ABSTRACT
In the final years of peace, it was the singular pursuit of power rather than the condition of labour which guided the German Labour Front's activities. And this was against a background of growing labour crisis, notably a shortage of skilled labour, from 1936 onwards. Whatever propaganda means were devised to wed the working classes more firmly to the goals of National Socialism, circumstances conspired to make the power of labour largely independent of them. As shortages of labour in the booming metal, engineering and construction trades became more acute, wage spirals and the pirating of workers by employers became widespread. It was perhaps not surprising, then, that traditional working-class consciousness remained relatively intact, despite the terror of the Gestapo and the SS in industrial districts like the Rhine-Ruhr. Worker opposition became manifest not in organised protest but in suspicion, in individual acts of non-co-operation, and in refusals to accept the Labour Front's propaganda. In the prelude to war, the regime made movements towards a comprehensive direction of the labour market, but the measures were piecemeal and often indecisive, and the popUlation slow to conform. The Labour Front actually got in the way of such efforts and continued to make populist propaganda. It was the inmates of the concentration and work camps who were to become the real labouring class of National Socialism: at once impressed, servile and unremunerated, where 'Kraft durch Freude' was anathema.
