1939 by Frederick Taylor

Author:Frederick Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

SEVEN

June/July 1939

‘Fine, Fine, Fine. Blue and Sunshine Everywhere’

The muffled but insistent rumours of war over Danzig did not seem to harm bookings for the German Labour Front’s KdF (‘Strength Through Joy’) tours, home or abroad, in the first half of 1939. After more than a year of hysterical propaganda, tension and fear, followed then by peaceful victory for the Führer, Hitler’s people had grown somewhat inured to danger. Germans had, perhaps, come to assume that the wizard in the Reich Chancellery would always manage to pull off another stroke of magic and gain yet more territory for the country without provoking a new apocalypse.

Over the course of 1939, 140,000 ‘racial comrades’ were privileged to take part in KdF’s programme of overseas cruises. Many millions more went on subsidized domestic trips of various kinds – to the seaside, the forests, the mountains, to picturesque towns and villages; the list of possibilities was long. Just a few years earlier, trips away from home had been, for millions, an improbable dream; in the Weimar era, there was no legal minimum entitlement to paid annual leave, which had accordingly varied, sometimes dramatically, from workplace to workplace. A survey in 1933 of the 42,000 workers at Siemens’s giant plants in the capital revealed that 70 per cent had never spent any of their free time outside Berlin.1 When the Nazi regime declared that German workers would be entitled to two to three weeks’ paid Erholungsurlaub (relaxation leave), the way was all at once open for the recently founded (November 1933) leisure subdivision of the German Labour Front, KdF, to start offering travel and vacation possibilities alongside its other ‘after-work’ activities such as sports clubs, popular libraries, keep-fit clubs and the like.

Both the new paid vacation ordinances and the regime’s sponsorship of mass tourism were shrewd propaganda moves, compensating as they did for the loss of trade union and collective bargaining rights under the repressive labour laws introduced early in 1934. The KdF vacation offerings were a good part of the reason why, whatever their initial hostile attitudes and continuing gripes about low pay and long hours, millions of workers gradually found themselves inclined to reach an accommodation with the Nazi system. Even in the Sopade reports, the balance was more than positive for the regime when it came to KdF. ‘Yes, the state never offered us things like this before, in those days we never got out of our old neighbourhoods,’ said one respondent. Another: ‘Today you can see what use our trade union dues are put to.’ ‘Women especially,’ another reporter observed, ‘talk for months about the wonderful trips and thereby spread enthusiasm to those around them.’2

Then a teenager in Berlin, Rudolf Urbahn later admitted that KdF had worked its magic on him:

After Hitler’s seizure of power, at first we got the pleasant sides of it. After three years there was near-full employment instead of mass unemployment, which probably all of us thought the most important thing. Seen as a particular achievement was the

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