Description
Book Synopsis Work played a central role in Nazi ideology and propaganda, and even today there remain some who still emphasize the supposedly positive aspects of the regime’s labor policies, ignoring the horrific and inhumane conditions they produced. This definitive volume provides, for the first time, a systematic study of the Reich Ministry of Labor and its implementation of National Socialist work doctrine. In detailed and illuminating chapters, contributors scrutinize political maneuvering, ministerial operations, relations between party and administration, and individual officials’ actions to reveal the surprising extent to which administrative apparatuses were involved in the Nazi regime and its crimes.
Trade Review Reviews for the German Edition:
“The results of this broad archival research venture are as impressive as they are innovative, especially since—unlike the thoroughly researched topic of Nazi state social and labor policy—the Reich Ministry of Labor comes into the spotlight for the first time.” • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“One reads with interest the descriptions of institutional affairs, housing, pension insurance, labor law, and developments after 1945. The strength of the study lies in its presentation of new results based on intensive archival work by scholarly collaborators.” • Süddeutsche Zeitung
Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Rüdiger Hachtmann, Elizabeth Harvey, Sandrine Kott, Alexander Nützenadel, Kiran Klaus Patel and Michael Wildt
Introduction
Alexander Nützenadel
Part I: Administrative Structure, Personnel and Institutional Conflicts
Chapter 1. The Reich Ministry of Labour, 1919–1945: Organization, Leading Personnel and Political Room for Manoeuvre
Ulrike Schulz
Chapter 2. Mid-Level Civil Servants’ Education, Professional Life and Career Structure
Lisa-Maria Röhling
Chapter 3. The Reich Ministry of Labour and the German Labour Front: Permanent Conflict and Informal Cooperation
Rüdiger Hachtmann
Part II: Policy Fields
Chapter 4. The Housing Policies of the Reich Ministry of Labour
Karl Christian Führer
Chapter 5. Pension Insurance Policy: The Impact of Labour Deployment and Discrimination
Alexander Klimo
Chapter 6. Labour Law in the Nazi State: The Labour Trustees and the Criminalization of Breaches of Employment Contract
Sören Eden
Chapter 7. The Labour Administration and the Organization of the War Economy
Henry Marx
Part III: Expansion, War and Crimes
Chapter 8. Social Policy. External Propaganda and Imperial Ambitions
Kiran Klaus Patel and Sandrine Kott
Chapter 9. Labour Administration and Manpower Recruitment in Occupied Europe: Belgium and the General Government
Elizabeth Harvey
Chapter 10. The General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment and the Reich Ministry of Labour
Swantje Greve
Chapter 11. Holocaust and Labour Administration: Jewish Labour Deployment in the Ghettos of the Occupied Eastern Territories
Michael Wildt
Part IV: The Ministry after 1945
Chapter 12. A Vanishing Act: The Reich Ministry of Labour and the Nuremberg Trials, 1945–1949
Kim Christian Priemel
Chapter 13. New Beginning and Continuities: The Top Personnel of the Central German Labour Authorities, 1945–1960
Martin Münzel
Appendix I: Designations of Office
Appendix II: Biographies
Index
