Interest in the Nazi period continues unabated, generating a continuous flow of conventional treatments of familiar topics as well as publications using new interpretive ideas or addressing neglected issues. Daniel Hadwiger's new book falls into the latter two categories.
The author discusses the German National Socialist People's Welfare (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, NSV) and the French National Relief (Secours national) as a means of comparing social policy in the two countries during World War II. The NSV was founded by the Nazi Party in Berlin in 1931. Two years later, the party's national organization co-opted it to promote the NSDAP's ideological program. The Allies abolished it in 1945. The National Relief was created in France in August 1914 by prominent private individuals to help those suffering due to World War I. It financed its activities through private donations. It was revived in October 1939 to support the French war effort using a combination of private contributions and government subsidies. After the liberation in 1944, it was renamed and reformed. In 1949, it closed down, its purpose having disappeared.
Using these two organizations to analyze social policy is problematic since both were private entities. The welfare state consists of government institutions. Private organizations often complement those institutions but remain distinct from them. The German welfare state comprises three main components: 1. insurance (Versicherung); 2. basic social support based on rights (Versorgung), and 3. social work (Fürsorge). The classic social insurance programs that cover invalidity, old age, sickness, and unemployment fall into the first category. The benefits provided to government officials (Beamte) are examples of the second. Social assistance administered by municipalities is an example of the third. Government programs such as housing construction, education, and public transportation are additional dimensions of the welfare state. The two organizations discussed by the author complemented government activities in the third category. Studying them can add detail to the picture of social services of the two countries but cannot add much to our understanding of the main lines of their welfare state policies.
The distinguishing feature of this work is its comparative approach. Earlier publications concentrated on one organization or the other. The author attempts to add a new dimension to the discussion by applying Louis Althusser's state ideological apparatus thesis, Thomas Etzemüller's social engineering interpretation, transnationalism, inclusion/exclusion, modernization, and women's rights viewpoints, as well as the memory perspective.
The sources for this study suffer from a major weakness. The records of the central offices of both the NSV and the National Relief were lost toward the end of the war. The author partially fills the resulting gaps by using records from select regional archives, sources at the central state archives of the two countries, and an exhaustive reading of the secondary literature.
The author contends that the NSV and the National Relief were central instruments of social policy in their respective countries. They were responses to left-wing social assistance organizations and were social Darwinist. Hadwiger claims that they exemplified the welfare policies of the last phase of the history of national states and that both were typical welfare organizations of the 1940s.
The NSV enjoyed a position of relative strength due to the Nazi military victories of the early part of the war. It had a utopian vision of the future in which it would create a racially perfect society in Germany by ridding the population of undesirables. It came into its own as a disaster relief organization in response to the area bombing of German cities by the RAF Bomber Command. Most of its employees were volunteers who were chosen for their political loyalty. The majority were lower-class women willing to work for little or no pay. The organization was financed from both public and private sources and benefitted from a monopoly on charitable giving bestowed upon it by the government. It also redistributed property confiscated from Jews and political enemies of the regime. The NSV discriminated against Jews and Sinti and Roma. The author contends that it took a class-based view of society, but later suggests that it focused on people's “origins” (Abstammung), 272). He concludes that the NSV was a political charity. After the war, it faded from memory.
The National Relief's position was the opposite of that of the NSV: weakness as a consequence of France's military defeat in June 1940. It cooperated willingly with the Vichy government but was not as politicized as the NSV, nor did it promote a program of lasting social or political change. Like the NSV, most of its employees worked gratis. Unlike the NSV, the National Relief selected employees based on qualifications, most of whom were upper-middle-class Catholic women. It, too, was financed by a combination of contributions, for which it enjoyed a monopoly, and government transfers. Some of its revenues came from expropriations and fines imposed on Jews and political opponents of the Vichy regime. It also received sizeable contributions from France's overseas territories. The National Relief had no explicit policy concerning Jews, though some of its local officials refused to help them on racist grounds. It also discriminated against Gaullists and communists. When choosing beneficiaries, it concentrated on age and place of residence. Hadwiger characterizes the National Relief as a middle-class, Catholic war charity. After 1949, it, too, was quickly forgotten.
The author's thesis that the NSV and the National Relief lay at the center of wartime social welfare policy in their respective countries is untenable. It would be more accurate to say that the two charities played significant supporting roles. The fashionable interpretive ideas used by the author add little to his analysis. Nationale Solidarität und ihre Grenzen serves two useful purposes: it offers the reader a convenient way to learn a great deal about the two charities, and it provides us with an example of the hazards of presentism.
