The Workers' Opposition in Nazi Germany 


By Tim Mason 
History Workshop Journal # 11, Spring 1981


I want to begin with a distinction - the distinction between the political 
resistance of the German working class to Nazi rule, and what I want to call the 
workers opposition. 
Resistance in this sense comprised only the clearly politically self-conscious 
behaviour of the adherents of persecuted organisations -the illegal, 
conspiratorial activities of those groups and individuals, who sought to weaken 
or overthrow the Nazi dictatorship in the name of Social Democracy, Communism, 
or the trade union movement; political activity, that is, which was 
characterized by a general and basic rejection of, and challenge to National 
Socialist rule. 
However, the political role of the working class in the Third Reich was not 
confined to this heroic and tragic underground struggle. Alongside the resilient 
agitation and organisation of the illegal groups, economic class conflict 
re-emerged in Germany on a broad front after 1936. This took forms which were 
not clearly political in character, as far as the demonstrable motives of the 
workers who took part were concerned. Indeed, in many cases it is not possible 
to detect in the sources any evidence at all of conscious political 
considerations among them. Further, this struggle for the basic economic 
interests of the working class does not appear to have been organised in any 
way. It manifested itself through spontaneous strikes, through the exercise of 
collective pressure on employers and on Nazi organisations, through the most 
various acts of defiance against work-place rules and governmental decrees, 
through slow-downs in production, the taking of sick-leave, demonstrations of 
discontent, etc. 
This refusal of the working class fully to subordinate itself to the Nazi 
system, can be termed opposition: opposition which exploited the contradictions 
within the capitalist economic order and within the dictatorship, and heightened 
these contradictions. It occupied the grey area on the margins of fascist 
legality. It posed a massive, but not a fundamental principled challenge to the 
regime. 
This distinction between opposition, and resistance in the working class is not 
a matter of the pursuit of analytical clarity for its own sake. The distinction 
has a real basis in the facts of the working-class experience, which is itself 
of central importance to any discussion of the theme: for, the effective 
separation of the political resistance groups from their class was a decisive 
success for the regime of police terror in the Third Reich. The powers of the 
Gestapo meant that political resistance had above all to be secret . (The only 
exception were the funerals of resisters who died under interrogation or 'while 
trying to escape'. Comrades and friends of the dead person assembled at the 
graveside, and the Gestapo just watched.) Class conflict in industry was, on the 
other hand, in all its forms, necessarily public - public in the sense that a 
slow-down, for example, or demands for better working conditions, were 
immediately registered by employers and by government agencies; indeed, after 
1938 such behaviour was increasingly likely to attract the attention of the 
Gestapo itself. 
It was, I think, in the first instance for these reasons, that the members of 
underground political groups did not take part in the class conflicts in 
industry - had they done so, they would have lost their cover, and thus have set 
their political work severely at risk. It is arguable, further, that this 
separation of resistance groups from their class was further accentuated by the 
character of German Communism after 1928: communist resistance groups were the 
most activistic of all, but their illegal work was marked by the overwhelming 
importance to it of ideological factors and of organisational loyalties. Before 
1933 the roots of the KPD in the industrial working class were not far-flung and 
they were deep only in some places; thereafter, its underground struggle seems 
to have drawn little inspiration from class conflict in the workplace. 
Thus the distinction between resistance and opposition is not imposed by the 
historian in hindsight, but derives from the actual situation of the working 
class under Nazi rule. This is brought out most clearly in the reports by the 
Gestapo, by the party's German Labour Front and by the state labour 
administration on discontent and conflicts in industry. These organisations 
always acted on the supposition that, behind every strike, etc., stood a 
communist 'wire-puller' or a Marxist 'agitator'. Despite their brutal methods of 
interrogation, however, the police were rarely able to prove that this was the 
case, and on these rare occasions, they usually discovered individual 
ex-members of working-class parties, not underground activists. These findings 
were a cause of considerable doubt and puzzlement to the regime. (2) 
This distinction between resistance and opposition cannot, however, be allowed 
to lead us to the simple conclusion that the workers' opposition was completely 
apolitical. Do the scale and the forms of this opposition tell us anything about 
its specific qualities? What is the meaning of terms like political and 
a-political in respect of the German working class in the Third Reich? In what 
sense can one speak of class conflict in a situation where the class had been 
deprived of the possibility of organising itself and of educating itself 
politically? What determined the behaviour of industrial workers in the years of 
Nazi rule? The theme of the workers' opposition raises all these different 
questions of interpretation, and more. 
In this brief paper it is not possible to go into detail into the institutional 
and economic background to these questions. But two features of the origins and 
establishment of the Nazi dictatorship are of great direct importance for an 
assessment of the workers' opposition. First, it must be strongly emphasized 
that the organisations of the working-class movement were destroyed by force in 
1933. Unlike many middle-class organizations, they were not gradually undermined 
from within, politically outflanked and 'coordinated' by tactical maneuvers. 
Taken as a whole, the German working-class movement had lost surprisingly little 
of its substance in the years of crisis before 1933 -the Nazi party did not 
succeed to a significant extent in subverting the loyalty of members and 
supporters of the parties or the trade unions. Thus in this sector the Third 
Reich began with a massive act of physical destruction and repression. This 
swift and brutal elimination of the working-class movement had many short-term 
advantages to the new regime, but it was bound to leave behind a legacy of deep 
bitterness in the working class - which, moreover, in political and industrial 
terms, already looked back on a long history and a wide experience, and which 
had been on the whole well educated by its organisations. It cannot be stressed 
strongly enough that a very large proportion of the workers involved in the 
opposition of the late 1930s had for years been members or supporters of these 
working-class organisations. Fascist demagoguery could not obliterate what they 
had learned from this activity. 
A second background point: both the political victory of Nazism over the 
working-class movement, and the extraordinary powers which employers gained 
over their own workers through the legislation of 1933-34, were consequences of 
the economic crisis and of mass unemployment. In a vital respect the repression 
of the working class began in the labour market. Alongside and beyond the 
political terror of 1933, the universal fear of unemployment, hunger and 
destitution had a strong disciplining impact on the working class, and this fear 
was systematically played upon. In the first two years of Nazi rule, employers 
and the party could choose who kept or obtained a job. However, this essential 
material basis of the common dictatorial power of the state, the party and 
capital, was inevitably eroded by the regime's policy of rearmament. (3) 
Full employment which resulted from this policy, formed the basic condition for 
the emergence of the workers' opposition, and also gave it one of its most 
obvious forms of expression. Rearmament transformed mass unemployment into a 
labour shortage. This change took place in a labour market which remained 
largely unregulated until mid- 1938, for a worker's freedom to change jobs was, 
from the point of view of employers and the state, an acceptable mechanism for 
guaranteeing the supply of labour to the expanding armaments industry - 
acceptable , as long as it was a matter of re-allocating the unemployed. Soon, 
however, key groups of skilled workers, and shortly, thereafter all wage 
earners, found themselves in a situation in which they could sell their labour 
power to the highest bidder: by the end of 1938 there were 1 million vacancies, 
a million unfilled jobs, in the German economy as a whole. (4) Workers changed 
jobs within the same branch of industry, in order to earn higher wages. 
Job-changing increased to such an extent that in 1938-39 all people in regular 
employment were moving on average once every 12 months. (5) By now, only a small 
part of this movement of labour represented recruitment by the armaments sector 
from other sectors (while the sectors which, were still losing labour, 
especially agriculture, could not afford to do so). Job-changing now appeared 
above all as a major source of disruption in the factories: before a worker 
left, there would be long discussions on the shop-floor; he/she would need time 
to get used to a new job; wages increased; production costs increased still 
faster. Complaints from industry over these conditions became more and more 
numerous, more and more emphatic - a fact which, on its own, admittedly does not 
demonstrate any link between job-changing and workers' opposition. 
This was, however, not a matter of the impersonal, automatic unfolding of the 
laws of supply and demand in the labour market - that sort of thing only happens 
in economics text books. The new possibilities for action had to be recognised 
and used by the workers. This occurred on the one hand through the individual 
worker playing the market and seeking his personal advantage wherever he could 
find it; such modes of action often, if not always, ran counter to the interests 
of industry and the regime, and were frequently associated with defiance of 
regulations and with breach of contract. However, more interesting in the 
context of this paper were actions which rested upon group solidarity among 
workers. From 1936 on, it was widely reported that workers were taking 
collective action in order to lend weight to their demands. Under the conditions 
of growing labour shortage, the handing in of notice was no longer an instrument 
of employer discipline, but rather a lever for those groups of workers who, in 
one way or another, could get together within their firm. Demands for wage 
increases, accompanied by realistic threats of a collective giving of notice, 
became quite frequent. These tactics were very often successful, especially, but 
not exclusively, in the building industry, where smaller and middle-sized firms 
had to reckon with the solidarity of their whole labour force. Firms in the 
glass and wood industries came under the same pressures during 1937; and in 
autumn 1938 the labour administration reported that collective negotiations and 
threats of this kind were growing ever more widespread -despite the general 
lengthening of periods of notice required. Such action by workers was frequently 
successful. 
In many other cases collective pressures from the workers are remarked upon, 
without there being any mention of threats. In the coalmines and in the printing 
and paper industries of the Ruhr, for example, officials of the Labour Front 
found that they had no choice but to make wage demands on behalf of the workers 
- they were not supposed to act as spokesmen but the mood on the shop-floor was 
so solid. The fascist organisation did not have the strength to hold the 
government's line on wage policy at the shop-floor level, and for this reason 
often became the target of informally organised pressures on the part of its 
captive membership. In still further cases the sources give no information 
concerning the specific forms of collective action, but merely remark that 
collective demands were raised. Among these were actions by groups of workers 
which did not have strong traditions of trade union militancy, such as 
agricultural labourers in the northern provinces of Prussia, textile workers 
(men and women) in Hesse and Saxony, and shop-assistants in the retail trade 
who, in the 18 months before the invasion of Poland, sustained a partly 
successful campaign for early closing on Saturdays. (6) 
This type of practical solidarity was not expressly forbidden by the regime. But 
it required a measure of collective independence which was fundamentally 
incompatible with the Nazi system of domination, the destruction of which was 
one of the regime's main goals in domestic policy. It was the solidarity of a 
largely unbroken class consciousness, and it was for that reason that these 
developments were watched so closely by government and party agencies. This 
class consciousness was not merely economic, at least not in the narrowest sense 
of the term. Trade union or social democratic yard-sticks of social justice were 
repeatedly brought forward by groups of workers in conflict situations, and were 
recognised as such by government officials, on whose records we have to rely. 
Thus it was repeatedly remarked upon, that workers were very well informed about 
the overall movements of profits, prices and wages, and could quote the relevant 
figures in support of their demands. The same trained eye for economic 
realities, the same sense of social justice is also apparent in the widespread 
discussions among workers about the continuing high rate of contributions for 
unemployment insurance in the later 1930s when unemployment was disappearing. 
(The government did not have sufficient confidence in its propaganda skills to 
advertise the fact that the money was financing the building of the autobahns!) 
(7) The many rumours which circulated among industrial workers during the later 
1930s also demonstrate the durability and effectiveness of long years of trade 
unions struggles before 1933. Against a background of growing economic 
difficulties and bottlenecks which were obvious to all who worked, there were 
persistent rumours that the government wanted to abolish the 8-hour day, to cut 
wages, to introduce food rationing, and so on. Such rumours represented and fed 
on keen insights into the pattern of economic developments; indeed, in its own 
interest, the government ought to have been acting in accordance with them, but 
before June 1938 it desisted from such measures out of fear of the opposition 
which they would surely arouse."(8) 
Fascist propaganda could not eradicate this sort of class consciousness. Loyalty 
to trade unionism was sometimes explicitly stated. In June 1937 for example the 
great miners' strike of 1889 and its 'allegedly good results' were the subject 
of widespread and lively discussion in the Ruhr coalfields. The previous summer, 
the Ministry of Labour had warned the Nazi press against publishing full reports 
on the sit-in strikes in France. The intention of these reports was to celebrate 
the superiority of the German social order over the degenerate inefficiency of 
divided France. It was observed, however, that the reports were, for quite other 
reasons, attracting 'undesirably strong attention among German industrial 
workers, who did not normally read the Nazi press with much care. The warning 
was repeated in March 1937. (9) 
Strike threats, heated industrial conflicts and actual strikes were in fact not 
infrequent in Germany after 1935. In an important policy document of October 
1936 Ministers noted that strike attempts by skilled workers, in order to gain 
wage increases, were no longer a rarity. (10) A tabulation of strikes has 
recently come to light in the Wiener Library in London. For the 18-month period 
from February 1936 to July 1937 the officials of the Information Office of the 
Labour Front listed 192 strikes and strike-like protests. As a source for 
historians this confidential memorandum has many defects and the list of strikes 
is not even fully complete. But it is the best document that we have to date on 
this important theme, and the strikes which it does tabulate can certainly be 
taken as a large and representative cross-section of those which did take place. 
(11) 
They were nearly all small. In only 6 cases did more than 80 people take part; 
the average was probably around 30. In every case the strike was confined to a 
single workplace, in larger firms to a single department. This brings out 
clearly one particularly important point: police terrorism had robbed the 
working class of its ability to achieve spontaneous active solidarity on all but 
the smallest scale. Without their own organisations, groups of workers in such 
conflicts were heavily isolated from each other. The strikes were also all 
short-lived - the Gestapo, state and party officials were always on the spot the 
same day, often within hours. The strikes all seem to have been about questions 
of wages and working conditions; sometimes specific acts of chicanery by 
employers or by the labour exchanges furnished the occasion. Some strikes were 
defensive, others, it seems, offensive efforts to gain improvements; and there 
are trustworthy references to offensive strikes in other sources from these 
years The tabulation is too sketchy to permit a more substantial analysis, but 
one thing does clearly stand out: in the light of the prohibition on strikes, of 
the permanent repression and surveillance, of the fact that there was no doubt 
that the Gestapo would arrest strikers, it called for a very high degree of 
determination and solidarity to down tools. Over ten strikes per month, spread, 
as they were, over most sectors of the economy, was, also, not a small number. 
And, of course, those groups of workers who almost came out on strike, then 
finally did not, do not appear in the statistics - like those in one firm, for 
example, who all simultaneously began to wear red-rubber washers from beer 
bottles around their jacket buttons. They all asserted that the washers were 
necessary to hold their buttons on. (12) Nothing more seems to have happened, 
but the fact that this incident was recorded shows that the authorities and the 
employers were getting nervous: industrial peace, the great national community 
of effort and all the other self-congratulatory propaganda slogans could not be 
taken for granted. 
One reason for this was the weakness of the Nazi presence on the shop-floor. 
This is brought out with unusual clarity by the report on a strike in a glass 
factory early in 1937. The Nazi spokesmen of the workers, whose task it was to 
deepen the atmosphere of trust in each firm, themselves joined the 150 strikers; 
among these 'Councilors of Trust' were members of the SS and others who had been 
on training courses for the exercise of their office. (13) From the following 
years there are further examples of the predominance on the shop-floor of class 
solidarities over the political loyalties of Nazism. Late in 1938, for instance, 
a supervisor in a large firm was charged with revising (that is, cutting) piece 
rates. He was a member of the Nazi Storm Troopers' Organisation. Some of the men 
whose wages he had to cut were also Storm Troopers, and they told him that he 
must either refuse to do the job, or resign from the SA. Here a Nazi 
organisation and its ideal of comradeship was being firmly used against its 
original purposes. (14) 
That these conflicts in industry were not more severe and more numerous was due 
in some part to the fact that employers increasingly tended to give way to the 
pressure from below: weekly earnings in industry increased rapidly in the 3 
years before the invasion of Poland -on average by around 17 %.15 But it was for 
industry not just a case of giving way to worker pressure. In order to recruit 
additional labour, employers in the large and rapidly expanding armaments sector 
found it necessary to improve wages and working conditions off their own bat; 
necessary, furthermore, to make this connection clear in public. By poaching 
workers from other firms, they helped to publicize the new balance of forces in 
the labour market. They could not act otherwise, for on the one hand the state 
was unwilling to regulate the labour market in their interests, yet on the other 
hand was demanding rapid increases in armaments output. Poaching by means of 
higher wage rates, the offer of supplementary health insurance, cheap canteen 
meals, generous holiday pay, assistance with travel to and from work, bonuses of 
all kinds, Christmas boxes, installments on a Volkswagen etc., could only have 
the effect of raising the workers' consciousness of their own market value - the 
more so, since this competition among firms for workers was not confined to 
inflationary job offers in the daily press, but sometimes took on rather crude 
forms: the football team of a big firm from Magdeburg traveled to Berlin one 
week-end in the autumn of 1936 in order to play a match against the team of 
Rheinmetall-Borsig. The Berlin firm offered its visitors considerably higher 
wages, and they all stayed to work for Borsig. (16) The costs of these policies 
were passed onto the state, in the form of higher prices for armaments and other 
government contracts. From the vantage point of the Reich government, it was 
beginning to look by 1938 as though class conflict in the labour market might be 
collusive as between two parties directly concerned, and as though the only 
certain outcome would be the undermining of the financial system. As one 
well-informed General put it, what was taking place here was "a war of all 
against all.' (17) 
On the whole these employers, money was not very well spent. Higher wages and 
welfare benefits at work did not make workers more contented, or less desirous 
of further material advances for themselves. One Trustee of Labour saw this 
problem clearly at an early stage: wage increases, he reported, 'have not 
improved the mood of the workers; it even seems as if the workers have become 
more dissatisfied'. (18) in many cases it was obvious to all that the 
benevolence of employers was a crudely pragmatic method of securing their labour 
force: bottle-necks in the engineering and machine tools sectors; 
  Even where there has hitherto been little evidence of a genuine sympathy for 
  the social interest of the members of the retinues, the social conscience (of 
  the employers) is now growing proportionately to the increasing shortage of 
  labour. (19) 
Workers were not likely to be impressed by this sort of thing: 
  Armaments firms are falling over themselves to introduce social reforms and 
  welfare amenities. The fact that indiscipline can frequently be observed in 
  precisely these firms, proves that the hoped-for psychological effects (of the 
  welfare measures) on the workers are not taking place, and that even the 
  opposite effects are being achieved. (20) 
These attempts to placate and to bind workers to their firms through concessions 
and fringe benefits lead in to the second part of a consideration of the 
workers' opposition - to the questions of productivity and work-discipline. For, 
according to the official ideology, improvements to working conditions served 
above all the goal of raising productivity: the workers would, so it was 
proclaimed, honour the evidence that industry cared for them - evidence in the 
shape of better lighting, reduction of noise, canteens, health programmes, 
factory sport, etc. - by working harder. Strength through Joy was not just the 
name of the most notorious organisation in this field, it was also a programme. 
The expectation was disappointed. In the late 1930s productivity per head seems 
to have fallen in many branches of industry. Both for industry and for the 
regime this was a decisive issue, for the trend endangered the re-armament drive 
and therewith the whole policy of expansion through war. Despite its importance, 
the problem was never investigated comprehensively or in detail at the time - a 
fact which throws an interesting light on the indifference of the regime to 
modern scientific methods, but which also makes it very difficult for the 
historian to interpret the trend. There is hardly any good statistical evidence. 
The only exception is the coalmines, where per capita productivity fell by 10% 
between 1935 and 1938. (21) Otherwise I only have hard figures from various 
building firms, in which productivity fell by between 9% and 60% in the same 
period In July 1938 an informed estimate put the national fall in productivity 
in the building industry at 20%. At the same time the head of the administration 
in Saxony put the drop in all industries at between 15% and 30%. (22) Beyond 
this there is a very large number of general and impressionistic reports from 
industrialists and from the labour administration, all of which complain about- 
falling output and declining work-effort without putting clear numerical values 
to the complaints. (It is not easy to make such calculations in branches of 
industry where technical changes regularly alter the categories of measurement.) 
The aggregate economic statistics do also point in the direction of a fall in 
productivity, but it is not possible to do precise calculations with them. 
Hoffmann's indices of industrial output divide industry into different branches 
from the categories used for employment figures, but it is noteworthy that these 
indices show a slowing down in the rate of growth of output in most branches in 
the years 1938-39, and stagnation in one or two. (23) Thus it can probably be 
assumed that the problem of productivity was indeed serious, though it is not 
yet possible to say exactly how serious. 
Neither is it possible to give a clear or definitive account of the reasons for 
it. A general fall in productivity can have a variety of different causes: 
shortages of raw materials and spare parts; bad production planning; the wearing 
out of plant; bottle necks in the engineering and machine tools sector; and in 
the mines, the attempt to exploit more difficult seams. Now there is no doubt 
that all of these factors did play a role in Germany in the late 1930s. It was 
recognised in the government and in industry, on all sides, that the hectic 
preparations for war, together with the relatively high level of consumption, 
had led to a general overstraining of the whole economic system. 
However, industrialists and senior civil servants at the time were quite certain 
that by far the most important single factor was declining effort on the part of 
the workers. Their reports and memoranda from the years 1938-39 are full of 
examples of bad work discipline, 'declining work morale' as they called it. The 
source materials give the impression that detailed description of this type of 
behaviour was almost intended to serve in place of the missing productivity 
statistics. Whether or not it could be proved exactly, it was self-evident to 
them that the main problem was 'the human factor'. The workers were simply not 
co-operating. 
By and large, one can probably accept them as descriptively accurate. A degree 
of scepticism is certainly not out of place, for it is not unknown for employers 
to make untrue assertions about their workers! In some cases it is indeed quite 
possible that reports on low productivity were filed in order to blame workers 
for some shortfall or other, for which otherwise the employer himself could have 
been called to account, some managers of armaments firms asserted for example 
that their workers were so tired and dissatisfied that they had deliberately 
prevented the punctual completion of military contracts. (24) However, they 
could have been telling the truth. At this distance in time the story cannot be 
checked. On the whole, the overwhelming number of the complaints, the fact that 
they come from a variety of different sources simultaneously, and the fact that 
individually, they could have been checked at the time by one or another branch 
of the state bureaucracy - are all considerations pointing to their basic 
reliability. And this impression is borne out when we come to examine government 
policy, for the government acted as if they were true. 
Under the polemical umbrella heading 'declining work morale' the holders of 
power in state and industry threw together a rich variety of different modes of 
behaviour. It was widely observed, especially in the mines and the building 
industry, that workers went absent from the job for days on end. They were now 
earning enough to be able to afford it. In a mine in Silesia absenteeism 
increased fivefold in a 12 month period, up to 7% of the labour force; and in 
August and September 1939 20% of the workers were missing from Berlin armaments 
factories on the day after pay day each week; this in a period of war 
conditions. (25) Some employers desisted from imposing the fixed fines for 
absenteeism, lest the attitude of their workers become even more recalcitrant as 
a result. There was a growing refusal to work overtime - the people wanted their 
rest. Bad workmanship and slow working were frequently deplored; workers brought 
pressure to bear on especially diligent colleagues, in order to get them to slow 
down. Drinking at work increased. There were frequent conflicts and quarrels 
with foremen and managers. Carelessness on the job led to accidents and damage 
to machinery, incidents which often looked like industrial sabotage. The 
sickness rate rose rapidly, so that many industrial insurance schemes got into 
the red - and here there was no question that some of this sickness was feigned, 
by people who just wanted to have a few days off. And so on . . . This is no 
more than an extremely compressed sketch of what was a very broad, diffuse and 
varied development. 
What was really at stake in this 'collapse of labour discipline'? Formulating an 
answer is made the more difficult by the fact that those people, whose actions 
are at issue, had every reason to disguise their own motives. Secrecy and deceit 
were among the most important techniques of the art of survival under the Nazi 
dictatorship. Workers who repeatedly went absent without good reason, and were 
then arrested, for example, were not about to tell the Gestapo that they had 
acted in this way because they considered the regime to be criminal, and 
rejected its repression, its exploitation and its war - even if this were true. 
This was the shortest route into the concentration camp. They spoke of being 
over-tired, of having to attend to family problems - which need not have been 
false. 'Everything is disguised today', said the spokesman of one group of 
workers to their employer, 'and thus we have to behave accordingly.' (26) That 
was perhaps the only certain truth. Our sources come entirely from those in 
authority, and are thus difficult to interpret, even when they contain direct or 
indirect quotation from workers. When asked, workers made it clear that they 
knew they were being lied to the whole time. They responded in kind. 
On the basis of their own experience, employers and civil servants constructed 
for themselves two explanations of the problem. First was the hypothesis that 
the labour shortage had by now become so acute that 'inferior human material' 
was being employed on a regular basis in industry, people with physical or 
personality weaknesses which would have normally prevented them from gaining 
such jobs, the 'antisocial elements' in the language of the Gestapo. There may 
have been odd fragments of evidence for this piece of social Darwinist 
speculation, but it could not account for the fact that 'work morale' was often 
especially bad among experienced and well paid skilled and semi-skilled workers. 
The authorities thus tended to fall back on a crude version of the reserve army 
of labour theory, and to see the collapse of discipline as an inevitable, 
mechanical consequence of full employment: from 1938, almost every worker could 
be sure that he or she was irreplaceable, and, if sacked for bad work, sure that 
they could get another job. One foundation of industrial discipline was fear of 
unemployment, so this view ran; since this fear was no longer present, the 
workers were no longer putting themselves out. 
This explanation is clearly too crude and global. The psychology of work, the 
psychology of class is not so simple. After all, even in the years 1938-40, 
pride in craft and pride in achievement did not entirely disappear from German 
industry. However, this is an inadequate rather than a totally misleading 
hypothesis. Full employment was a condition of the development of the workers' 
opposition. And there can be no question that many workers did simply exploit 
the new labour market situation for their own individual and immediate 
advantage. This attitude, in which peace and quiet, personal convenience, 
private needs, amusement and relaxation centrally determined behaviour at work, 
seems from the sources to have been especially widespread among young workers 
and among women workers; and a large proportion of the women who worked in 
industry were also young. In 1939 most workers in these two groups would have 
had little or no conscious experience of the working class movement. 
Furthermore, the education of youth under National Socialism formed an extremely 
bad preparation, with its emphasis on a youth culture of excitement and 
adventure, for the hard routine of the industrial working week; for their part, 
women often had to bear the typical double burden of industrial labour and 
housework, and often gave priority to their households. As far as motives are 
concerned, this side of the decline in work discipline may have been 
a-political. We do not know, but it remains noteworthy that the simple private, 
interests of a large number of workers were coming increasingly into conflict 
with the demands of rearmament and war. 
This point by no means exhausts the subject. 'Bad work discipline' was not just 
an individual matter. Here too, group solidarities were very much in evidence. 
From 1938 on there appear to have been fewer strikes than in the preceding 
years, but the informal collective pressures on employers remained very strong. 
Attempts to enforce a speedup, for example, often met with a resilient 
opposition, which rested on conscious cooperation among the workers affected. 
It also seems most unlikely that the mass absenteeism in certain firms came 
about without mutual understanding among the workers. The same applies to 
refusal to do overtime, and to continuing wage demands. These phenomena seem to 
be something more than 'bad work discipline' - these were new, class-specific 
forms of oppositional behaviour, dependent upon large-scale group solidarities 
and tactically appropriate to a regime of terroristic repression. On the state 
of affairs in some nearby lignite mines the War Economy Inspector in Dresden 
reported laconically: 
  Epidemic of absenteeism. Similarly, insistence upon longer holidays. Threats 
  of dismissal without notice naturally make no impression at all. 
This was March 1939. (28) 
This element of collective self-assertion on the pan of the working class 
becomes the more apparent, if the process of the collapse of work morale is set 
alongside the increasingly severe interventions of the state against the tights 
and interests of industrial labour. For a large part of the bad discipline was 
in fact the direct and conscious expression of resentment against the new 
measures of regimentation. Every new measure occasioned a new wave of 
opposition, and these activities cannot be dismissed as an automatic consequence 
of full employment and economic security. 
This began with the first governmental attempts to restrict the freedom to 
change jobs. Workers felt strongly about this freedom, both in principle, and 
because it was a guarantee of the possibility of financial or professional 
advancement. In an engineering firm, skilled workers reacted to the new 
restrictions in 1937 with a dramatic mime, dragging themselves around the 
shop-floor as though they were chained to their work-place. A group of basket 
makers from Bavaria wanted to take jobs in the building industry, but were 
refused permission by the labour exchange; they all withdrew together from the 
Labour Front and refused to pay their dues. (29). Legal restrictions of this 
kind were extended to cover more and more branches of the economy during 1938, 
and everywhere they met the same resentment. They were regularly and 
systematically subverted by workers, who understood full well how to make their 
employer glad to part with them: bad work and indiscipline were among the main 
methods used in order to force through a desired change of employment, which had 
in the first instance been prohibited. This type of opposition to the new 
restrictions was thus to a considerable degree individualistic and instrumental 
- large numbers of individual workers wanted to take better jobs. The deep 
discontent, however, was general, and the restrictions were a frequent topic of 
bitter criticism. 
But the next two sets of government measures hit whole groups of workers, often 
all the employees of particular firms. From June 1938 on the state attempted to 
prevent further wage increases by use of administrative force and the criminal 
law, and also to force through wage reductions in two main sectors of industry. 
These controls led to further apathy, resignation and bitterness in the working 
class - they were not exactly designed to improve morale! In firms where wages 
were actually reduced there occurred, almost across the board, a fall in output 
- as if, as was observed at the time, workers on time rates wanted to cut their 
productivity by the same sort of amount as their wages had been cut: a striking 
testimony to the durability of trade union solidarities. (30) 
At the same time, the government introduced a scheme of civil conscription, 
whereby it could compel workers to take on particular jobs by force of law; 
conscripts were often separated from their families. Despite the police terror, 
despite the propaganda campaign on behalf of sacrifice for the Fuhrer, Volk and 
Fatherland, etc., this measure also met with strong opposition. In Berlin, wives 
demonstrated at the railway stations as their menfolk were carted off to build 
the Siegfried Line; many conscripts simply failed to appear at their new 
designated place of employment; and the productivity of those who did turn up 
was often so low that many employers after a time decided to make no use of 
their right to request conscripts, and to struggle on against the labour 
shortage on their own, without the assistance offered by the state. Conscript 
labourers also mounted a series of strike actions over their legal status and 
their wages and working conditions. (31) 
Yet all of this opposition was overshadowed by the reaction of workers to the 
war Measures of September 1939. The government ordered further wage cuts and 
more civil conscription; hours of work were lengthened and overtime bonuses 
abolished, paid holidays were suspended. Wage earners lost virtually all their 
remaining rights. The consequence was a massive wave of resentment. Absenteeism 
and refusals to do overtime and week-end shifts increased to such an extent that 
production was seriously disrupted in October. The appeal to the workers' 
patriotism had little effect, although the war was now a shooting war. One 
Secretary of State spoke of 'behaviour which in formal terms amounted to 
sabotage'. The government was forced to give way and to withdraw most of its war 
measures, lest the 'home front' collapse. (32) 
Now it cannot be demonstrated that what occurred in German industry in the first 
weeks of the war amounted to a general rejection of the war by a large section 
of the working class. While it is true that the war was unpopular throughout 
Germany at this time, this interpretation cannot actually be proved from the 
sources. That is to say, we probably cannot speak of resistance in the precise 
sense of the term. But what happened clearly did have a quite different quality 
from 'bad work discipline': it had the quality of a broad denial of co-operation 
by the working class, a denial marked by economic class consciousness in the 
widest sense, and in which the solidarities of the old working-class movement 
were still a driving force. This refusal to co-operate was the exactly 
appropriate method of asserting immediate class interests within the 
dictatorship. More aggressive or decisive actions, the 'riot' or 'rising' which 
Hitler feared, (33) could hardly be brought about in the absence of 
organisations, and would, as everyone knew, have been repressed with ruthless 
brutality. And the denial of co-operation by the working class , a denial marked 
by economic class consciousness in the widest sense was adequate to the 
situation, in that its scale was sufficient to force the government to change 
its social and economic policies within 5-12 weeks. This was no small 
achievement, for the relaxations were at odds with military requirements. 
Taken in the round, the opposition amounted to a new form of class struggle: a 
diffuse, almost wordless conflict, which lacked the rules and procedures for 
the temporary resolution of the issues, lacked the specific partial goals, which 
the existence of independent class organisations impose upon the class 
struggle. It was an unregulated, and seemingly endless trench war, along a badly 
defined, straggling and long front, in which the working class fought with the 
few weapons left to it (the partial withdrawal of labour power), and the 
government, faced with the earlier failure of incentives to produce results, 
could hope only to buy time. It was reduced to a combination of material 
concessions and police terror. 
A few representatives of the ruling groups did see what was at stake. The 
verdict, 'formally speaking, sabotage', I have already quoted. Perhaps a little 
more precise was the term 'passive resistance', which was also occasionally used 
at the time by civil servants. (34) The owner of a tannery in Dresden spoke of a 
'disguised strike', a rather exact formulation. (35) A senior officer of the War 
Economy Staff tried to get behind the disguises by making a trip around the 
factories and mines of the Ruhr in autumn 1938. He was a prudent man and so 
conversed only with workers' spokesmen (presumed Nazi supporters), security 
officers and employers. The opinions, interests and complaints which he noted 
bore, taken together, a fair resemblance to the programme of present day Social 
Democracy - in the whole system of national socialist rule and policies, only 
the person of Hitler seemed to meet with much approval. Workers wanted free 
speech, an honest press and radio, higher real wages, a free labour market with 
the right to change jobs, fewer collections for and fewer demands on their time 
by Nazi organisations, and no war; between the lines a desire for the 
reinstatement of trade unions can be detected.(36) 
To put the problem in this way inside the regime called not only for a degree of 
insight but also for a little courage. For terms like 'disguised strike' pointed 
directly to the failure of National Socialism in its central attempt to build a 
national community which would transcend class conflict. The report on the Ruhr 
workers closed with the words: 'The education of the population as a whole to 
the tasks which will be demanded of it by a total war with all its various 
burdens, this education has by no means been adequately carried out'. That the 
great denial by the workers did indeed carry this political implication was 
indirectly acknowledged by the regime itself: for the repeated warnings to 
workers to turn up on time, to work conscientiously, etc., all brought home to 
them the political, economic and military consequences of their poor work 
morale. Low productivity, it was stressed, meant a direct weakening of the 
German armaments effort, and thus after September 1939 aid to the allies, the 
betrayal of the German soldier. In the general crisis of the first months of 
war, this was not an exaggeration. At the very least, therefore, the denial of 
co-operation by the German working class was politicized from above. Whatever 
the motives of individual workers or groups of workers may have been at first in 
their refusal to put themselves out, whether at first purely private, of a trade 
union order, or secretly political - their attitudes were politicized by the 
regime. They were reproached with a political failure. After repeated warnings 
of this kind, and then threats, every act of absenteeism was at the very least 
in this sense a political act. (37) 
Warnings had little effect. They had to be supplemented. In the summer of 1938 a 
large part of the labour law had effectively been transformed into criminal law: 
some 'slackers' were brought up in court and imprisoned, mainly to encourage the 
rest. (38) 
But this was a cumbersome way of dealing with the problem -soon the Gestapo 
intervened directly, and the apparatus of police terror, with its arbitrary 
arrests and its labour and concentration, camps was unleashed on 'work-shy and 
anti-social' elements. This began before the war. One week after the invasion of 
Poland, Himmler announced demonstratively that a communist had been executed for 
refusing to work. (39). From 1938 on the maintenance of labour discipline 
quickly became a new central area of Gestapo responsibility. It grew with a 
certain necessity alongside the original main task of the Gestapo - the 
persecution of the political and economic organisations of the working class. 
(40) 
Neither resistance nor opposition were able to overthrow the Nazi regime. In the 
event, the opposition probably caused it more trouble than the resistance. The 
regime had to take account of the 'disguised strike', for without efficient 
armaments production there would be no war of expansion. The fact that the 
government gave way on essential points to the workers' opposition in the autumn 
of 1939 probably saved the whole regime from major turmoils and domestic crisis 
in the first winter of World War 11. 
Some historians and social scientists find little surprising, little of interest 
in this chapter in the history of the German working class. Is it not always the 
case, they ask, then and now, in capitalist and in communist systems, that 
workers exploit a favourable labour market for their own purposes? Against this 
very general and rather knowing approach, one must insist upon the importance of 
the specific political context in which the workers' opposition against National 
Socialism developed. Among these particular conditions were 
1. the recent physical destruction of working-class organisations; 
2. the massive repression and exploitation of the working class during the years 
1933-36; 
3. the implausibility, even evident mendacity of Nazi propaganda in the sphere 
of economic and social affairs (Gemeinschaft - the stress on community of 
interests etc.), which seems to have confirmed and intensified the alienation 
of the working class; 
4. the fact that from 1938 the government was obviously steering a course 
towards war in external, and fiercer repression in internal affairs; 
5. the circumstance that the workers' opposition did indeed weaken the 
re-armament and war effort, and was for this reason repressed and thus 
politicized by the regime; 
6. the effects of the omnipresent police terror - this certainly meant that the 
extent and intensity of that opposition which was actually expressed and 
recorded, was considerably less than the sum of resentments, bitterness, and 
hatreds which workers actually carried around with them in the late 1930s. By 
1939 the Gestapo made it prudent to desist from opposition, let alone from 
resistance. 
How significant was the workers' opposition? How many people engaged in 
oppositional activity? How far were they drawing on traditions of the German 
Labour movement? How far did their actions express political antipathy to the 
Nazi regime? These questions of interpretation necessarily remain in part open, 
because we don't know very much about what was going on in the heads of workers 
in these years - less, probably, than at any other time in the history of the 
German working class. The disenfranchisement of this class by National Socialism 
included its disfranchisement before the bar of history: in very large measure 
it lost the possibility of documenting its experience, its situation, its 
consciousness for the future. The dictatorship isolated it from its own future, 
and from us today. 
But on odd occasions the pedantry of the Gestapo does allow the disfranchised to 
speak for themselves. In November 1937 slips of paper were circulating in the 
mining town of Beuthen, Upper Silesia, which bore the motto, 'We are all aryans, 
for we are proletarians'. It is worth reflecting on the angry wit, the daring, 
and the impotence of the author of the comment; on the mindless diligence of the 
police officer who copied it into his notebook, then typed it up and riled his 
report in multiple copies, one of which went to an army staff officer in 
Breslau; on the dutifulness of this officer, who in turn had the motto 
transcribed and forwarded to his superior in Berlin, who preserved the report 
for posterity. (41) 'We are all aryans . - . ' 
But the protest in chalk was wrong. German workers were workers rather than 
proletarians, and that was part of the problem. Who were the German 
proletarians? They were those people who could, in the end or from time to time, 
stand the strain of experiencing the social and political order under which they 
lived as totally inhumane, of experiencing it in all its different guises as the 
enemy. They were those who, at least at some time, were not misled by the 
seductive and threatening appeals to their patriotism, or to their pride in 
their craft skills or their powers of endurance; those who knew, or at some 
point realized, that Hitler was not a magical embodiment of the interests of 
'the German people', whose good intentions were being constantly frustrated by 
his lieutenants; they were those who did not permit themselves to be reconciled 
to the regime by its persistent gestures in the direction of social equality and 
welfare, and those who did not wish to be part of a German master-race, 
supervising an enslaved slave labour force. The proletarians were those whom 
well-grounded fear of torture and execution did not hold back from acts of 
defiance, conspiracy and political solidarity. They were numerous. That they 
were neither numerous nor well organised enough, was in the first instance due 
to the Gestapo and its informers. However, the inability of the German working 
class to mount a massive, open challenge to the Nazi regime, also had something 
to do with the difficulty which, for much of the time, most German workers had 
in experiencing that regime as absolutely intolerable. 
Its capacity to bend a little under the pressure of opposition helped a little 
to draw the sting of resistance, helped to make it that much more difficult to 
feel and to live an active, categorical rejection. If the regime had not bent in 
October/November 1939 there could well have been riotous demonstrations and 
strikes - this matter requires exact and disciplined speculation. Quite as 
difficult to answer is the question: what, early in 1940, were the social and 
political attitudes of those workers whose absenteeism and go-slows had forced 
the government to bend in the previous autumn? We do not know. Some were perhaps 
looking for their next success in a conflict with management and the regime. 
Others were perhaps confirmed in a 'them-us' cynicism: extortion was indeed the 
only legitimate and effective mode of bargaining ... Others again may have felt 
a subjective relief or reconciliation, a sense of partial wrongs being partially 
righted. And some of the workers concerned were certainly in the German Army, 
being trained for the invasion of France. 
The only thing which we today can be sure of, is that no one group of workers 
involved in the non-co-operation of 1939 knew how any other group interpreted 
that experience of conflict. Factual information could not be exchanged; 
motives, intentions and strategies could not be analysed and discussed. This 
particular impotence, instituted and perpetuated by the exactly synchronised 
machineries of terror and propaganda, made it much harder for workers to become 
proletarians. 
This essay was originally a paper at a Ruskin Workshop. It has slowly been 
revised and extended in the fight of the comments of colleagues and of 
discussions in several different seminars and conferences. It is no longer a 
paper, but it is not yet a comprehensive article. I had intended to develop it 
into a more detailed and more analytical article of some 40-50 pages, and have 
worked through some of the additional relevant source materials. But this 
intention has been overtaken both by the opening up of quite new collections of 
source materials in recent years (Gestapo files on individual opponents of the 
regime; records from the lowest levels of the civil administration in Bavaria; 
reports from the social democratic underground to the exile leadership), and by 
the progress of new research projects on particular aspects of the general 
themes of this essay. With the exception of the studies of the Institute for 
Conentemporary History in Munich (the Bavaria project), of Ian Kershaw, 
Manchester, on popular images of Hitler, and of Detlev Peukert, Essen, on the 
working-class-and communist resistance struggles, little of this new work has 
yet been published. Much of it, however, is nearing completion. The following 
list of researchers whose theses and projects will shortly deepen and alter our 
understanding of this terrible chapter in working-class history is not 
exhaustive - but it does show how much interest the subject now commands: Tim 
Ash (St. Antonys College, Oxford); Edward Harrison (University of Salford); 
Gunther Morsch (Technical University, Berlin); Stephen Salter (St. Antonys 
College, Oxford); Annemarie Tröger (Free University, Berlin); Michael Voges 
(Kiel University). Several of these studies take the analysis through to the end 
of the war. The fact that my essay ends in 1940 is not the least of its 
weaknesses. 
This new work has rendered absurd the idea that any article of 40-50 pages on 
the workers' opposition could be comprehensive. The justification for an essay 
on 'work in progress' at this particular time is the hope that it may serve to 
open up a discussion of the central issues of interpretation - a discussion 
which could, perhaps, take place in the pages of History Workshop Journal. 
Further, the importance of the theme is not confined to Germany and does not 
diminish with the end of World War II: different forms of workers' opposition 
and resistance to different kinds of extreme repression urgently need to be 
compared. However informal, such comparisons will define the problems more 
sharply. This discussion seems to be on the intellectual agenda for historians 
on the Left; and the question of opposition and resistance does also have, 
contingently, a certain sad political actuality. 
The notion of making comparisons raises the first of two big problems of 
interpretation about which I am still very unsure. By deliberate implication my 
essay conveys the impression that the workers' opposition in Nazi Germany was 
something of real substance, both in its forms and in its scale. Others, 
however, with an eye perhaps to more recent movements among black workers and 
students in South Africa, or to the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, may find 
it surprising that there were not massive moments of desperate insurgency and 
violent outrage. Did the Nazi regime not merit such moments? Perhaps the 
question should be turned around: why was opposition, as defined above, not more 
spontaneously militant? There are no simple answers on this issue. I am still 
not sure what it is that most needs to be accounted for, the defiance of German 
workers, or their ultimate containment until April/May 1945. Clearly both need 
to be accounted for; at issue is the crucial problem of emphasis. My emphasis 
upon defiance is provisional. Comparisons offer one possibility of clarifying 
this bitterly difficult problem. 
The second uncertainty of interpretation is no less fundamental. In explaining 
the nature and extent of the workers' opposition, I have attached considerable 
significance to the schooling which millions of German wage-earners had gained 
as members of trade unions between 18% and 1933. Many of their actions after 
1933 look like informal trade unionism -the assertion of values and the 
continuation of practices which could no longer be associated with formal 
organisation. (There were some exceptions: the opposition of those groups of 
workers who had probably had no direct experience of trade unions is noted as 
such.) This reading of the sources has been contested by researchers into 19th 
century German labour history. They regard these forms of opposition as typical 
rather of pre than of post-trade union experience and point out correctly that 
it has not yet been proved that the trades which were best organised in the 
1920s were the ones with the highest incidence of collective opposition in the 
1930s. Was the workers' opposition a forcibly induced regression in terms of 
working-class tactics, a retreat into primitive forms of bargaining in which 
sheer resentment was the dominant motive and in which the never-organised 
workers could play a greater role than the ex-union members, precisely because 
they were not weighed down with experience (= caution, sense of order?) of 
formally organised class conflict? I doubt it. But it is a good question. It is 
a question about the quality of the affiliation of German industrial workers to 
their unions in the years 1914-33. How much these trade unions mattered in the 
lives of their members, what they learned from them, are questions which have 
not yet been systematically investigated. There can of course be no general 
answer -conditions varied from place to place, trade to trade, time to time, and 
union membership fluctuated quite violently during these two decades. For the 
moment, however, I am inclined to stick by my provisional impression that the 
skills and social values which informed much (clearly not all) of the workers' 
opposition after 1933 had been produced by the organised working-class movement 
before it was destroyed in that year. A truly pre-trade union workers' 
opposition would perhaps have been more desperate and more violent, less canny. 
But this question, like the preceding one, and several others of lesser 
significance, is wide open. The answers will be plural and complicated. Work is 
in progress. 
Notes: 
I. The assistance and encouragement which Raphael Samuel and Jane Caplan gave me 
in all stages of the work on this essay went beyond the call of normal editorial 
duty. 
2. The division between resistance and opposition was not, of course, absolute. 
In l938 the exiled leadership of the Communist party encouraged underground 
resistance workers to concentrate their word-of-mouth propaganda in the 
factories on day-to-day issues of wages, deductions from pay, working 
conditions, etc. - that is, on the sorts of issues which were often the occasion 
of open opposition by groups of workers. And in 1939 a Communist Party pamphlet, 
'The Ten Commandments', circulated in the Ruhr, advising workers on how to cause 
the maximum trouble in the mines and factories without running too much risk of 
arrest: that is, by raising as many questions as possible with management about 
industrial safety, etc., in order to slow down production. My evidence suggests, 
however, that oppositional forms of behaviour in industry were widespread before 
the KPD adopted this strategy, and were not dependent upon underground 
encouragement for their vitality; further, that underground resistance workers, 
for very good reasons, did not themselves play a prominent role in oppositional 
activities. But there is room for much more research. 
3. For a detailed discussion of these two background points, see T.W.Mason 
Soziaipolifik im Dritten Reich, Opladen, 1977, ch.ll-IV. 
4. Minister of Labour to Lammers, Reich Chancellery, 17 December 
l938,in T.W.Mason, ed., Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft , Opladen, 1975, 
doc.no. 149. 
5. F.Syrup, Hundert Jahre staatlichhe Sozialpolitik, 
ed.,O.Nculoh,Stuttgart,1957, p.423. 
6. The above examples are taken from the very detailed reports of the Trustees 
of Labour (high state officials) which are reprinted in Mason, ed., A 
rbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft. 
7. The files of the Gestapo, the Trustees of Labour and the armed forces' War 
Economy Inspectors contain many references to discontent over this issue in 
1938. For the way in which the insurance funds were In fact used see the 
official Labour Front publication, Deutsche Sozialpolitik 1938, pp.244ff. 
8. Details of the rumours are contained in the reports of the Trustees of Labour 
(see Mason, Arbeiterklasse). In his sociological study of rumours in nazi 
Germany, Der zerredete Widerstand, Dusseldorf, 1970, Franz Dröge persistently 
underestimates the experience and intelligence which was necessary in order to 
generate plausible rumours within the working class. The topic merits further 
analysis. 
9. Reports of the Trustees of Labour in Mason, Arbeiterklasse, doc.no. 41, 30. 
10. Detailed memorandum of Ministries of Labour and Economics on labour policy 
and legislation for the new Four Year Plan, Mason, Arbeiterklasse , doc-no. 3. 
11. The main report is cyclostyled, and is entitled 'Arbeitsniederlegungen', 
Folgell. The file in the Wiener Library also includes one other report by the 
Information Office of the DAF and one number of its bulletin, 'I-Nachrichten', 
both of which contain supplementary information on strikes. 
12. Gestapo LÜneburg, annual report for 1937, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (in future 
HA), R58, file 457. 
13. Trustees' reports, February 1937, Mason, Arbeiterklasse, doc.no. 27. 
14. Trustees' reports, last quarter 1938, Mason, Arbeiterklasse, doc.no. 150. 
15. G.Bry, Wages in Germany 1871-1945, Princeton, 1960, p.243. 
16. War Economy Inspector, Hanover, to W.Stab, 15 September 1936 (appendix), 
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg (in future BA/MA), WiIF5, file 202. The firm 
which lost its team was almost certainly Krupp. 
17. Cf.General Thomas as quoted by B.A.Carroll ,Design for Tota/ War,The Hague 
l968, p.210 (21 October 1939). General Keitel used a very similar phrase with 
specific reference to the economy at a meeting of the Reich Defence Committee, 
15 December 1938, BA/MA, WiIF5, file 560/2. And Goring spoke in the same vein to 
the Reich Defence Council, 18 November 1938, Mason, Arbeiterklasse, doc.no. 152. 
It is important to note that members of the dictatorial elite saw social and 
economic developments in this way at the time. 
18. Trustees' reports, September 1937, Mason, Arbeiterklasse, doc.no. 45. 
19. Trustees' reports, third quarter 1938, Mason, Arbeiterklasse, doc.no. 136. 
21. Mason, Arbeiterklasse, ch.XI 
22. 'Der Deutsche Volkswirt', 22 July 1938; Oberpräisident of Saxony to Ministry 
of Economics, 25 April 1938, HA, R41, file 151. 
23. See W.G.Hoffmann, Der Wachstum der deutschen Volkswirtschaft seit der Mitte 
des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, 1965, pp. 70-5, 346, 354, 362, 
389-95; also Bry, Wages, p.20; and Statistisches Handbuch von Deutschland 
1928-1944, Munich, 1949, ch.Vc. 
24. War Economy lnspector, Berlin, to W.Stab,18 August l939,BA/MA,WOI-8,file282. 
25 War Economy Inspector, Breslau, to W.Stab, 27 July 1939, BA/MA WOI-8, file 
287; and War Economy Inspector, Berlin, to W.Stab, 19 September 1939, BA/MA, 
WOI-8, file 282. 
26. War Economy Inspector, Dresden, to W.Stab, 17 August 1939, BA/MA, WOI-8, 
file 283. 
27. On the contradictions between the nazi ideology of female domesticity and 
the needsof German wartime industry, see T.Mason, 'Women in Nazi Germany, 
1925-1940', in History W-orkshop Journal, I and 2, 1976. 
28. W.Stab, compilation of War Economy Inspectors' reports, 10 March 1939, 
BA/MA. WiIF5, file 176. 
29. Trustees' reports for March and September 1937, Mason, Arbeiterklasse, 
doc.no. 30, 45. 
30. War Economy Inspector, Wiesbaden, to W.Stab, 9 March 1939, BA/MA, WOI-8, 
file 291. 
31. For details see Mason, Arbeiterklasse, ch.Xlll. 
32. 1 have published a brief sketch of this crisis in 'Labour in the Third Reich 
1933-1939'. Past & Present, 33, April 1966. For full documentation see 
Arbeiterklasse, ch.XXI. 
33. See A.Speff , Etinnerungen, Frankfurt/M 1969, pp. 173, 229. 
34. Both Trustees of Labour and War Army Inspectors spoke of the workers' 
opposition as 'passive resistance' in the later 1930s. 
35. War Economy Inspector, Dresden, to W.Stab, 17 August 1939, BA/MA, WOI-8, 
file 283. 
36. War Economy Inspector, Munster, to W.Stab, 3 September 1938, HA/MA, WiIF5, 
file 187. 
37. The files of the personnel department of the (then) IG Farben Film Factory 
at Wolfen give a very detailed picture of this build-up of managerial and 
political pressure against slack discipline', 1939-40. 
38. Criminal prosecutions for indiscipline at work had been made possible by the 
Wage Decree of June 1938. The Trustees acted as prosecutors. In November 1939 
one Trustee had over 1,000 such prosecutions pending in his district- War 
Economy Inspector, Munster, to W-Stab, 22 November 1939, BA/MA, W08, file 
106/17. 
39. W.Shirer, Berlin Diary, London, 1941, entry for 8 September 1939; M.Broszat, 
" The Concentration Camps 1933-1945' in Anatomy of the SS State, (paperback) St. 
Albans, 1970, p.210. 
40. For examples of the rapid growth of Gestapo activity in big industrial 
firms(often at the invitation of management), see W.Stab, compilation of War 
Economy Inspectors Reports, 20 April 1939 (Nuremberg district), BA/MA, WiIF5, 
file 176; and notes by the Hamburg Inspector in November 1939, HA/MA, W08, file 
110/3. 
41. War Economy Inspector, Breslau, to W.Stab, report for November 1937, BA/MA, 
WOI-8, file 265.