Germans Under the Nazis Practice Questions

Read Interpretations A and B below, then answer parts (a), (b) and (c).

Interpretation A: from the memoirs of a man from Hamburg who was unemployed for two years during the Depression and who in 1934 was given a job building the new motorways, one of the Nazis' public works schemes to reduce unemployment. His memoirs were published in West Germany in 1979.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

Before 1933 I queued for the dole for two years and my children went hungry. Then the work came back. I was given a job on the new motorway, with a wage packet every Friday and my dignity restored. Later my brother earned good money in an aircraft factory. People say now that we were cheated, but in those years there was work for any man who wanted it, and we felt that the country was being rebuilt.

Interpretation B: from a book about the Nazis' policies to reduce unemployment, written in 1938 by a former trade union official who lost his post when the Nazis abolished the trade unions in 1933 and who left Germany in 1935. The book was published abroad for foreign readers.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

The fall in unemployment is a conjuring trick. Jews and married women pushed out of their jobs were simply struck off the registers, and conscription removed hundreds of thousands more young men. Others are marched into the Labour Service for six months of spade work at pocket money. Since the unions were destroyed in 1933 wages have been held down and hours lengthened, and the factories turn out guns rather than the goods a worker might wish to buy.

Read Interpretations A and B below, then answer parts (a), (b) and (c).

Interpretation A: from a tape-recorded interview given in 1979 by a man who had been an unemployed factory worker in Düsseldorf during the Depression and who later worked in an armaments factory.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

In 1932 I had been out of work for two years and my family was close to going hungry. Within three years of Hitler coming to power I had a steady job and my wife had a place on a cheap holiday by the sea through Strength Through Joy. People say now that we were all forced into it, but nobody forced me. We supported him because he gave us work, order in the streets and pride in being German again.

Interpretation B: from an account written in 1946 by a German schoolteacher who had been dismissed from his post in 1935 after refusing to join the Nazi teachers' organisation, published for German readers after the defeat of Germany.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

It is too easy to say that the German people chose Hitler. From 1933 the newspapers, the radio and the cinema said only what Goebbels permitted; the trade unions were abolished and the other parties banned. I lost my post in 1935 and my neighbours stopped speaking to me, not out of hatred but out of fear of the Gestapo and the camps. What looked like enthusiasm at the rallies was largely obedience. Germans cheered because silence had become dangerous.