The Himmler Brothers by Himmler Katrin

Author:Himmler, Katrin [Himmler, Katrin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2012-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

11

Educating People to Make Sacrifices for the Community: Gebhard – a Civil Servant’s Career

Since his appointment as head of the technical college, Gebhard had been conspicuous by his absence from the institution. The main reason was his numerous voluntary activities. Beside his work running the college, his officer training and his participation in the NS Teachers’ Association, at the beginning of 1936 he became involved on a voluntary basis with the Party’s Hauptamt für Technik (Central Office for Technology) and the NS Bund Deutscher Technik (NSBDT, the Association for German Technology) that was affiliated to it. Both were run by Fritz Todt, who gave Gebhard great support during his next career moves.

By 1938 the NSBDT had swallowed up almost all of the technological and scientific organizations, including the Federation of German Engineers through which Gebhard had arrived at the Association for Technology. The aim of this centralization was to ensure that the ‘efforts of German technology were in line with the requirements of the people and the state’. Since the announcement of the four-year plan in the autumn of 1936, the Nazi regime had placed increased emphasis on technological innovation, above all in order to increase the production of goods that were important for warfare. Germany was to be armed and capable of waging war within four years.

Initially many engineers were sceptical about this course. The profession had gone through a severe crisis during the last years of the Weimar Republic. The poor employment situation meant their numbers had declined steadily and they continued to do so at first under the Nazis. This was soon to have serious consequences, as the push for increased production in the construction industry and armament technology turned the former surplus of engineers into an acute shortage. But even this did not mean that older engineers, who had often been unemployed during the final years of the Weimar Republic, found work again. In an article published in the Rundschau Deutscher Technik (Review of German Technology) of 23 March 1939 Gebhard, in his function as coordinator of the ‘Bounden Duty Campaign’, appealed to German industry to consider older engineers when making new appointments, since they had mostly become unemployed through no fault of their own during the earlier ‘years of decline’ – under the ‘regime of Jews and Freemasons’, as he added in the October 1942 issue of the magazine Reich und Geist (Reich and Spirit).

The artificially created boom meant that engineers were now in demand and their work was more and more highly regarded. In the period running up to the war there was a growing rapprochement between National Socialism, with its nationalistic, racial ethos, and technology.

In January 1938 Gebhard attended a one-week ‘national training course’ run by the NSBDT in Plassenburg Castle in the north of Bavaria. He was responding to a ‘call-up order of the National Socialist Party’ – failure to attend ‘without good reason’ would result in ‘a summons before the Party court or other disciplinary consequences’. A leaflet sent out in

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