ABSTRACT
This chapter provides provides the context for the success in preventing the unionization not only of the rural workers east of the Elbe but also of the transport workers and junior officials in the large Reich and state public services, and for the extension of a powerful effective police and military deterrent force. The nationalized industries of the Reich and the states were out-and-out strongholds of the repression of union agitation. And in the last decades before the war the Prussian Ministry of the Interior used all the indirect means at its disposal to repress and check union influence, by giving support to the 'yellow' labour movements and purging the veterans' associations of those members who refused to leave the Free Trade Unions. In Imperial Germany every employer could prohibit his employees from joining certain trade unions.
