Bureaucracy, Work and Violence

The Reich Ministry of Labour in Nazi Germany, 1933–45

Alexander Nützenadel, Alexander Nützenadel

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789204599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Work played a central role in Nazi ideology and propaganda, and even today there remain some who still emphasize the supposedly positive aspects of the regime's labor policies, ignoring the horrific and inhumane conditions they produced. This definitive volume provides, for the first time, a systematic study of the Reich Ministry of Labor and its implementation of National Socialist work doctrine. In detailed and illuminating chapters, contributors scrutinize political maneuvering, ministerial operations, relations between party and administration, and individual officials' actions to reveal the surprising extent to which administrative apparatuses were involved in the Nazi regime and its crimes.

PART I

ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE, PERSONNEL AND INSTITUTIONAL CONFLICTS

Chapter 1

THE REICH MINISTRY OF LABOUR, 1919–1945

Organization, Leading Personnel and Political Room for Manoeuvre

Ulrike Schulz

There is certainly no escaping the bureaucratic organization. It makes no difference whether we place the substrate and the necessities of our lives, those aspects that require organization, in the hands of the state and its subdivisions, or whether we surrender them to those who lay claim to them as organizers or private firms and exploit them for monetary and other purposes. No matter what, it is the same machinery, the same immense structure that results, in whose bleak, innumerable chambers our soul dies, as in catacombs of its being. It makes no difference who creates it, to whom it belongs – the cage is built; it is now our fate.

— Alfred Weber, ‘Der Beamte’

When Alfred Weber published these lines in 1910, he still hoped to warn his readers about the imperceptibly growing bureaucratic machine that was, he believed, taking over every sphere of life. He wanted to cast light on what he perceived as the ever-deepening antagonism between the free and dynamic professional (Berufs-Menschen) and the impersonal, ‘bureaucratic’ (beamtlich) hegemony of ‘machines’ (Apparate). He imputed to these ‘machines’ an inherent metaphysical dynamic that was supposedly reordering society but was, in reality, subjugating it.¹ Alfred Weber’s older and incomparably more famous brother, Max Weber, also ascribed tremendous sociopolitical significance to the ever-enlarging ‘bureaucracies’, which he observed and analysed in the world around him. He too saw in this development a tendency to curtail the freedom of the individual. But unlike his brother, Max Weber believed this form of rule by cadres of administrative staff (Verwaltungsstäben), as he called them, was ‘legal’ because they acted in accordance with rational and objective principles. These principles included the separation of office and individual; a commitment to neutrality; the gearing of administrative processes towards rational perspectives; standardized training and professionalization.² For Max Weber, the task of the administrative cadres was to enforce these principles and thus to ensure that individuals could neither be advantaged nor disadvantaged due to bias. He bequeathed to posterity a perspective on administration as a democratic institution.

The two visions presented by Alfred and Max Weber regarding the genesis of modern administration have retained their potency to this day – the former espousing the negative semantics of an all-conquering bureaucratic machine, the latter the positive semantics of an efficient organization, based on a division of labour, in which the supra-individual dimensions of the polity are steered in accordance with rational procedures.³ These contemporary analyses were prefigured above all by the seemingly inexorable growth of large companies since the turn of the century and by the agencies of public administration. While Alfred Weber held that it was irrelevant who was driving the bureaucratization of society, Max Weber set out an ideal-typical analysis of the principles he thought constitutive of this process. The principles themselves apply, according to Max Weber, regardless of whether they hold sway in a company, a hospital or a political association. And it makes very little difference what form these principles take in a given organization. Certainly, an insurance office has a different task within the polity than a hospital. But both form part of an administrative system, featuring a division of labour, within an overarching societal framework.

Particularly for Max Weber, the generalizing perspective – transcending specific organizations and their characteristics – was a challenge posed by his era. What he sought to provide was a general schema of a system rather than a sociology of ‘public administration’ as such. Nonetheless, he might well have produced such a sociology had he not died in 1920. His early death deprived the pioneer of organizational sociology of the opportunity to observe, over an extended period, the Reich ministries – organizations of a democratic orientation whose structure reflected the principles of the division of powers – after the First World War and the November Revolution. On 21 March 1919, these ministries were established as a major element in the executive of the Weimar National Assembly (Nationalversammlung).⁴ By decree, the National Assembly provided itself with a government consisting of a Reich chancellor (Reichskanzler) and a so-called Reich Ministry, the latter consisting of a number of specialized ministers and ministers without portfolio. For the first time, this included a Labour Ministry as one of the supreme Reich authorities.

Given his prior studies, within this organization of ministers, the Reich Labour Ministry, its sociopolitical implications and organizational setup would surely have captured Max Weber’s attention. First, because here the interests of the two major camps in the labour struggle (Arbeitskampf) came up against one another. For the organized labour movement, that is, the SPD and the trades unions, but also for social reformers and national liberals, the ministry was a major step towards a future in which the working class would enjoy dignified living conditions and participate fully in the body politic. Members of the conservative-bourgeois camp, conversely, regarded state social policy as economically unproductive. The German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) and most of the business community thus regarded the ministry as an expensive, crisis-prone and biased workers’ interest group at the beck and call of the trades unions.⁵ Second, from an organizational perspective, the Reich Labour Ministry, impelled by social deprivation in the aftermath of the First World War, brought together such a wide and complex range of responsibilities that, when it was set up, its staff often found themselves entering uncharted territory. Predecessor organizations on the Reich level were either absent or failed to reflect the new challenges faced by a modern mass administration.

A history of the Reich Labour Ministry that examines both dimensions of the organization’s work – the policy fields it administered, some of which were highly contested, and its organizational characteristics – affords new and perhaps even surprising insights into the work of governance and state social and labour policy in the period between 1919 and 1945. In such a history one must inevitably pay special attention to the role of the ministry and its staff under Nazism. Ultimately, the fields of labour and social affairs were of tremendous importance to Nazi ideology (the key word here being Volksgemeinschaft), but also to the German policy of occupation after 1939 (the crucial term in this case being forced labour). Accordingly, from 1933 onwards, various Nazi party officeholders and the Hitler regime paid great political attention to the Reich Labour Ministry. To understand the ministry’s significance within Nazism, it is vital to systematically analyse its internal organization. Only in this way can one fully grasp the ministry’s role, powers, responsibilities and impact. It is also crucial to ask what criteria one might deploy, today, to evaluate the work of its staff, while also contemplating the kinds of issues they found themselves confronted with in their own era.

In what follows I flesh out three aspects of the history of the Reich Ministry of Labour. The first is that this history cannot begin with Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’ in 1933. Any examination limiting itself to the years between 1933 and 1945 would neglect the period of just fourteen years from the ministry’s establishment in 1919, through its development to its stabilization during the ‘utopian-democratic’ and crisis-hit years of the Weimar Republic.⁶ Yet these years are crucial to understanding the organizational prerequisites and policy foci of the Reich Labour Ministry, part of Hitler’s regime from 1 February 1933. Second, in this context it is essential to consider the roles and responsibilities of the politicians, political civil servants and permanent staff in the ministry within specific constellations of actors. Otherwise, one risks a foreshortened view that reduces this organization’s complex functional mechanisms to the decisions made by the minister or leading officials. What impact did Franz Seldte,⁷ as sole Reich labour minister between 1933 and 1945, make in his role? Why, for example, was he considered a ‘weak’ minister? Third and finally, it is crucial to identify the external influences affecting the ministry between 1933 and 1945. Among those bodies to which the Reich Labour Ministry was relevant for various reasons were Nazi Party organizations such as the German Labour Front, but also the other ministries. How might one describe their influence on the Reich Labour Ministry?

The Establishment and Development of the Reich Labour Ministry in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933

The Reich Labour Office (Reichsarbeitsamt) was founded on 4 October 1918, just under six months before the establishment of the ministries. It took over responsibility for the social policies previously dealt with by the Reich Economic Office (Reichswirtschaftsamt), which had come into being precisely one year earlier, in October 1917, and had itself been allocated certain areas of responsibility previously under the remit of the Reich Office of the Interior (Reichsamt des Innern). The latter had been the leading institution of domestic policy in the German Empire until 1917. Under the direct control of the imperial chancellor (Reichskanzler), it brought together all important fields of domestic policy under one roof, from coinage to workers’ accident insurance.⁸ During the First World War, this agency found itself overwhelmed by this wide range of duties. It thus seemed essential to achieve a more fine-grained division of labour and redistribute its responsibilities.

Before the end of October 1918, nine expert counsellors (vortragende Räte) and about twenty department heads (Referenten), a total of fifty-six established civil servants (planmässige Beamte) and thirty-seven white-collar employees (Angestellte) began to restructure the Reich Labour Office.⁹ Most of them came from the Reich Office of the Interior and the Reich Economic Office, though some had served in the Prussian Domestic Administration (Innenverwaltung). Gustav Bauer, an SPD politician and trades union official, was appointed head of this agency, and was made state secretary to this end.¹⁰ At the point of transition, the Reich Labour Office was responsible for welfare provision for blue- and white-collar workers, labour market regulation, job placement, unemployment benefit and workers’ insurance. The new Reich Labour Office also subsumed the Reich Insurance Company (Reichsversicherungsanstalt), which provided workers’ disability insurance and had existed since 1884, and the White-Collar Workers’ Insurance (Angestelltenversicherung), a public corporation and supervisory authority founded in 1911, as a second strand of statutory old-age insurance.¹¹

The orderly development of the organization, however, lasted for just a few days. The Reich Labour Office had barely seen the light of day when it found itself at the epicentre of the November Revolution of 1918. Over a period of a few months, the organized labour movement managed for the first time to force the elites of the German Empire to respond to their political demands. The momentum engendered by the First World War and the Communist Revolution of 1917 in Russia enabled the working class to establish itself henceforth as a political force in its own right. This set in motion a rebalancing of political forces that was to mould the development of the entire twentieth century.¹² Key demands put forward by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which had now been formed in Germany on the model of the Russian Revolution, were addressed directly to the nominally responsible Reich Labour Office. The first priority was gaining recognition for the trades unions as the legitimate representatives of the workers. This role as political representative was associated with far-reaching demands for workers’ rights, including worker participation, free collective bargaining and company-related social policies of benefit to workers.¹³ Before they had time to catch their breath, the officials in the new Reich Labour Office found themselves participating in the first, fraught negotiations between employees’ and employers’ representatives and were witness to hitherto unthinkable accords, as in the case of the Stinnes-Legien Agreement (Stinnes-Legien-Abkommen).¹⁴ Also of enduring significance to the future of the Reich Labour Office and, from March 1919, the Reich Labour Ministry were those demands delegated to the constituent National Assembly during the negotiations between the transitional government and the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, demands that were enshrined in the Weimar constitution in August 1919. These ranged from a comprehensive labour code through a central employment agency to state-subsidized housing and unemployment insurance. The workers’ representatives thus sought to remedy the failures of the previous twenty years as rapidly as possible.

This left very little time to think systematically about the Labour Office’s organizational setup. Looking back, the staff of the new agency must have found it breathtaking how rapidly it grew, month on month, from the last few weeks of 1918 onwards.¹⁵ Certainly, in the fields taken over from the Reich Economic Office, there were preliminary plans as well as sometimes long-established organizational structures. But even here there were few fields of responsibility with respect to which officials could straightforwardly build on the state of affairs as at 1914. The top priority and political dictate of the moment was to develop the body of legislation concerning labour law, worker protection and company-related social policy, in such a way as to improve the working and living conditions of workers and their families and thus also – in the spirit of raison d’état – to help prevent their further political radicalization during this febrile period. In this context, the Works Councils Act (Betriebsrätegeset...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I. Administrative Structure, Personnel and Institutional Conflicts
• Part II. Policy Fields
• Part III. Expansion, War and Crimes
• Part IV. The Ministry After 1945
• Appendix I. Designations of Office
• Appendix II. Biographies
• Index