Smashing the Unions

The trade union movement fared no better. Hitler declared the First of May a National Labour Day, to which the trade union leaders humbly offered their full cooperation. The official organ of the German TUC, Gewerkschaftszeitung, published an article for its May Day edition with the following scandalous statement:

We certainly need not strike our colours in order to recognize that the victory of National Socialism, though won in struggle against [the Social Democrats]…is our victory as well!

After the National Labour Day mass demonstration of 100,000, Goebbels wrote: “Tomorrow we will occupy the trade union buildings. There will be little resistance”.

The next day the SA occupied the trade union headquarters, dissolved the unions, confiscated the funds and arrested its leaders. They were loaded into trucks and taken off to the Nazi concentration camps. Theodor Leipart and Peter Grassman, leaders of the Trade Union Confederation, proclaimed their readiness to cooperate with the fascist regime. “The Leiparts and Grassmans,” declared Doctor Robert Ley, assigned by Hitler to reorganize the trade unions into a German Labour Front, “may hypocritically declare their devotion to the Fuehrer as much as they like but it is better that they should be in prison.” And that is where they were carted off.

The end was shameful and inglorious. There was no resistance to the totalitarian nightmare, only abject capitulation by the labour leadership.