Background
Robert Ley was born in Niederbreidenbach, Rhineland, on 15 February 1890.
Robert Ley was born in Niederbreidenbach, Rhineland, on 15 February 1890.
He studied chemistry at the universities of Jena, Bonn, and Munster. He volunteered for the army on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and spent two years in the artillery before training as an aerial artillery spotter with Field Artillery Detachment 202.
After studies he participated in World War I as a flier and in 1917 was shot down and taken prisoner by the French. Returning to Munster in 1920, he worked as a chemist with I.G. Farben in Leverkusen until his dismissal for habitual drunkenness.
Ley joined the NSDAP in 1924 and a few years later he was appointed Gauleiter in the Rhineland. Ley became a member of the Prussian legislature in 1928 and was put in charge of the NSDAP organization in the Cologne-Aachen district. He was elected a member of the Reichstag for the same district in 1930. Appointed Reich Organization Leader in November 1932, the pathologically uncouth but enterprising Ley rose in importance after the Nazis came to power, without ever quite reaching the very top rank of the Party leadership.
On 2 May 1933 Ley began a campaign which in a few days successfully "co-ordinated" the once free and independent trade unions in the Reich into the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front). For the next twelve years this monolithic labour organization, which eventually had twenty-five million German workers under its aegis, was controlled by a temperance-preaching alcoholic.
The largest, single mass organization in the Third Reich, the DAF developed into a mammoth empire run by a swollen bureaucracy whose officials came from the NSDAP, the former Nazi unions, the SA and the SS. Its ostensible purpose was to restore "social peace" in the world of labour by overcoming the class struggle in favour of the unity of the Volk. Its paternalistic "socialism", which legitimized competition in the service of the nation, aimed at winning over the working class to the Nazi way of life by looking after their social welfare and surrounding them with the "right" cultural atmosphere.
Operating with a huge budget, it controlled the hiring and firing of workers, their compensation and insurance, care for the elderly and disabled, while using its funds for workers' education, the construction of buildings and the stabilization of wages. Employers and employees wore the same, simple blue uniform in accordance with the classless Nazi ideology of "an organization of creative Germans of the brain and fist" which claimed to have made the worker ‘an equal and respected member of the nation'. The militant phraseology of the DAF which appealed directly to the mentality of the trenches was designed to stimulate maximum productivity. As Ley put it in a speech in the Siemens electrical w'orks in Berlin in October 1933: "Every worker must regard himself as a soldier of the economy."
In compensation for the end of collective bargaining and the outlawing of strikes and all independent trade unions, the DAF sought to divert the working classes by creating an elaborate and sophisticated form of regimented leisure through the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organization, also headed by Ley. After 1934 this venture in dirt-cheap mass tourism, sport and recreational activities, which involved some nine million German workers in organized leisure, became an important weapon in the modern Nazi version of "bread and circuses". Opening up cultural vistas previously available only to the upper classes (theatre, opera, lectures, etc.), it also enabled workers to travel to foreign lands at minimal prices.
Apart from the seagoing ships used by Strength through Joy travel groups, the DAF owned extensive properties, building societies, banks, insurance companies, publishing outlets and the Volkswagen factory, all of which provided Ley with unlimited possibilities for self-enrichment. The Volkswagen (People’s Car) project, which the DAF took in hand in 1938, was a classic example of the fraudulent façade behind which Nazi "socialism" deceived the working classes. German workers were obliged to pay on an instalment plan before delivery, but not a single car was ever turned out for any customer in the Third Reich, the money was never refunded to the wage-earners and Ley pocketed the profits.
The classless utopia of the Volksgemeinschaft which protected the rights of workers was no less illusory, in spite of organizations such as the ‘Beauty of Labour' unit set up by Ley to improve working conditions in plants and factories. In reality the principle of Gefolgschaft (following the plant leader) was restored in the factories, where employers largely regained their powers while the take-home pay of German workers declined. Tied down by State controls, they found it difficult to move from one job to another, their wages and salaries were frozen and they were obliged to pay increasingly large gifts to a variety of Nazi ‘charities’. Thus under Ley’s leadership, the DAF served primarily as a vast propaganda organization under the aegis of the Nazi Party, intended to maximize productivity by anaesthetizing the independent political consciousness of the workers. In addition to his role as dictator of the Labour Front, Ley was also made overlord of the Reich housing programme during World War II and given the task of building and organizing the Ordensburg schools-Teutonic order castles where the future Nazi élite was to undergo a combination of Platonic training, the British public school ethos and indoctrination into Nazi racial mythology. Only the toughest and best graduates of the Adolf Hitler Schulen were to be admitted to these castles, where the curriculum was defined by Ley as ‘four years of the hardest possible physical and mental exertions’. Character training based on sports, tests of courage, education in social poise, etc., was designed to breed a new race of leaders.
Captured by American troops after trying to flee to the mountains near Berchtesgaden, Ley committed suicide on 24 October 1945 in his prison cell while under arrest and awaiting trial at Nuremberg.
An ardent Nazi and close personal friend of Hitler’s.
Implicated in various street and public brawls in the early days of the movement, the coarse, eccentric Dr Ley was a bitter anti-semite who used his Party newspaper, the Westdeutscher Beobachter, for conducting a vicious campaign against Jewish' department stores and ‘Jewish’ money power.
He specialized in publishing blackmailing articles to extort money, chiefly from Jews.
Though Ley claimed that the schools opened the door to political leadership for the man in the street, the Ordensburgen, with their trappings and mystique of a medieval chivalric order, revealed the quasi-feudal ethos of National Socialist ideas of leadership. Moreover, Ley's deification of Hitler, which took on extreme sycophantic proportions, indicated how deeply his own thinking was impregnated by the Fuhrerprinzip. Rabid anti-semitism permeated the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Nazi labour boss no less intensely.
Quotations: In a speech in Karlsruhe in May 1942 Ley declared: ‘It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind, the Jews have got to be exterminated.’
The prototype of the plebeian, radical Nazi constantly fulminating against bourgeois customs and the "blue-blooded swine", Ley was an unstable personality and an erratic, inept administrator, whose crackpot theories and sometimes ludicrous public statements did not prevent him from making a personal fortune under the cover of his Party activities or from enjoying considerable popularity.