Work(ers) under the Swastika

This chapter has two objectives. It analyses the Nazi regime's destruction of the German labour movement as well as the NS regime's profound impact on the status and conduct of German workers. After 1945, scholars initially assumed (in retrospect, rather naively) that a vaguely or sometimes undefined 'German working class' resisted the Nazis en bloc. In turn, more recent studies have questioned the extent to which German workers constituted an entity even before 1933. The current historiography has also inquired both into the Nazis' destruction of German organized labour and the regime's efforts to integrate workers into a streamlined, dissent-free, National Socialist Germany and into questions relating to working-class support for or resistance against the regime.