Instant Hitler

"His political career began in 1919 when he became Member No. 7 of the midget German Labor Party," Time magazine wrote of their 1938 Man of the Year. "Discovering his powers of oratory, Hitler soon became the party's leader..."

"Workers of the mind and fist! Vote for the front soldier Adolf Hitler!" (Collection here.)

Last week in New Jersey:

In an explosive tirade that fired up some demonstrators and embarrassed others, a national union leader went nuclear on Gov. Chris Christie, calling him a Nazi over and over.

"Welcome to Nazi Germany," Christopher Shelton, a top official at the Communication Workers of America, told thousands of protesters today outside the Statehouse in Trenton. "The first thing that the Nazis and Adolf Hitler did was go after the unions."

The modern mind & fist: Above - a poster designed to rally support for the government teachers union in Wisconsin, 2011. (From Time magazine). Below, images from teachers rallies. "Can you tell the difference?" asks the poster in the lower photo.

It's more correct to say the first thing Hitler did was create a union, but Shelton went on to call members of the New Jersey legislature "Adolf Christie's generals" for supporting the governor's efforts, adding "They're Nazis, goddamn it" for good measure. (Quick note for the young readers: "Nazi" was short - and pejorative; no one deserved that more - for Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. See etymology here. Directly translated: "National Socialist German Workers' Party," though "labor" is interchangeable with "workers..." Various other national or international socialist groups then and now weren't comfortable with the full name for his organization, declaring Hitler to be "far right" and themselves "left" - or center - and the rest of us somewhere in between.)

Other speakers at the New Jersey event were quick to distance themselves from Shelton's remarks. In that situation I'm sure most people would; however, others embrace such highly charged, emotionally delivered declarations with something akin to religious fervor. It's only with disgust I can turn my attention to Adolf Hitler at all, I suspect a majority of Americans share that sentiment, some perhaps in the belief that if you ignore those people they go away. (After all, it can't happen here...) However, we live in a country where erroneous versions of history are increasingly popular and decreasingly trivial. The notion that Paul Revere's ride had nothing whatsoever to do with gun rights is spreading faster than Tony Weiner's Tweets (or unemployment, or mortgage foreclosures...). Meanwhile, off the top of my head I can name four Republican governors who've been declared Hitler over labor-related issues this year (and not just by labor union officials). Along with Christie they are Indiana's Mitch Daniels, Ohio's John Kasich, and Wisconsin's Scott Walker. (Walker most notably insofar as amount of national news coverage and enthusiastic participation of those who believed the charge - mostly government school teachers.)

The presumably anti-Hitler forces even have a new Hitler quote to support their claims:

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike" - Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

I've seen it repeatedly on Facebook, discussion boards, blogs and other locations over the past several months. It's a fabricated Hitler quote - it sprang into existence in February this year (just in time for the Wisconsin campaign) - but like so many other fabricated Hitler quotes it does sound kind of... Hitlery, to coin a term. (And like at least one other fabricated Hitler quote it sprang into being at the exact moment it was needed to advance an agenda remarkably similar to Hitler's.) It's even dated the actual day Hitler shut down those unions that weren't part of his socialist labor movement (the day after he held massive May Day celebrations), leaving his own Labor Front the only option available to workers. (Except they had no option - they had to join.)

So Hitler controlled Labor in Germany. The question becomes and then what? We know (or at least, we used to) Hitler blamed "speculators" (nudge wink) for Germany's economic woes, launched World War Two (citing his responsibility to protect German citizens in Czechoslovakia and Poland as an excuse) and killed millions - but we're talking about Labor here. We know (or at least, we used to) he revitalized the economy via government stimulus and jobs programs (the autobahn... public works... munitions... Volkswagen... tanks...), but what did Hitler do for those German workers of the mind and fist he claimed his party represented?

"Then and now," reads the text (a World War One reference) "we remain comrades." Deutsche Arbeitsfront is the German Labor Front. (Collection here.)

Let's turn to William Shirer for the answer. (Quick note for younger readers: his book Rise and Fall of the Third Reich documents exactly that, combined with his experiences as an American reporter in Germany throughout the period when Hitler came to power. It was a bestseller in an America where most people old enough to read had personal memories of World War Two. The entire book is available online for free here, the section on labor referenced below begins here.)

So, did he really slash wages? The answer is yes. Well, sort of yes. For skilled laborers the average fall was one cent an hour: "from 20.4 cents an hour in 1932... to 19.5 cents during the middle of 1936," Shirer says. Things were even worse for others: "Wage scales for unskilled labor fell from 16.1 cents to 13 cents an hour." How could he pull that off without inciting a workers' revolt? Simple: total income grew by 66 per cent. How can this be, you ask? Simple: Hitler reduced unemployment in Germany from six million to less than a million in that same time frame. (What part of socialism do you not understand?)

However, as Shirer makes clear, the typical German worker's income fell in other ways.

Besides stiff income taxes, compulsory contributions to sickness, unemployment and disability insurance, and Labor Front dues, the manual worker - like everyone else in Nazi Germany - was constantly pressured to make increasingly large gifts to an assortment of Nazi charities...

"Don't donate," urges this poster encouraging generous contributions to a National Socialist Worker's Party charity drive, "Sacrifice."

Much of that charity money went to support Germany's many unwed mothers and their children. With Hitler's encouragement and financial support their numbers were climbing sharply in the pre-war years - Der Führer foresaw the need for a large future pool of soldiers.

"Many a workman lost his job," Shirer reports, "because his contribution was deemed too small." How bad were things at their worst? All totaled, says Shirer, "In the mid-Thirties it was estimated that taxes and contributions took from 15 to 35 per cent of a worker's gross wage." I can only imagine an American veteran of D-Day and beyond reading that in 1960 and wondering... taxes, union dues, health insurance all mandatory, and charity "encouraged" - and totaling 15 per cent of gross income! We Americans fought a revolution over less! How could the Germans put up with that?

Shirer leaves no doubt as to how bad it was for the German worker. Those with weak stomachs might want to stop reading here - it keeps getting worse.

There was another heavy cost to the wage earner. As the largest single party organization in the country, with twenty-five million members, the Labor Front became a swollen bureaucracy, with tens of thousands of full-time employees. In fact, it was estimated that from 20 to 25 per cent of its income was absorbed by administration expense.

Okay, at this point you've probably noticed that mandatory taxes, union dues and health insurance combined to support a bloated bureaucracy isn't just a description of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, it also fits America today. (Though we do have cleaner, less inherently disturbing graphics, IMHO.) We all know Nazi Germany was horrible, Shirer from first hand observation. But reading past his general characterizations and into his specific descriptions it becomes obvious that many of the differences are nothing more than semantic - with obvious exceptions that still set us apart. For instance, we still have some states where (except for federal government employees) you don't have to join a union to get a decent job; union officials in twenty-first century America can still negotiate (while calling anyone who negotiates with them Nazis); and our unemployment rate is nowhere near that low. (And some of us wish our mandatory taxes and contributions were only 15% of our gross income...)

And...

Germans also had something called Kraft durch Freude (KdF - translated: "Strength through Joy") that subsidized vacations (the beach, cruises, skiing...) sports, the theater, opera, concerts, (including a "ninety-piece symphony orchestra which continually toured the country, often playing in the smaller places where good music was not normally available") and a host of other diversions. (We've got the NEA and NPR, of course, but ...) Through KdF Hitler even started up his own government motor company (see Volkswagen link above) to subsidize ownership of economical, fuel efficient cars for German workers. (Many who paid in advance were disappointed; no one ever got one...)

Much of the focus of all KdF efforts was on government "health and fitness" guidelines for the German worker, whose "proper diet" and exercise were seen as government responsibility. "To the ordinary German in the Third Reich this official all-embracing recreational organization no doubt was better than nothing at all," says Shirer, "if one could not be trusted to be left to one's own devices."

It provided members of the Labor Front, for instance, with dirt-cheap vacation trips on land and sea. Dr Ley built two 25,000-ton ships, one of which he named after himself, and chartered ten others to to handle ocean cruises for Kraft Durch Freude.

Shirer went on one such cruise himself, and says "the German workers seemed to have a good time." Of course, Shirer could see something the average German would likely not admit: they'd been transformed into nothing more than "serfs" (to use his term).

I always thought Rise and Fall was a cautionary tale - but obviously others saw it as a how-to manual. I'd like to thank our patriotically concerned American union officials for the numerous shrill warnings over the past several months. I'm not clear if it's lower unemployment or subsidized vacations they're concerned these Hitlerific Republican Governors are trying to force on unsuspecting American workers, but at least when they try it we'll recognize it for what it is - the last few steps on the road to Nazidom.

Are you shovel ready, comrade?