Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly ...receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party's rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society.From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.
The Speer Ministry, 1942–1945 McKitrick, Frederick L
From Craftsmen to Capitalists,
09/2016, Letnik:
37
Book Chapter
On the night of February 8, 1942, Dr. Fritz Todt, Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions, who had successfully concentrated a good deal of the responsibility for war production in his ministry, ...perished in a mysterious plane crash after leaving Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. In a move that surprised everyone, Hitler named Albert Speer to the job the next morning.¹ The man who up to that point had served as Hitler’s chief architect and held several technical war-planning posts proved an even greater organizational genius than his predecessor. By managing to squeeze every last bit of productive
In examining the effects of unrestrained freedom of trade we saw that, while the American policy resulted initially in a large influx of new firms into certain trades, the situation soon stabilized, ...and by 1950–1951 the difference in absolute numbers of new firms between the American zone and the British and French zones (where the old rules were still in force) was minimal. Market forces seem indeed to have acted as a corrective in adjusting the supply of handwerker, and the actual outcome did not correspond to the apprehension of leaders before the fact.¹ What did change, however, was
The Federal Republic of Germany and its Siamese twin, the German Democratic Republic, were both creatures of the Cold War and the growing incompatibility of the rival social systems of East and West. ...This great shift among the former Allies from mutual fear of fascism to fear of each other hardened over the course of 1947 as most Western leaders became convinced of Stalin’s implacable opposition to democratic development in Europe. The decisive event in this process was the London Six-Power Conference from February 23 to June 2, 1948, which included Britain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United
From Zünfte to Nazism McKitrick, Frederick L
From Craftsmen to Capitalists,
09/2016, Letnik:
37
Book Chapter
Two central ideas will concern us throughout the course of this study. The first is the ability of German artisans, Handwerker, to adapt to the process of industrialization. The second is how the ...organizational structure—its coherency, legal authority, and economic influence—affected that adaptation and how it shaped handwerk as a social group, a Stand, with a distinct identity. The outcome of these developments was to have enormous implications for the political and social stability of Germany—and of Europe—in the twentieth century.
By the start of the nineteenth century the golden age of German handwerk had long
The Handwerk Act of 1953 McKitrick, Frederick L
From Craftsmen to Capitalists,
09/2016, Letnik:
37
Book Chapter
So far in part III we have noted a number of changes that made handwerk very different in the postwar years from what it had been before 1933 in its relation with other socioeconomic groups and in ...its ideological outlook. In chapter 10 we saw that handwerk emerged after the war in a very different structural position in the German economy, and perhaps just as important, that the the war with industry was perceived as as being over, and as such was celebrated among handwerker and their leadership. Accordingly, the other dimension of the postwar reality for handwerk was its
The devastation of Germany in 1945 is difficult to imagine for anyone accustomed to the routine and comforts of life in times of peace. It was so extreme that it shocked even Germany’s enemies. ...During the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, President Truman was deeply shaken after a tour of bombed and battle-scarred Berlin with “the long, never-ending procession of old men, women, and children wandering aimlessly along the autobahn and the country roads carrying, pushing, or pulling what was left of their belongings.”¹ The physical destruction of six years of war—mines flooded and unusable, industrial plants wrecked, and,
The Americans worked to dismantle the corporate authority of handwerk organizations essentially because they believed as a matter of principle that in most cases the market was a better mechanism of ...regulation than a bureaucratic structure, and that such authority operated to the benefit of established businesses and kept out much-needed fresh blood. What is more, the Americans believed such restrictions in the economic sphere were necessarily linked—institutionally and by mentality—to political authoritarianism. The German response, as we have seen so far, was that the authority vested in the handwerk organizations performed the valuable functions of regulation that
We have seen how in the British zone the initial uncertainty as to the legal status of handwerk organizations was resolved decisively with the promulgation of the December 6, 1946 Handwerk Ordinance, ...which represented a clear victory for handwerk and its organizations. But in the American zone, developments for handwerk took a strikingly different course. While during the period of the controlled economy the functions of handwerk organizations remained in practice virtually the same as those in the British zone, these responsibilities turned out to be only as provisional as the economic controls themselves. Not only did the US military
