Quoting Sergio Bologna’s Nazism and the working class:

Recent research projects have shown how the social security system and the bureaucracy which administered it were consistently seen by the German proletariat as an adversary against which it had to stand its ground.

The latest issue of the magazine Werkstattgeschichte carries a series of accounts by people telling the stories of their own personal tribulations as unemployed and poor people obliged to queue at social security offices in the 1920s. The accounts cover three successive periods: the Great Inflation (1923), the period following the great rationalisation (1924–28) and the period of the Great Depression (1929–33). In the memories of people who lived through those years, the relation with the welfare office is always conflictual.

The effect of the crisis was to reduce to a state of poverty people who came from a variety of different social strata — clerks, shopkeepers and artisans, for example, who were expected to queue alongside old people, [former sex workers], single mothers with children, sailors without ships, unemployed factory workers, young couples devoid of means, and invalids. Once a day, once a week, or once a month, they had to go and convince the relevant authorities of the legitimacy of their requests, and had to repeat their personal stories with a mixture of humiliation and submission.

[…]

Then there was the major problem represented by the very large numbers of migrant workers, travelling from one place to another in search of work; of necessity they found themselves requesting assistance not from the municipality of their own home towns, but from the town in which they were residing at the time.

If this situation was already creating tension and unease in the period prior to the Great Depression, one can imagine what it must have produced with the onset of the crisis itself, and with the fact that, as we have seen, all of a sudden millions of people were expelled from the system of state unemployment insurance and put onto the municipal social security system. It was precisely at this point that the role of the social benefit system as a system of control and monitoring came to the fore. With the polarisation of the relationship between the administrative structure and the claimant in the course of the Depression, the structure progressively lost almost all its character as a social service, and became increasingly a supplementary policing system over the weaker parts of society. It became a system which increasingly divided and selected, creating further systems of degradation, but above all institutionalising social differences.

This was the basic building‐block of the [Third Reich’s] system. One of the basic arguments of the research on marginalised sections of the population in the final period of the Weimar Republic concerns the role played by the welfare system. Our Foundation has done extremely important work on this area, around the history of municipal social security in Hamburg (the volume, edited by Angelika Ebbinghaus, was published in 1986 under the title Opfer und Taterinnen). What does this research reveal? It shows that the staff of the welfare bureaucracy, which was largely female, went over more or less without problems from the Social Democratic government to the [Fascist] government. The [Fascists] took over almost the entire personnel, and asked them to continue working as previously. In other words, to continue carrying out functions of monitoring, surveillance and classifying. In the meantime the [Fascists] were constructing a parallel structure of selecting out marginalised people on biological and racial grounds. The welfare structure, which included social hygiene personnel in addition to administrative staff, provided various kinds of information on individuals, on single “cases”, to the authorities, who then intervened, in the sense of the segregation or physical annihilation of those individuals (internment in labour camps or in so‐called psychiatric clinics, where they were subjected to forced sterilization and other “eugenic” operations).

The majority of these people were considered suitable candidates for segregation and eventual annihilation because, for various reasons, they were defined as asozialen, in other words “anti‐social”. The reasons were many‐fold: because they had been unemployed for too long; because they had committed small crimes against the common good; because they had been involved in prostitution; because they had illnesses that were considered hereditary; because they were seriously disabled; because their marital or sexual behaviour was irregular; because they had repeatedly assumed antagonistic protest attitudes in the workplace or against representatives of institutions (this was the case with the majority of Communist sympathisers); because they had changed their place of residence too often; or simply because they had been caught too many times on public transport without a ticket.

Large numbers of the poor and the marginalised were thus defined as “anti‐social” on the basis of information gathered by the welfare offices and amassed in their personal files, and they were then slotted into a machinery of selection which was not only a process of racial selection, but also a process of social selection. The majority of those interned in camps at the start of the [Third Reich] consisted of these so‐called “anti‐social elements”, who were subsequently to be termed gemeinschaftsfremde (“alien to the community”). Even by 1941 there were still 110,000 non‐Jewish German prisoners in concentration camps, interned as asozialen. The politics of racial selection did not thus originate in anti‐semitism; it originated not in ethnic concerns, but in order to handle the social question. The intention was physically to destroy the marginalised. This was what then led to the development of the so‐called Nazi eugenics policies, or, as they were called, the “demographic policy” (Bevolkerungspolitik). The first Lagers, the first concentration camps, were the “labour houses” (Arbeitshauser) or hostels for the boarding of those who, in exchange for welfare benefit, were obliged to do compulsory labour. It is here that we must look for the origin of the [Third Reich’s] concentration camp system.

(One of its most important origins, to be precise.)

On the basis of the 1924 law which introduced social security for the poor, measures were also brought in to introduce forced labour. Now, when [Schicklgruber] instituted his first measures of forced labour to reduce unemployment, he did it in terms of the law that had set up forced labour. The law of June 1933 (Gesetz zur Verminderung von Arbeitslosigkeit, the “Law for the Reduction of Unemployment”), one of the most important framing laws of [Fascist] labour policy, was framed explicitly in terms of the 1924 law on compulsory labour. This kind of labour is defined as a relationship does not give rise to a wage; it is part of a welfare service, and thus exists outside the framework of civil law governing labour relations; since the worker had no right to a wage, the services in kind which he received, in other words board and lodging, were conceived as a welfare provision, which came within the framework of administrative law. This was the nature of the juridical instruments by which the [Fascist] government brought about a reduction of unemployment over the next two years.

The [Third Reich] boasted of having absorbed, in the space of two years, something like eight million of the unemployed. However, we should not forget that about 70% of the jobs created by the [Third Reich’s] employment policies were part of the big programme of infrastructural public works (such as the Autobahn motorways). The workforce employed on these projects was defined within the juridical framework of compulsory labour (Pflichtarbeit). This was one reason for the growing discontent which spread among these workers, and which, in 1935–36, gave rise to what some have called a “cycle of strikes”. The police authorities and the party organs registered 260 stoppages of work, most of which took place on motorway building sites or on building sites of other public works projects. The shortage of evidence as to which figures might have played a role as agitators, initiators and organisers of these stoppages suggests that the great majority of the workers who were active in these protests had already endured experiences, however brief, of imprisonment and internment in the camps.

All the above, plus the fact that the great majority of workers were given jobs which were more or less forced labour, lend little credibility to the notion that the [Third Reich] was an advanced example of Keynesianism in action. It would be more precise to say that the [Third Reich] combined a number of formulae which we could call Keynesian (the financing of public works to create jobs) with welfare‐type mechanisms inherited from the Weimar Republic, in addition to another absolutely integral factor — a system of coercion and repression within which the concentration camp functioned as a key component of labour policy. In short, the spending of public moneys to reduce unemployment could exist only within a labour policy environment in which not only were market variables suspended, and in which enormous areas of labour were regarded as falling outside of the rules of the civil code and were left in large part to the discretionality of the executive powers — in other words, labour that had become militarised. Thus the prevalent attitude of [Fascism] in relation to the working class was one that led not to its advancement or emancipation (as Zitelmann claims), but to its militarisation.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

  • Water Bowl Slime
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    121 year ago

    It shows that the staff of the welfare bureaucracy, which was largely female, went over more or less without problems from the Social Democratic government to the [Fascist] government. The [Fascists] took over almost the entire personnel, and asked them to continue working as previously.

    You know a system is fucked when the Nazis take control and decide that it’s fascist enough as is and change nothing.

  • @knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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    71 year ago

    The more I learn about 1920s-1930s Germany, the more I see exactly the same things playing out again today. You’d think Germans would notice this kind of stuff for all the education and “national shame” that’s still carried on about “the NS times,” but they don’t.

    I recognize much of the very same frustration with welfare offices today. There isn’t enough welfare, there’s too much welfare, the wrong people are getting it, they’re taking advantage of the system and our precious taxpayer money, etc. Those welfare offices do indeed police and penalize people who inadvertently break the rules or have material situations which prevent them from following the rules in the first place.

  • @KiwiProle@lemmygrad.ml
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    61 year ago

    Jesus, in Aotearoa there was huge barney because the welfare office went through a woman’s Snapchat to determine (in their own minds and without consulting her) that she was in a relationship and thus slashed her benefit. Policing relationships like fascists