Jane Caplan

Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: Intention and explanation. A current controversy about the interpretation of National Socialism

for the past eleven years or so a subterranean debate has been going on among German historians of National Socialism. It has been growing increasingly bitter, and yet it has not really come out into the open, as a debate with a clear literary form. One has to trace its erratic public progress through a series of book reviews and odd passages within articles in journals and anthologies. The debate has reached such a pitch of intensity that some historians are now accusing other historians of ‘trivializing’ National Socialism in their work, of implicitly, unwittingly, furnishing an apologia for the Nazi regime. This is perhaps the most serious charge which can be made against serious historians of the subject. Since the historians so accused have not the least sympathy for fascist causes, past or present, but are on the contrary progressive in their political positions, the debate is not a political slanging match (although in a strange way it is that too) – it raises in an acute and bitter form fundamental questions about modes of historical understanding and methods of interpretation, and fundamental questions about the moral and political responsibility of the historian. The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to this partly hidden debate; to put forward in the form of theses (rather than of extended and documented historical arguments) a critique of both positions in the controversy; and to suggest that the terms of debate can be and should be transcended. It is not an easy subject to write about.

Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: The containment of the working class in Nazi Germany

this introduction to the essays collected in Angst, Belohnung, Zucht and Ordnung does not conform to any standard pattern or formula. It is not an editorial preface, for the collection has no editor, but is the product of individual and collective work by its four authors. The Introduction is not a brief guide to, or historiographical scene-setting for, these four monographic essays, since they do not need an introduction of this kind. They can all stand on their own, as rounded and critically self-aware contributions to the study of Nazi labour and social policies. My introduction has a different function. It aims to furnish both a counterpoint to and one possible interpretative framework for these four exact analytical studies of labour law, wage policies, leisure organizations and factory welfare: to suggest one general context (and it is not the only one) in which these four essays, together with some other recent research and criticism, may be read; to suggest possible approaches for new research; and to think out loud about whether I and other historians have been asking all of the right questions concerning the political economy of National Socialism in the past ten years. What follows is thus long and essayistic. Unlike the four contributions, it is not a scholarly study; references have been kept to an absolute minimum. It is a product of uncertainty and reflection, rather than of sustained and purposeful work. It is as much a response to the work of these four historians as an introduction to it. The contributions to Angst, Belohnung, Zucht und Ordnung help to advance and to systematize our understanding of the social policies of the Nazi regime.

Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the 'National Community'.

This book analyzes the attitudes and policies of the Nazi leadership towards the German working class. The author argues that the regime did not securely integrate the working class and was thus less successful in imposing mass economic sacrifices in the interests of forced rearmament. With a growing labour shortage in the late 1930s, industrial conflict re emerged. These two factors slowed down military preparations for war and may well, it is argued, have influenced Hitlers foreign policy in 1938/39.The author has added a substantial epilogue to this edition in which he responds to the main criticisms, aroused by the German original, and assesses the relevance of more recent research to the arguments put forward.