The Day of National Labour

On 1 May 1933 Germany celebrated May Day for the first time as a statutory, paid public holiday. It was not, however, the labour movement’s holiday that the Social Democrats had been seeking since 1919, but a “Day of National Labour” (Feiertag der nationalen Arbeit), devised by the government of Adolf Hitler and stage-managed by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Processions marched under swastika flags all over Germany, and in the evening, at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin, Hitler addressed a crowd that the propaganda put at one and a half million. The trade unions had called on their members to take part in the celebrations. The next morning SA and SS units seized their offices throughout the country.

A holiday with a hidden purpose

Three months after becoming Chancellor, Hitler already held almost all the instruments of power. After the Reichstag fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree had suspended civil rights, the communists were in prisons and camps, and on 23 March the Enabling Act had given the government the right to make laws without parliament. The great workers’ organisations, however, were still intact. The social democratic “free trade unions”, grouped in the General German Trade Union Federation (Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, ADGB), still had several million members. In the works council elections of March 1933 their candidates decisively defeated the Nazi National Socialist Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO) in most workplaces, whereupon on 4 April the government simply suspended the elections.

Hitler regarded the free unions as the movement’s most dangerous opponents and feared they might call a general strike like the one that had brought down the Kapp Putsch in 1920. Goebbels devised a double game. On 24 March he noted in his diary that 1 May must be made a great festival and that on 2 May the union buildings were to be occupied. On 10 April the government announced a law making 1 May a “holiday of national labour” on full pay. This fulfilled one of the oldest demands of the labour movement, which the Weimar parties, out of consideration for their coalition partners, had never carried through. In the spring, in secret, an Action Committee for the Protection of German Labour was set up under the NSDAP’s organisational chief, Robert Ley. On 16 April, at the Obersalzberg, Ley and Goebbels obtained Hitler’s approval for the plan to smash the unions, and on 21 April Ley sent detailed instructions to the Gauleiters.

The ADGB leadership under Theodor Leipart knew nothing of this. Since February it had pursued a policy of accommodation: it distanced itself from the SPD, gave assurances that the unions served the state “whatever its political system”, and hoped to survive that way. In mid-April the ADGB leadership welcomed the new holiday, and in the second half of the month called on members to take part “everywhere” in the celebrations organised by the government. The Christian trade unions, which had previously not observed the “Marxist” May Day, also welcomed it.

The day in Berlin

The celebrations were prepared as the greatest propaganda spectacle Germany had yet seen. In the morning a youth rally was held in the Lustgarten, in front of the Berlin Palace, attended by hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. A choir of 1,200 sang, and speeches were given by Goebbels and by President Paul von Hindenburg, who told the young people that only the discipline and spirit of sacrifice “that had always proved their worth in the German army” would raise a generation capable of meeting the tasks history would set Germany. Hitler then called on the children to give three cheers for the old field marshal. Around midday, at Tempelhof airfield, Hitler and Hindenburg welcomed delegations of workers flown in from every part of the Reich.

The main ceremony took place in the evening on the Tempelhof field. Workers from Berlin factories had to assemble at their plants in the morning and marched to the site in close columns. Civil servants were threatened with dismissal, and in some factories workers’ clocking-in cards were taken away so that it could be checked who had failed to turn up. Yet directors and managers marched in the processions too, to show that in the “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft) there were no longer any classes. The setting was designed by a young architect, Albert Speer: gigantic flags were hung behind the platform and lit by searchlights at night. According to contemporary figures, between one million and one and a half million people gathered on the field. The figure cannot be verified, but it was in any case one of the largest rallies in German history. Many ADGB members also came to Tempelhof, and the chairman of the textile workers’ union marched with his men behind a swastika banner.

The slogan of the day was “Honour labour and respect the worker!”. In a speech broadcast by every radio station in the Reich, Hitler said that for seventy years the Marxists had split the nation into classes, and that it now had to be united above estates and interests. The white-collar worker must not look down on the manual labourer, and every German, “whatever his origins”, should do manual work at least once in his life. This heralded the compulsory Labour Service introduced in 1935. Hitler announced great public works, among them road building, which was to begin that same year, and professed his desire for peace. He ended with something close to a prayer: “Lord, we will not forsake Thee; now bless our struggle for freedom, and thereby our German people and fatherland.” The evening closed with the singing of the anthem and a great firework display. Similar celebrations were held in every city of the Reich. “Flying” counter-demonstrations organised by the now illegal KPD went almost unnoticed.

The impression was enormous, foreigners included. The French ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet, wrote in his memoirs that guests left Tempelhof feeling that “a spirit of reconciliation and unity” had blown over the Third Reich.

On the figures

Some chronicles state that Hindenburg and Hitler appeared together that day before a crowd of 500,000. This is a simplification. The two men did indeed appear together in public, in the morning in the Lustgarten and at midday at Tempelhof airfield. At the evening rally, the main event of the day, it was Hitler who spoke. For that rally, contemporary sources and most studies give a figure of between one million and one and a half million participants. The youth rally in the Lustgarten, by contrast, drew “hundreds of thousands”. All these figures come from Nazi propaganda or from a press already subject to censorship, and should be treated as estimates.

The next day

The reconciliation was a sham. At ten o’clock on the morning of 2 May, SA, SS and NSBO units occupied the ADGB’s union buildings, newspaper offices and banks all over Germany, and Leipart and other union leaders were taken into custody. On 10 May the German Labour Front was founded under Ley, an organisation that brought together workers and employers alike. The trade unions that only the day before had marched at Tempelhof ceased to exist.

The holiday itself remained. A law of 27 February 1934 made 1 May the “national holiday of the German people”, and until the war it was celebrated every year with parades of the SA, the SS, the army and the Hitler Youth, with maypoles decorated with swastikas, popular festivities and a radio address by Hitler. It no longer had anything in common with the old workers’ holiday. After the war 1 May was kept as a day off work in both German states, but now as Labour Day in the traditional sense.

Significance

1 May 1933 was a textbook example of the method the regime used in its first months in power: a combination of seduction and violence. The Nazis appropriated their opponents’ symbol, gave the workers what they had long wanted – a paid day off – and surrounded them with a spectacle that promised an end to class struggle and great public works. A day later they smashed their organisations. The same mixture of promises, propaganda and terror made it possible over the following months to abolish every party except the NSDAP.

It also mattered for the road to war that the labour movement – the only force that in 1920 had been able to paralyse the country with a general strike – ceased to exist as an independent organisation. The public works, motorways and labour service announced at Tempelhof, and above all rearmament, eliminated unemployment within a few years and won the regime millions of supporters. When Germany went to war in 1939, the workers no longer had either unions or parties that could say “no”, and the national community extolled on 1 May 1933 had become a nation under arms.