Now I have heard this a few times from the mumbo-jumbo right wing media:
a] That the trade unions helped him to power.
b] That the communists were on his side.
Gosh; I wish they wouldn't go Godwin especially when they are flat our lying.
Let's see
The communists ran against Hitler in the elections of March 1933 indeed they won 81 seats. Now without a majority since the Nazi's rose to power with 44% of the vote; and since he hadn't managed to arrest all the communists after the Reichstag Fire a month earlier he decided to arrest the newly elected communist deputies. In so doing he now had a majority in the Reichstag, so much for working together.
The next little obstacle was the trade unions:
On the 2nd of May 1933 he ordered the Sturm Abteilung[SA or brown shirts] to arrest the Trade Union leaders. He also reduced worker wages and took away their right to strike.
[The SA were later rewarded during the night of the long knives on the 30th of June 1934 when Hitler ordered the SS to kill these thugs and 400 were butchered.]
Now Hitler set up the Labor Front which I suppose in your worst nightmares could be regarded as a state run workers union. This ensured wages were fixed and direct reductions for taxes carried out, additional deductions were then made for the Strength Through Joy program which was used for propaganda showing the Nazi party's love of the worker [free holidays for the party faithful and building stadiums].
Now; if you are going to go Godwin and all please get your facts lined up in order otherwise I might have to go all Godwin and tell you whom the Republicans resemble.
Goddammit I hate insomnia.
from Mein Kampf 1922
The trade union in the National Socialist sense does not have the function of grouping certain people within a national body and thus gradually transforming them into a class, to take up the fight against other similarly organized formations. We can absolutely not impute this function to the trade union as such; it became so only in the moment when the trade union became the instrument of Marxist struggle. Not the trade union is characterized by class struggle; Marxism has made it an instrument for the Marxist class struggle. Marxism created the economic weapon which the international world Jew uses for shattering the economic base of the free, independent national states, for the destruction of their national industry and their national commerce and, accordingly, the enslavement of free peoples in the service of supra-state world finance Jewry.
Updated by LaFeminista at Sun Feb 27, 2011, 07:48:57 PM
PS I'm sorry where the link leads, but at the moment thats the only place I can find the complete text.
Don't click if you want to avoid nasty right wing sites
Updated by LaFeminista at Sun Feb 27, 2011, 07:51:52 PM
here is a less painful link, pdf doc
http://www.greatwar.nl/...