# Adolf Hitler's Own Book Mein Kampf (My Battle)/Chapter 24

Chapter XXIV
Labor Unions
Our position upon a question which has not yet been solved had to be made clear in 1922 due to the rapid development of our movement.
While we strove to find ways and means to win our way into the heart of the great masses, we continually were warned that the workers would never be really ours as long as they were represented in professional and economic fields by people with an organization quite different from our own.
The Nazi movement must engage in union activity. But the Nazi union is not a weapon for class warfare, but is purely an instrument of vocational representation. The Nazi state recognizes no “classes”, but instead knows only citizens with equal rights, and subjects without political rights.
The labor union in the Nazi state has not the faintest idea of taking certain people of the state and organizing them into a class intended to attack another class in the national body. This task really has nothing to do with the labor union anyway; it was drafted on to the union by the Marxists, in other words by Jews who intended to use the unions to destroy national economy and to enslave free nations for the benefit of international Jew finance.
The Nazi union must weld together certain groups of participants in the national economy in order to defend and strengthen the national economy itself. This is to be done by abolition of the abuses which injure the national economic system and the people who serve it.
The Nazi union considers the strike permissable only as a means to a national economy through an attack upon the anti-social abuses which hurt the efficiency of the economic system and in that way threaten the community. The Nazi union is not a weapon intended to annihilate national production, as all present unions intend.
The Nazi worker must be made to understand that if the national economic system prospers his own material fortune consequently improves.
The Nazi employer must know that good treatment of his employees is necessary to their existence and to his own economic power.
Nazi Workers, Employers— Both Slave
Nazi employees and employers are at one and the same time subject to and protectors of the entire national community.
Great personal liberty must therefore be accorded to them in their activity, because experience proves that the efficiency of the individual is increased by liberty, and hampered by force.
    (When Hitler became dictator of Germany he deprived workers of the right to strike against unjust conditions—labeling all strikes “treason to the state”—and initiated compulsory labor. On September 10th, 1939, Goering, leader of the Nazi five-year economic plan, stated: “Foreign countries say forced labor has been introduced here. They don’t understand the difference between duty and compulsion. We know what the difference is, but we don’t condescend to discuss it with foreigners.”
    (The result of this policy was described with startling frankness by the official Nazi economic journal, Deutsche Volkswirtschaft, which declared in March, 1939: “In recent weeks there has been a series of symptoms of overstrain among industrial workers. First, a grippe epidemic took on proportions which betrayed heightened susceptibility to disease through moral and physical stimulation as a result of nervous tension during working hours. Third, the number of unexcused absences from work has risen sharply.”
    (All unions in Germany were dissolved, funds were appropriated and scores of labor leaders were jailed on May 2, 1933—three months after Hitler became Dictator of Germany—so that workers are unable to protect themselves from exploitation in any way.
    (Hitler’s apologists state that if nothing else, Nazism has at least abolished unemployment. Roy Howard, famous American journalist and publisher, writes that what they call “absorption of unemployment” in Germany, we call WPA or PWA. Nazi Germany has large civilian armies mobilized for forced labor. In America that is confined to chain gangs, and to Federal and State penitentiaries—and it is not called “employment”.
    (Americans worry about the size of the National Debt. If the government put every business man in a straight-jacket, and spent enough to create employment to raise the debt from 40 to 140 billion dollars, the United States would approach what Germany is doing today as she builds her war machine.
    As for the employers, they have been subjected to rigid governmental control, which has been summed up in the phrase: “Everything which is not prohibited is compulsory”.)
    (Hitler first abolished the lockout, and is now in the process of nationalizing German economy, factory by factory, and industry by industry, for war purposes and not in the interests of the economic well-being of the nation. Today he has so weakened the power of Germany’s pre-Nazi industrial leaders, that he could undoubtedly put all of them into concentration camps overnight without running any danger of provoking revolution.
    (Roy Howard in recent dispatches from both Germany and Italy declared that he found industrialists bitterly regretting that they ever helped Hitler and Mussolini along the way to power.)
The Nazi union sees in the strike a weapon which can be applied only as long as there is no Nazi racial state. But it will be the duty of the Nazi state to care for all individual members of the state.
Economic councils will be set up with the responsibility of preserving national economy and of perfecting it; in these economic councils class war will end. Here employers and employees won’t fight their eternal battle over wages—they will together solve this problem, always with the welfare of the state as a first consideration.
The task of the Nazi labor union is the preparation for the setting up of these economic councils.
    (Hitler is apparently vaguely thinking about some sort of a corporate chamber such as that which Mussolini, after more than sixteen years of similar talk and absolutely no action, finally inaugurated in Italy on March 23, 1939. Whether Il Duce’s corporate chamber will be able to lift Italy out of its present sad economic condition is problematical. Meanwhile, after six years of dictatorship in Germany, Hitler has taken no steps toward formation of any “council of economics”.
    (Goering has been given almost unlimited powers as leader of the economic five-year plan.)
Once our movement realized that it needed a labor union, the question arose: how are we to get them? The thought of a Nazi union side by side with other unions was ridiculous. This left two ways:
(1) We could organize our own union, and then slowly attack the international Marxist unions.
(2) We could invade the Marxist unions and try to transform them with the force of our own idea.
Food, Clothes, Houses— Unimportant
The foundation of our own union seemed difficult in view of our lack of funds, and because it would be a tremendous battle at first to wean workers away from their old organizations. Also, I did not know any man I thought able enough to be entrusted with the task of forming our union. Still further, I have always been against the suggestion that a political view of life should be mixed up with economics at too early a point in its development; the people who form a movement must think more of the great ideals of the movement, and must not be allowed to think too much, selfishly, about their own immediate economic prosperity.
The 1918 November revolution was not made by unions, but in spite of them.
We had to avoid the danger of creating a Nazi union ​which might come to see its mission only as competition with the Marxist unions—our union must battle the Marxist organization not only as a union, but for the sake of the fundamental principles of the Nazi movement.
All these ideas stood against the thought of our creating our own union.
And so two possibilities were left: we could have our party members quit the unions, or else tell them to remain in them in order to destroy them.
I recommended the second choice. And so we acted in 1922. Others knew better and formed their own unions—denouncing us for not having any and announcing that this proved our stupidity or else our bias. But these other organizations did not last very long, so eventually they had no unions, and neither did we—but we had never fooled ourselves or others.