soviets from conquering all of Europe.[5]

 

The Soviets also lied about the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek in Poland. A Soviet-Polish committee concluded in August 1944 that at least five homicidal gas chambers operated in Majdanek. The documents at Majdanek prove, however, that the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek were delousing chambers built only for sanitary purposes.[6]

 

The Soviet archives have documented numerous criminal acts by the Soviet government. For example, the Soviet archives show that Stalin, Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich ordered the execution of 38,679 of their own army officers, poets, writers and other people in 1937 and 1938. These documents provide irrefutable proof of the executions of Soviet citizens ordered by these Soviet leaders.[7]

 

The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin also engaged in numerous additional criminal acts, including the mass murder of many millions of its own citizens. Destroying the documentation related to transports of Jews from the Aktion Reinhardt camps would be extremely easy and totally consistent with the criminal nature of the Soviet government.

 

The American military could also not be trusted to honestly report and disclose any documents that it discovered after World War II. The United States conducted a program of genocide against the German people after the war. This includes the mass starvation and murder of hundreds of thousands of German POWs, the expulsion of approximately 15 million Germans from their homes in eastern Germany, and the intentional starvation of millions of resident Germans.[8] Any nation that committed such atrocious criminal acts would not hesitate to hide or destroy documents that disprove the official Holocaust story.

 

Jewish Survivors

 

The question is often asked: Why haven’t any Jewish survivors of the Aktion Reinhardt camps testified that they survived these camps and were transported to the East? My answer is that Jews who publicly dispute the so-called Holocaust have been subject to physical threats, persecution, and harassment.

 

For example, American Holocaust revisionist David Cole, whose parents are both Jewish, was very effective in the 1990s in promulgating revisionist viewpoints. He was so effective that the Jewish Defense League threatened him into recanting his views. In January 1998, Cole changed his name to David Stein to protect himself, and he became publicly known as a right-wing Hollywood Republican. In May 2013, David Cole was exposed by a former friend and is now using his original name again.[9] Hopefully, his First Amendment right to free speech will be respected in the future.

 

Joseph G. Burg was a Jewish author of several books who testified at the 1988 Ernst Zündel trial in Toronto. Burg testified that he spoke to hundreds of people who had serviced and operated the crematoria, but he could not find anyone who had operated homicidal gas chambers. He said that the crematoria had been established for hygienic purposes as a result of typhus and other diseases. Burg also testified that he attended the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and met Ilya Ehrenburg, who had visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as a Jewish publisher who had been interned in Auschwitz for several years. Both Ehrenburg and the Jewish publisher said they did not see any homicidal gas chambers while they were at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[10]

 

Burg further testified that the German people, not just the Nazis, had been falsely blamed and defamed. He had frequently discussed the subject of German restitution with Zündel. If the Holocaust hadn’t been invented, in Burg’s opinion the Germans wouldn’t be paying restitution and, he pointed out, “they are paying.” He dealt with the subject of restitution in his book Guilt and Fate, which Zündel read in the 1960s. Burg testified that the reason for the continuation of war crimes trials was to prove to everybody that the Germans, even the ones born in America and Canada, were to be blamed for the murdering and gassing of Jews.[11]

 

Burg testified that he had suffered personally for publishing books and documentaries expressing his views on the “Holocaust.”[12] He was reportedly beaten by thugs from the Jewish Defense League, and was denied burial in the Munich Jewish cemetery.[13] Since Jews have been threatened and persecuted for challenging the official Holocaust narrative, Jewish survivors of the Aktion Reinhardt camps transported to the East would not want to publicly express what happened to them. It has never been safe for them to do so.

 

German Witnesses

 

Since Auschwitz-Birkenau was the original focus of the Holocaust story, a few Germans who had been at Auschwitz-Birkenau developed the courage to speak out. Thies Christophersen, for example, supervised about 300 workers, many of them Jewish, at Auschwitz from January to December 1944. On numerous occasions during this period, he visited Birkenau where allegedly hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed to death. In a memoir first published in Germany in 1973, The Auschwitz Lie, Christophersen wrote that during the time he was at Auschwitz he did not notice the slightest evidence of mass gassings. In March 1988, at the Ernst Zündel trial in Toronto, he also successfully answered numerous pointed questions by the prosecuting attorney about his experiences at Auschwitz.[14]

 

After The Auschwitz Lie was published, Christophersen received thousands of letters and calls. He wrote regarding these letters and calls:[15]

 

Many of those who contacted me can confirm my statements, but are afraid to do so publicly. Some of those are SS men who were brutally mistreated and even tortured in Allied captivity. I also immediately contacted those who claimed to know more about mass gassings. My experiences were precisely the same as those of French professor Paul Rassinier. I have not found any eyewitnesses. Instead, people would tell me that they knew someone who knew someone else, who talked about it. In most cases the alleged eyewitnesses had died. Other supposed eyewitnesses would quickly begin to stammer and stutter when I asked a few precise questions. Even Simon Wiesenthal had to finally admit before a Frankfurt district court that he was actually never in Auschwitz. All of the reports I have heard about are contradictory. Everyone seemed to tell a different story about the gas chambers. They couldn’t even agree about where they were supposed to have been located. This is also true of the so-called scholarly literature, which is full of contradictions.

 

Another eyewitness who did not see any evidence of genocide of the Jews is Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich. Dr. Stäglich, a German judge, visited Auschwitz several times during the Second World War as a German orderly officer of an Anti-aircraft Detachment. Dr. Stäglich published an account of his visits to Auschwitz in which he stated:

 

“On none of these visits did I see gassing installations, crematoria, instruments of torture, or similar horrors.”

 

Stäglich was emphatic that he never saw a German policy of genocide against the Jews.[16]

 

The historical blackout forces sought to intimidate German eyewitnesses from writing about their observations in the German concentration camps. Thus, after Thies Christophersen published The Auschwitz Lie in 1973, he was charged with “popular incitement,” “contempt against the state,” and defamation of the Jews. Christophersen spent a year in prison even though the charge of popular incitement was eventually dropped. All Christophersen had done was to write about his experiences while he was working at Auschwitz in 1944.[17]

 

Wilhelm Stäglich’s public challenge to the official version of life at Auschwitz brought forth severe reprisals from the German government. Stäglich was forced to resign his job as a judge in Hamburg, his health having been affected by a harassment campaign against him. German authorities also attempted to deprive Stäglich of his pension, eventually settling on a 20% reduction in his pension over a five-year period. Finally, in a crowning absurdity, Stäglich was deprived of the doctoral degree he had earned at the University of Göttingen in 1951.[18]

 

Prematurely retired, Stäglich worked for several years on an extensive study of the evidence supposedly substantiating systematic murder by gassing at Auschwitz. The book resulting from his study, Der Auschwitz Mythos, disputes the various “proofs” offered for the Auschwitz myth, and is a damning analysis of the postwar trials staged by the Allies. The publication of Der Auschwitz Mythos in West Germany in 1979 caused the defenders of the Holocaust story to censor Stäglich’s book. Nevertheless, all but seven of the 10,000 copies of the first edition of Der Auschwitz Mythos had been sold by the time the book was ordered seized by the German government.[19]

 

Germany soon passed laws after the publication of Stäglich’s book making it a felony to dispute any aspect of the Holocaust story. Similar laws were eventually passed in Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, and the European Union.[20] Such laws make it a felony for anyone to speak out against any aspect of the so-called Holocaust, including the transport of Jews from the Aktion Reinhardt camps to the East. It is a felony for Germans to do so.

 

Jew Transited to the East

 

Germar Rudolf has found an interesting case of a Jew transited to the East from Treblinka. Rudolf writes:[21]

 

Jean-Marie Boisdefeu has documented an interesting case he stumbled over while skimming Yad Vashem’s database of Holocaust victims. This case, too, is based on a memorial book published by government authorities, in this case of Germany. It concerns the Berlin Jew Siegmund Rothstein, born in 1867, who was first deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto for elderly Jews in August 1942. Barely a month later, however, on September 26, he was deported to Treblinka at the age of 75. But that was not his end at all, because the German authorities found life signs of him further east, as they finally determined that Rothstein died in Minsk, the capital city of Belarus, some 240 miles (286 km) east of Treblinka. I doubt 75-year-old Mr. Rothstein jumped off the train prior to arriving at Treblinka and ran all the way to German-occupied Minsk. Hence, he must have traveled there by train. I also doubt that the German authorities reserved a train just for him or put just him on a military train going to Minsk. Rather, he must have made that journey on a deportation train together with hundreds or thousands of fellow deportees from Theresienstadt.

 

Boisdefeu states that none of the thousands of Jews deported from Theresienstadt is listed in the German memorial book as having been killed at Treblinka, but that they all are listed with a variety of different locations where they either died or were last heard of and then went missing.

 

This case, too, indicates that thousands of Jews seem to have been deported to “the East” with Treblinka as a transit station. As a result, Treblinka must indeed have had the logistics to temporarily house, feed, and clean hundreds, if not thousands of individuals for short periods of time. Among other things, it most likely did have a very real shower facility for that very purpose.

 

Conclusion

 

Germar Rudolf writes:

 

As far as I know, no one has done any thorough, systematic research trying to locate more individual cases of Jews transited through Treblinka, Sobibór or Bełżec to other places using the data available in published sources, victim and witness databases, etc. ….Revisionists, on the other hand, have so far lacked the human, monetary, logistical and temporal resources to undertake such research on the grand scale it would require. So, in this case as well, the evidence keeps deteriorating, as memories fade, documents decay and survivors die.”[22]

 

Hopefully, someone will do this research in the future. For now, we have one known Jew who was transited to the East from Treblinka.

 

Defenders of the Holocaust story will probably still claim that there would be a massive amount of documentary evidence if Jews were transited from the Aktion Reinhardt camps to the East. Such claims ignore the fact that the documentation of transports from the Aktion Reinhardt camps could have been easily destroyed by the Allies. These claims also ignore the fact that Jewish and German witnesses have never been free to express what they saw and experienced without being subject to severe reprisals.

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Endnotes

 

[1] Graf, Jürgen, “David Irving and the Aktion Reinhardt Camps,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009.

 

[2] Longerich, Peter, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 340.

 

[3] Wear, John, “What Happened to Jews Sent to the Aktion Reinhardt Camps,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2020.

 

[4] Conot, Robert E., Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper & Row, 1983, p. 454; de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, Lincoln: 1990, pp. 230-235.

 

[5] Suvorov, Viktor, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008, Introduction, pp. xv-xix.

 

[6] Mattogno, Carlo, “The Gas Chambers of Majdanek,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, pp. 414-415.

 

[7] Bacque, James, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II, 3^rd edition, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011, p. li.

 

[8] Wear, John, “The Genocide of the German People,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2019.

 

[9] Cole, David, Republican Party Animal, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2014.

 

[10] Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, pp. 259-260.

 

[11] Ibid., pp. 261-262.

 

[12] Ibid., p. 262.

 

[13] http://revisionists.com/revisionists/burg.html.

 

[14] Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, pp. 170-175.

 

[15] Christophersen, Thies, “Reflections on Auschwitz and West German Justice,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 1985, p. 118.

 

[16] Stäglich, Wilhelm, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p. 293.

 

[17] Christophersen, Thies, “Reflections on Auschwitz and West German Justice,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 1985, p. 117.

 

[18] Stäglich, Wilhelm, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, 1990, pp. vii-viii, 292

 

[19] Ibid., p. viii.

 

[20] Thorn, Victor, The Holocaust Hoax Exposed: Debunking the 20^th Century’s Biggest Lie, Washington, D.C.: The Barnes Review, 2012, p. 2 of Foreword.

 

[21] Rudolf, Germar, “One Survivor, One Single Survivor!,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2017.

 

[22] Ibid.