Die völkische Ordnung von Armut

In 2015, Florian Wimmer died unexpectedly at a very young age. His doctoral thesis on Nazi welfare policy has now been published. The book centres on the Munich welfare office (Wohlfahrtsamt) during the Nazi period. Using a local focus had become a crucial approach to the history of National socialism some decades ago and, as current research is very much interested in the ways in which Nazi rule was implemented and how the concept of the people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) shaped the lives of individuals, focusing on a town or a region is still a preferred method. This is even more true for the examination of the welfare regime, because municipal interventions and inter-city variations are proving to be important to this story. The study starts by examining the institutional changes which the welfare office had undergone since 1933. Elements of self-administration as well as participative structures were eliminated and some services, such as legal advice, were taken over by bodies of the Nazi party, leading to a close entanglement of the Nazi party and the municipal administration. Moreover, from 1935 onwards, welfare bureaucracies were downsized since the number of welfare recipients was dropping rapidly. More changes become visible when looking at the staffing of the welfare administration, on which the second chapter is centred. Based on personnel records and denazification documents, Wimmer reconstructs the social data of the personnel: most of those holding leading positions were born between 1884 and 1896—thus many of them had fought in the First World War. By 1937, twenty-five out of thirty-eight officers had joined the Nazi party. Furthermore, the group of voluntary personnel, who assisted the professional staff in carrying out investigations concerning the backgrounds of welfare recipients as well as means tests, served as liaison between the Nazi party and the public welfare administration

Political science · European history and politics · German History and Society · German Social Sciences and History