page_title: Strength Through Joy
section_title: Activities
hierarchical_section_title: Strength Through Joy / Activities
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Scherl Bilderdienst: II. Weltkrieg 1939 - 1945, Überfall auf Polen am 1. September 1939. Das KdF - Schiff "Wilhelm Gustloff" wird als Lazarettschiff eingesetzt, hier im Danziger Hafen im Herbst 1939. 12065 - 39
context_page_description: Kraft durch Freude was a state-operated leisure organization in Nazi Germany. It was a part of the German Labour Front, the national German labour organization at that time. Set up as a tool to promote the advantages of National Socialism to the people, it had become the world's largest tourism operator by the 1930s.
  KdF was supposed to bridge the class divide by making middle-class leisure activities available to the masses.
  It also sought to bolster the German tourist industry, something it did successfully up until the outbreak of World War II. By 1934, over two million Germans had participated in a KdF trip; by 1939 the reported numbers lay around 25 million people. With the outbreak of war in 1939, the organization was mothballed, and several projects, such as the Prora holiday resort, were never completed.
context_section_description: Starting in 1933, KdF provided affordable leisure activities such as concerts, plays, libraries, day trips and holidays. Large ships, such as Wilhelm Gustloff, were built specifically for KdF cruises. They rewarded workers with taking them and their families to the movies, to parks, keep-fit clubs, hiking, sporting activities, film shows and concerts. Borrowing from the Italian fascist organization Dopolavoro "After Work", but extending its influence into the workplace as well, KdF rapidly developed a wide range of activities, and quickly grew into one of Nazi Germany's largest organizations. The official statistics showed that in 1934, 2.3 million people took KdF holidays. By 1938, this figure rose to 10.3 million.
  Two weeks after the Anschluss, when SS-Gruppenführer Josef Bürckel became Reichskommissar für die Wiedervereinigung (Reich Commissioner for Reunification) as well as Gauleiter, the first five trains with some 2,000 Austrian workers left for Passau, where they were ceremonially welcomed. While Bürckel announced that he did not expect all KdF travellers to return as National Socialists, he did expect them to look him in the eyes and say, "I tried hard to understand you."
  The National Socialists sought to attract tourists from abroad, a task performed by Hermann Esser, one of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda's (Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda) secretaries. A series of multilingual and colourful brochures, titled "Deutschland", advertised Germany as a peaceful, idyllic, and progressive country, on one occasion even portraying the ministry's boss, Joseph Goebbels, grinning in an unlikely photo series of the Cologne carnival.
  The KdF was awarded the 1939 Olympic Cup by the International Olympic Committee.
  
  At the outbreak of war, holiday travel was stopped. Until then KdF had sold more than 45 million package tours and excursions. By 1939, it had over 7,000 paid employees and 135,000 voluntary workers, organized into divisions covering such areas as sport, education, and tourism, with wardens in every factory and workshop employing more than 20 people.
caption: The cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff torpedoed in 1945
exif: {}