Source D supports this view. It is an SPD report (the SPD are responsible for some of the few sources concerning Nazi Germany that are not Nazi), written by an undercover agent (the SPD were outlawed by the Nazi regime), on the ‘variety and complexity of working-class attitudes to the regime in central Germany’, written in 1938. It supports my concerns raised about source A, saying that the workers ‘often complain about the fact that they earn much less now than in 1929’, however, there are some views in source D which have a more positive attitude to the Nazi regime, ‘the years of unemployment have not been forgotten’, this indicates that the number of jobs available rose under the regime. Source D also states that the workers are ‘at the end of the day’ glad to have work and draws attention to the fact that the worker’s wages ‘continually buy less and less’. Even though they have jobs, the workers are finding it increasingly hard to get by. From this source it appears that, contrary to what source A says, Nazi policy was definitely not beneficial to the working class.
This idea of a fall in wages compared to those before the depression is also reflected in source C, the average gross hourly earnings in industry, from original German sources. According to this source, the earnings have increased since the Nazis came to power but they are well below the amounts they were before the depression. This may be because the Nazis main concern was to get money to fuel their war industry, and not to help the poor. As this source only contains the average hourly earnings we don’t know what the minimum earning amount was and so there may be people whose earnings decreased under the Nazi regime.
Sources B and E are reports on the Nazis Strength Through Joy system, which was there to give Nazi workers improved facilities and benefits such as holidays, trips to the theatre and to the cinema. They both take different views on the effects of this scheme. Source B, written by the German Labour Front, who wanted to portray the Nazi regime in a positive light, suggests that it makes ‘life worth living again’ for thousands of workers and comments of the large amount of opportunities it’s given workers to travel around the world. Source E, another SPD report by an undercover agent, written without any access to official figures, says that Strength Through Joy is a ‘clever appeal’ to the ‘petty bourgeois’ unpolitical workers. The SPD agent is claiming that this is a publicity stunt for the Nazis, and that the Nazi regime is fooling workers into believing that this scheme is working. As they were obviously against the Nazi regime, they would not have wanted to portray the regime in a positive light, meaning that this report has reason to be biased against the Nazi regime. The truth probably lies somewhere in between the two sources. Some workers were given privileges through the scheme but the majority did not benefit and the experiences of those that did were exaggerated by the German Labour Front.
All these sources show that the Nazi regime was beneficial to workers to some extent, creating employment for those that had none, but not up to the standards that they claimed. They tried to portray themselves as helping the workers and giving them more rights, but from the SPD reports we can see that this is untrue and that they exaggerated the work that they were doing at returning Germany to the state it was before the depression.
