SobieskiSavedEurope
Gold Member
- Banned
- #301
I was talking more about the Fascists... I am a Fascist after-all... Not a Communist.
Thoughtcrime: Hitler: A Side We Never See
Hitler's tremendous social achievement in putting Germany's six million unemployed back to work is seldom acknowledged today. Although it was much more than a transitory achievement, "democratic" historians routinely dismiss it in just a few lines. Since 1945, not a single objective scholarly study has been devoted to this highly significant, indeed unprecedented, historical phenomenon.
Similarly neglected is the body of sweeping reforms that dramatically changed the condition of the worker in Germany. Factories were transformed from gloomy caverns to spacious and healthy work centers, with natural lighting, surrounded by gardens and playing fields. Hundreds of thousands of attractive houses were built for working class families. A policy of several weeks of paid vacation was introduced, along with week and holiday trips by land and sea. A wide-ranging program of physical and cultural education for young workers was established, with the world's best system of technical training. The Third Reich's social security and workers' health insurance system was the world's most modern and complete.
This remarkable record of social achievement is routinely hushed up today because it is embarrasses those who uphold the orthodox view of the Third Reich. Otherwise, readers might begin to think that perhaps Hitler was the greatest social builder of the twentieth century.
Because Hitler's program of social reform was a crucially important - indeed, essential -- part of his life work, a realization of this fact might induce people to view Hitler with new eyes. Not surprisingly, therefore, all this is passed over in silence. Most historians insist on treating Hitler and the Third Reich simplistically, as part of a Manichaean morality play of good versus evil.
Nevertheless, restoring work and bread to millions of unemployed who had been living in misery for years; restructuring industrial life; conceiving and establishing an organization for the effective defense and betterment of the nation's millions of wage earners; creating a new bureaucracy and judicial system that guaranteed the civic rights of each member of the national community, while simultaneously holding each person to his or her responsibilities as a German citizen: this organic body of reforms was part of a single, comprehensive plan, which Hitler had conceived and worked out years earlier.
Generous loans, amortizable in ten years, were granted to newly married couples so they could buy their own homes. At the birth of each child, a fourth of the debt was cancelled. Four children, at the normal rate of a new arrival every two and a half years, sufficed to cancel the entire loan debt.
Equally effective social measures were taken in behalf of farmers, who had the lowest incomes. In 1933 alone 17,611 new farm houses were built, each of them surrounded by a parcel of land one thousand square meters in size. Within three years, Hitler would build 91,000 such farmhouses. The rental for such dwellings could not legally exceed a modest share of the farmer's income. This unprecedented endowment of land and housing was only one feature of a revolution that soon dramatically improved the living standards of the Reich's rural population.
Under Hitler, every factory employee had the legal right to paid vacation. Previously, paid vacations had not normally exceed four or five days, and nearly half of the younger workers had no vacation time at all. If anything, Hitler favored younger workers; the youngest workers received more generous vacations. This was humane and made sense: a young person has more need of rest and fresh air to develop his maturing strength and vigor. Thus, they enjoyed a full 18 days of paid vacation per year
Hitler introduced the standard forty-hour work week in Europe. As for overtime work, it was now compensated, as nowhere else in the continent at the time, at an increased pay rate. And with the eight-hour work day now the norm, overtime work became more readily available.
In another innovation, work breaks were made longer: two hours each day, allowing greater opportunity for workers to relax, and to make use of the playing fields that large industries were now required to provide.
Whereas a worker's right to job security had been virtually non-existent, now an employee could no longer be dismissed at the sole discretion of the employer. Hitler saw to it that workers' rights were spelled out and enforced. Henceforth, an employer had to give four weeks notice before firing an employee, who then had up to two months to appeal the dismissal. Dismissals could also be annulled by the "Courts of Social Honor" (Ehrengerichte).
