JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The Project for the Reconstruction of the German Trade Union Movement was the brainchild of the wonderfully-named Hans Gottfurcht (God Fear, Fear of God, God Fright, etc), the docuiment printed in 1944 a year after the author began the organization in London.  Gottfurcht was a major domo in the union movement in Germany and headed one of the principal national committees from 1919-1933–that is, until the Jewish Gottfurcht found himself to be at odds with the NSDAP. And also when the NSDAP outlawed trade unions.  Gottfurcht survived in Germany as an insurance agent until finally getting out in 1938.  He worked his way to England, where at the begining of teh war found himselkf interned as an enemy alien–one of those ironic cases in which anti-Nazi Germans were rounded up with thousands of other fellow Germans.  Out of detention Gottfurcht founded the Socialist Trade Union for German Wrkers in Great Britain, advocating union positions and getting ready for the state of the economy in Germany in post-Nazi Germany.  

The pamphlet below is from my purchase of the Library of Congress “Pamphlet Collection”, and came to the LC via the library of the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS), the precursor to the CIA.  This was in the library for some time, and borrowed only once.  

It is interesting to see how strong post-war planning was for Germany–I haven’t studied this at all but in general reading I have come across many instances like this where plans were being made on how some segment of the German nation could proceed once the war was ended and the NSDAP extinguished.