National Socialism: Nazi motto “Work sets you free”: crimes and promises

Should refugees be obliged to do a non-profit work service on which the receipt of essential cash benefits is made dependent? Should unemployed Ukrainians be deported? Is there a need for a new reform of citizens’ benefit so that social benefits can be cut off for those who do not want to be placed in a job? Back to military service? Compulsory work for pensioners? What can each individual do, if not for their country, then at least for Germany as a location? Such discussions are taking place in this country. And it has to be said: This is happening in a country that, almost 80 years ago, realized its national community in the “German work” of industrial mass murder and wrote “Work sets you free” on the extermination and concentration camps.

But what does this National Socialist past have to do with Germans today? Didn’t their work actually liberate them, in the economic miracle, reconstruction and as world champions in reappraisal? A final line would be appropriate, as we no longer only hear from the right. The historian and social philosopher Nikolas Lelle has put forward a convincing argument against the forgetfulness of history from the New Right to the left-wing “German Guilt” agitation in his book “Work Makes You Free”: He shows how little there is about the National Socialist ideology and its Continuities into the now are known.

“Work kills”

Lelle begins his essay on “Approaching a Nazi motto” with the contradiction that, on the one hand, “Work sets you free” became a “symbol for the National Socialist mass murder” par excellence, but on the other hand, hardly anything is known about the scope and meaning of this sentence. “The gaps in knowledge are striking,” says Lelle, assessing the research situation. It cannot be said exactly why this statement was forged at the camp gates from Dachau to Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, nor who gave the order – and, above all, not what ideological meaning the camp inscription conveys.

Intuitively, however, it is difficult to figure out the motto because, first of all, “Work sets you free” is a cynical lie, at least for all those who were deported to the camp and had to read the six-meter-wide lettering on the gate. She did not expect a labor camp as a re-education center, as propaganda trivialized it. As Lelle tells survivor Tibor Wohl, the SS pointed out to those newcomers directly by the inscription: “There is a path to freedom, but only through this chimney!”, that of the crematorium. Wohl therefore called his survival report “Work kills.”

Lelle points out that freedom should primarily apply to the German national community. “Work makes you free” encompasses a deeply delusional projection that touches the core of National Socialist ideology, which is why Lelle interprets it not as a mere concentration camp motto, but as a Nazi motto. “German work” is nothing less than the ethnic struggle that is waged from the factory, on the German Labor Front (DAF) to the World War battlefields, whether as a soldier or in the nuclear family – against the Jews. Just as “the violence and murder in war appears as a form of work for the people,” the work in the concentration camp that organizes mass murder is also part of this “liberation.”

Annihilation anti-Semitism as work

It is therefore only logical that the motto “Work makes you free” was posted on the concentration camp gate so that it could be read from the outside, in contrast to the slogan “To each his own” at the Buchenwald concentration camp, which is directed inwards. It was a message to the German people, who would only come to their senses if they eliminated everything that was destructive with the sweat of their brow. Work is therefore an expression and means of National Socialist anti-Semitism. Hitler himself always expressed this idea very clearly. As Lelle quotes from “Mein Kampf,” it is about “creative work that itself has always been anti-Semitic and will be anti-Semitic.” And in Hitler’s speech “Why we are anti-Semites” from the Munich Hofbräuhaus in August 1920, the idea that the national community arises through work, only inhibited by the “anti-work” of the Jews, becomes clear.

The path to “liberation” led to the destruction of the Jews. Legitimacy for this was provided by the view that Jews were not capable of “work” – meaning Hitler’s idea of ​​”German work”, which was characterized by selfless service to the community, i.e. self-sacrifice – and therefore, strictly speaking, were not even alive. unworthy life. However, the anti-Semitic madness was implemented as precisely the work that Germans were encouraged to do in all areas of life, which “ennobled” them, as was written at the entrances to the camps of the Reich Labor Service (RAD), which Hitler appointed on May 1, 1933 Germans had committed to thunderous applause. The work was the practice of docility among the community and passed seamlessly into that of the SS men, concentration camp guards, police and firing squads, doctors and nurses. “In ‘Work Makes You Free’, National Socialist promises and crimes coincide,” Lelle sums up.

The Auschwitz survivor and Italian writer Primo Levi, whom Lelle cites, points out the contradiction of this self-image of German work. Levi interprets the sentence as an expression of the deeply racist and chauvinistic belief that work is unworthy of the “master race” and should therefore be assigned to the enemies of the Germans. “Your work makes us free” is the meaning that the sentence conveys, according to Levi. The resistance fighter and writer Jean Améry, on the other hand, interpreted the motto as an expression of the Germans’ work fetish. Your “work makes you unfree,” as Améry says.

Til today

In addition to these many levels of meaning, the camp inscription also contains a moment of resistance. The Polish prisoner Jan Liwacz was assigned to make the lettering in 1941, but he turned the B around. An act of resistance becomes clear here, because “it was literally no longer the seamless, perfect motto that the National Socialists thought it was supposed to be,” writes Lelle. The upside down letter perhaps also embodied the hope that the situation could be turned against the murderers, as Lelle quotes from an exhibition by the International Auschwitz Committee. However, this hope was exhausted when the legal process of the Nazi regime failed.

Lelle makes an important point about this: The Nazi work philosophy offered crucial continuity into the post-war period. While overly explicit references and anti-Semitism became taboo, for Germans “busyness has become their main weapon in defending themselves against reality,” as Hannah Arendt already noted. The processing was “also prevented by ‘German work’,” says Lelle. And it provided a starting point for the right to this day, as an ideologue and a cipher that is regularly used on social media. When, for example, AfD politicians provoke the pandemic with “vaccination sets you free” or “work sets you free” is repeatedly on the tip of people’s tongues – as a joke or supposedly harmless innuendo – the thin veneer of taboo becomes apparent.

The misunderstood taboo leads to transgression anyway, Lelle notes with Freud, and takes these taboo breaches as evidence of a lack of processing. Because “the National Socialist work concept successfully evaded coming to terms with it” and was “perceived as pre- or apolitical.” It therefore still functions today as a code for the anti-Semitism that formed the ideological core of the Nazis and is currently making its way into the relativization of the Shoah, conspiracy myths and Israel-related anti-Semitism.

Nikolas Lelle: “‘Work sets you free’”. Approaches to a Nazi motto. Criminal Publishing House, 120 pages, br., 19 €.