The abolition of the trade unions in Germany

At ten o’clock on the morning of 2 May 1933, SA and SS units, together with activists of the National Socialist Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO), simultaneously entered the union buildings, newspaper offices, funds and bank branches of the social democratic “free” trade unions all over Germany. The police did not intervene. The chairman of the General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB), Theodor Leipart, his deputy Peter Graßmann and dozens of other officials were taken into “protective custody”; many were beaten and several were murdered. The unions’ assets were seized. In most cities the operation took little more than an hour. Only the day before, the members of these same unions, at the call of their own leaders, had marched in the Nazi processions for the Day of National Labour. Eight days later the German Labour Front was set up in their place.

The Republic’s strongest organisation

The German trade union movement was one of the most powerful in Europe. The ADGB, linked to social democracy for half a century, had some eight million members in 1920, and it was the ADGB that, by calling a general strike, brought down the Kapp Putsch within four days. Alongside it there were smaller Christian unions, close to the Catholic Centre Party, the liberal Hirsch-Duncker associations and the white-collar federation, the AfA-Bund. During the Great Depression, when unemployment exceeded six million, the unions lost many members and much money – and, above all, their weapon, the strike: it is hard to strike when crowds of unemployed are waiting at the factory gate. Even so, the free unions still had several million members and possessed property, a press, schools and a bank.

After Hitler came to power, some SPD and union activists demanded a general strike, but the ADGB leadership rejected the idea. “Organisation, not demonstration, is the watchword of the hour,” Leipart said on 31 January 1933. After the Reichstag fire, SA squads, appointed as auxiliary police, raided union buildings in many cities, beat activists and carried them off to the first camps. The works council elections of March 1933, however, brought the Nazis defeat. In the Berlin power stations 91 per cent of the workforce voted for free union candidates, and the NSBO won only in some mines and in Krupp works in the Ruhr. On 4 April the government suspended these elections by law and gave the authorities the right to remove council members deemed “enemies of the state”.

The ADGB leadership chose the path of accommodation. In March it assured Hitler that the unions were part of the social order “regardless of the form of the state”, distanced itself from the SPD and praised the new Chancellor’s speeches. The historian Heinrich August Winkler called this a “public act of submission”. In April the leaders of the free, Christian and liberal unions negotiated the creation of a single, non-party umbrella body, and on 28 April agreed its manifesto, full of praise for the “national renewal”. They hoped that in this form the unions would survive. They did not know that the fate of their organisations had already been sealed.

Goebbels’s and Ley’s plan

On 24 March the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, noted in his diary the idea of holding a great festival on 1 May and occupying the union buildings on 2 May. In the spring an Action Committee for the Protection of German Labour was set up in secret. Formally it was headed by the NSDAP’s organisational chief, Robert Ley, but in practice by Reinhold Muchow of the NSBO. On 16 April Adolf Hitler approved the plan. On 21 April Ley sent the Gauleiters an instruction: the operation was to target above all the ADGB and the AfA-Bund, and all chairmen of the individual unions, district secretaries and branch managers of the Bank of Workers, Employees and Civil Servants were to be arrested. Ley ordered “the greatest discipline”. The workers were to be given the impression that the action was directed not against them but against an “outdated system”, and immediately afterwards free rallies were to be organised for them, with assurances that their rights would be “unconditionally protected”.

The immediate prelude was the Day of National Labour. The ADGB called on its members to join the processions and ordered the black-white-red flags of the old Empire to be flown from union buildings. That evening, at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin, Hitler spoke of honouring labour and of the end of class struggle.

2 May

The next day the plan was carried out across Germany almost simultaneously. SA and SS units occupied the buildings, and NSBO activists took over the offices as “commissioners”. Above all they seized files and account books: Ley and Muchow wanted to use them to prove corruption on the part of the union leaders and so give the confiscation of their assets a “legal” justification. Leipart and Graßmann were held in custody, where they were mistreated, and were not released until June. Most of those detained were freed after a few weeks.

Arrests were not the end of it everywhere. In Duisburg, SA men beat four union officials to death in the cellar of the union building. There were victims in other cities too. Telegrams pleading for help, such as the one the local ADGB executive in Kassel sent to President Paul von Hindenburg, went unanswered. On 3 May Goebbels noted with satisfaction that everything had gone smoothly.

Lower-ranking officials and union employees were offered continued employment under NSBO supervision. As a result, on the surface little changed for many members: the offices stayed open and dues were collected as before. That was exactly how the operation had been planned. The other unions concluded that they had no choice. Within a few days the Christian and liberal unions – 239 organisations in all – submitted to the Action Committee. No one resisted. As the British historian Richard J. Evans writes, the mighty German trade union movement vanished overnight.

The German Labour Front

On 10 May 1933, at a congress in Berlin attended by Hitler, the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) was founded, with Ley at its head. It took over the buildings, assets and members of the former unions. On the same day a Berlin court, at the request of the public prosecutor, seized all the SPD’s assets, making use among other things of the files confiscated on 2 May. The Christian unions, which still formally existed, were absorbed at the end of June.

The DAF was not a trade union. It brought together workers and employers alike in the name of the “national community” and conducted no wage negotiations at all. A law of 19 May 1933 abolished collective agreements, and from then on wages and working conditions were set by state-appointed “Trustees of Labour”. The Law for the Organisation of National Labour of 20 January 1934 made the owner the “leader of the enterprise” and the employees his “retinue”. Strikes were banned. Membership of the DAF was formally voluntary but in practice unavoidable: in 1941 the Front had some 25 million members and was the largest organisation in the Third Reich. Its agency Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through Joy”) organised cheap holidays, cruises and concerts for workers, which were meant to make up for their lost rights.

The correct term

Many chronicles state under 2 May 1933 that Hitler “banned the trade unions”. No law or decree was issued that day, however. The unions were not prohibited but seized, and their assets and members were taken over by a Nazi organisation. Formally this happened through “submission” to the Action Committee and subsequent incorporation into the DAF. German historians speak of the “smashing of the trade unions” (Zerschlagung der Gewerkschaften). The effect was the same as a ban: from May 1933 until 1945 there was not a single independent trade union in Germany.

Significance

The smashing of the unions was one of the most important steps in the Gleichschaltung, or “coordination”, of Germany. The unions were the largest social organisation of the Weimar Republic and the SPD’s financial backbone. Ley wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter on 4 May that Marxism in Germany would now lose “its material basis”. A few weeks later the SPD was banned, and the remaining parties dissolved themselves.

Historians still debate why so powerful a movement put up no resistance. They point to unemployment, which had sapped the unions’ strength; to memories of the days when the labour movement had fought for recognition by the state and did not want to give a pretext for repression; to hopes of public works; and to the fact that some workers liked the Nazi slogans about “ennobling labour”. Some union activists, such as Wilhelm Leuschner, later went underground. Leuschner was one of the conspirators of 20 July 1944 and was executed.

For the road to war, what mattered above all was that the regime had rid itself of the only force capable of paralysing the country with a strike. In the years of rearmament the state and the DAF could freeze wages, lengthen working hours and transfer workers to the war industry without fear of organised opposition. During the war the same machinery took millions of forced labourers from occupied Europe, Poland among them, into German factories.