Kraft durch Freude
- Emily
- Oct 24, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 25, 2021
Strength Through Joy, in other words, was known for its supervised after-work activities, holidays and leisure time. One of the most popular organizations in fact. Robert Lay is a key person you will want to know for this blog. You may notice the title looks German; you guessed correct. It's a term that belonged to the Nazi Party. And Robert Lay was put in charge of this organization. As you imagined it was more so put together to promote their party.
This was their logo. It's very obvious which party it belonged to with the large swastika. It was set up in Nazi Germany so that all aspects of a worker’s non-working time were looked after. Actual free time was really non existent, they were babied and always looked after. Being sent to daycare because workers supposedly couldn't be trusted on their own. The Nazi Party liked to control anything it could. At these camps, the day started with the raising of the swastika flag and ended with the flag being taken down. There were supposedly around 7,000 staff members in this organization.
This Nazi organization along with other main ones by the names of DAF (The Labour Front) and SdA (The Beauty of Labour) affected the standard of living workers, employment and so on. These were created simply because they were worried about losing support, and the support was crucial. These types of organizations promoted employees and encouraged the rights of workers.
Strength Through Joy served two purposes:
The first was to ensure that no one had too much time on their hands to get involved in untoward activities against the state. There was a belief that idle hands might get involved in anti-state misdemeanours.
The second main purpose of Strength Through Joy was to produce an environment within Nazi Germany whereby the average worker would be grateful to the state for providing activities and holidays that in normal circumstances they could not afford as individuals.
Keeping in mind that when some workers went to holiday camps they found their holidays were regimented and controlled. No one was allowed to do exactly what he or she wanted to do. In a totalitarian state, the government even wanted to control a worker’s holiday. Unfair, yes. (historylearningsite.co)
To make it more unfair, and a definite invasion of privacy; they had a large number of government spies there who masqueraded as holidaymakers. They listened in to conversations and identified anyone who made what were deemed to be anti-Hitler comments.
Some Growth of the Organization
| In 1934, 2.1 million people took part in some form of KdF event.
|By 1936 KdF had a membership of 30 million German workers.. yet with a view of the party being small. Yet ‘only’ 7.4 million participated in a KdF trip that year, with nearly 23 million not doing so. It arranged theatre trips, summer holidays, skiing holidays, summer and winter hikes, cruises and outdoor activities. People living in the countryside had trains made available for them to get into a city to watch theatre performances. The state provided about as much as could be needed to take up anyone’s slack free time.
|By 1937, this had risen to 9.6 million. Between 1936 and 1937, over 1 million hikes were organized.
|Fascist Italy was one of the few European countries to help out. Cheap skiing holidays were held in the Italian Alps while in the summer around 30,000 people holidayed on the Italian Riviera. Strength Through Joy ships took a lucky few on cruise holidays. A total of 150,000 went on KdF cruises between 1934 and 1939.. considerably low number
Robert Lay
Robert Lay was killed during an air raid in Port Hamburg by the Royal Air Force, March 9 1945
Below you will find a propaganda video, showing a Strength Through Joy parade
To read further on this organization if interested, I have provided a great resource below:
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