GERMAN LABOUR FRONT

New Zealand Herald, Volume 82, Issue 25179, 17 April 1945, Page 3

GERMAN LABOUR FRONT

POWERFUL ORGANISATION ITS BEARING ON THE FUTURE The Germans have a genius for organised passive resistance. It was German workmen who made ,the only general strike that ever succeeded—the strike against the military coup d'etat in March, 1920, writes F. A. Vojght, in an editorial article in the Nineteenth Century, London. It was German workmen who paralysed the French in the Ruhr three years later. The time will surely come when the National Socialist Party, the S.S., the S.A. and the Gestapo will be destroyed, whether by the Allies or by the Germans themselves. But one of the creations of the party will surely remain—the Labour front. It is the most powerful union in the world. Today German industrial workmen and their families make up more than half the population. German agricultural labour is organised as never before. What is left of the middle and upper classes has an unprecedented solidarity with labour. In no country in the world has antagonism between class and class been so reduced as it has in Germany. That is why, in spite of immense loss of life, jn spite of colossal destruction, in spite of utter weariness, the Germans may he the best-organised community in Europe—a land of order in an anarchic world.