David’s Reviews > Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the 'National Community' > Status Update

rounding off a 270-page book with a 100-page epilogue summarizing the next 10 years of debate and severely bracketing the value of your own contributions ... Mason was nothing if not a doggedly honest scholar.

it was impossible before the war to force the workers to make the material sacrifices that were the indispensable prerequisite for building up the country's military strength ... The government lacked the authority — objectively as well as according to its own estimations — to implement the draconian social and economic measures that might have reduced or eliminated this strain.

By 1938 manpower shortages had become so widespread that ... occupations that had no particular tradition of trade-union militancy, such as barbers and salespersons, were asserting their right to demand changes in social policy. A large, spontaneous movement to demand earlier shop closings on Saturday was causing major headaches for the Labour Front, the government and shop owners.

According to official statistics the number of people taking holiday cruises jumped from 2.3 million in 1934 to 10.3 million in 1938, and the number taking part in other leisure activities during the same period sky-rocketed from from 9.1 million to 54.6 million. In 1939 the annual turnover of 'Strength through Joy' was RM 2.5 billion. There is no doubt about the popularity of StJ (Kraft durch Freude).

The issue of a 'disparity between east and west' runs like a red thread through all government discussions on questions of social and economic policy in the period 1933 to 1942. Even the aggressive programme of rearmament and later the war only magnified the problem, since most of the new armaments factories were being built — in part for political and military reasons — in central Germany.

The biggest misunderstanding of fascist institutions arises from taking them at face value, as collective avatars of the "total" state. Mason shows the actual development of the nazi movement and state was a constantly shifting opportunistic chaos: the central leaders betting on multiple contradictory horses, some of which come out on top, approved after the fact by the leadership.