German Labour Front
The Nazis banned all trade unions that existed before their rise to power, and replaced them with the German Labour Front (DAF), controlled by the Nazi Party. They also outlawed strikes and lockouts. The stated goal of the German Labour Front was not to protect workers, but to increase output, and it brought in employers as well as workers. Journalist and historian William L. Shirer wrote that it was "a vast propaganda organization...a gigantic fraud." Meanwhile, the Chamber of Economics (whose president was appointed by the Reich minister of economics) absorbed all existing chambers of commerce. By 1934 these two groups merged somewhat when the Chamber of Economics also became the economics department of the DAF. To aid this, a board of trustees run by representatives of the Nazi Party, the DAF and the Chamber of Economics was set up to centralize their economic activity.