German History Vol. 25 No. 4

10.1177/0266355407082773 © 2007 The German History Society

A Family Vacation for Workers: The Strength

through Joy Resort at Prora

Shelley Baranowski

(University of Akron)

[e-mail]

The Nazi regime’s goal of expanding Germany’s ‘living space’ presupposed
rapid rearmament and the enlargement of the nation’s armed forces. Yet in the
eyes of the Nazi leadership, social integration and racial purification had to
be instituted at home even before expansion could begin. Only a Volk united
against the social distinctions of the past, particularly that of class, and cleansed
of ‘undesirable’ genetic traits, could become a ‘master race’ (Herrenvolk)
capable of defeating its enemies and ruling an empire. Thus, in addition to
destroying ‘Marxism’—that is, the trade unions and the parties of the left—
ostensibly ‘private’ choices, such as marriage, child-bearing and household
consumption became targets of the Nazi state’s radical interventionism, even as
it espoused the sanctity of the German family and the father’s authority within
it. Initiated shortly after taking power, the Nazi ‘racial hygiene’ programme
aggressively intervened against the reproduction of the ‘unfit’. At the same
time, the regime promoted the formation of ‘child-rich’, racially ‘valuable’
families, including working-class families, whose frugality and self-sufficiency
would sustain the ‘racial community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) as it prepared for
the war to come.

1

Nevertheless, the nascent consumerism of interwar Germany, with its

promises of personal gratification, and the anticipation of a higher material
standard of living, required some accommodation, for the popularity and
legitimacy of the Third Reich depended at least partially on sustaining the
‘everyday’ or ‘normal’ lives of its citizens. The Nazi regime indeed hindered
the production and distribution of consumer goods production to privilege

1

See especially Michelle Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and

Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 86–271; Nancy R. Reagin, Sweeping the
German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 110–80;
Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy 1933–1945 (Oxford and New York, 1997); and Gisela Bock,
‘Antinatalism, Maternity and Paternity in National Socialist Racism’, in David Crew (ed.), Nazism
and German Society, 1933–1945 (London, 1994), pp. 110–40.

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Shelley Baranowski

rearmament, while German living standards compared unfavourably to those
in Britain, France, and certainly the United States. By the same token, the Third
Reich tolerated consumption that neither threatened the regime’s militaristic
and racial priorities nor advanced unrestrained desires. Alternatively, it encour-
aged consumption that modestly rewarded ‘racially valuable’ families in the
present while promising abundance once ‘living space’ was secured.

2

As a purchasable but intangible commodity, tourism appeared to conform

to Nazism’s vision of acceptable consumption. It absorbed personal and
family purchasing power that would otherwise have lacked for ‘material’ com-
modities, and it promoted internal economic development. Before 1939,
it brought in foreign tourists whose currency the regime saw as vital to the
German economy. Moreover, because tourism had become increasingly
segmented by market, having expanded beyond the upper-middle-class con-
stituencies of the Kaiserreich to include salaried employees, its popularity
affirmed the ‘normality’ that many Germans desired, which included vacation
travel for edification, relaxation and pleasure. In fact, the economic uncer-
tainties of the Weimar period forced resorts that once catered exclusively to
well-to-do bourgeois families to reach beyond their customary clientele in
order to survive.

3

Yet commercial tourism did not easily lend itself to the pro-

motion of the regime’s goals. Despite the rapid ‘synchronization’ of local and
regional agencies that promoted tourism and the conspicuous inclusion of
Nazi commemorative sights among domestic tourist destinations, German
commercial tourism emphasized well-travelled vistas, spas and coastal
resorts, unwilling to place ideology before tourist desires.

4

Even more glar-

ingly, the cost of commercial travel remained prohibitive for wage earners,

2

The debate regarding the Nazi regime’s success or failure in promoting an ‘economic miracle’

remains vigorous, although the tide has turned to the latter position. For the latest, see Mark
Spoerer’s answer to Werner Abelshauser, ‘Demontage eines Mythos? Zu der Kontroverse über das
nationalsozialistische “Wirtschaftswunder” ’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 31 (2005), 415–38.
Abelshauer’s article that spawned the controversy, ‘Kriegswirtschaft und Wirtschaftswunder:
Deutschlands wirtschaftliche Mobilisierung für den Zweiten Weltkrieg und die Folgen für die
Nachkriegzeit’, appeared in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 47 (1999), 503–38. On the low
standard of consumption in Germany, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and
Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006), p. xxiii. On the Nazi regime’s variant of consumption,
see Wolfgang König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft: ‘Volksproduckte’ im Dritten
Reich: Vom Scheitern einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft (Paderborn, 2004); and
Hartmut Berghoff, ‘Enticement and Deprivation: The Regulation of Consumption in Pre-War Nazi
Germany,’ in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds), The Politics of Consumption: Material
Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford and New York, 2001), pp. 165–84.

3

See Christine Keitz, Reisen als Leitbild: Die Entstehung des modernen Massentourismus in

Deutschland (Munich, 1997), pp. 21–208; Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford and New
York, 2000), pp. 19–114; and Hasso Spode, Wie die Deutschen ‘Reiseweltmeister’ wurden: Eine
Einführung in die Tourismusgeschichte (Erfurt, 2003), p. 105.

4

See Kristin Semmens, Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (Houndmills, 2005),

pp. 16–96 and 154–86.

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whose integration into the ‘racial community’ the Nazi regime considered
central to its vision.

Thus, in November 1933, following the destruction of the Left and the

creation of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF, or German Labour Front) to defuse
management–labour conflict, the DAF founded Kraft durch Freude (KdF, or
Strength through Joy). A multi-faceted agency, which spanned the worlds of
work and leisure, KdF claimed to ‘honour’ blue-collar workers by improving
the hygiene, safety and aesthetics of the workplace, and by negotiating price
reductions in order to peddle middle-class leisure practices to workers at a
discount. In so doing, it hoped to achieve three objectives, the first of which was
the creation of an alternative form of consumption that eschewed American
commercialism, individualism and ‘materialism’, and the class-defined col-
lective entitlements of Marxism. By organizing concerts and art exhibits on
the shop floor, arranging sports programmes, distributing cheap opera and
orchestra tickets, and providing package tours to destinations within Germany,
as well as overseas cruises, KdF would ‘improve’ the standard of living of
workers without acceding to wage increases that siphoned off investment from
rearmament. Second, KdF leaders believed that if wage-earners were pro-
vided with a healthful workplace and sufficient respite, productivity would
increase and careers would be lengthened, thus allowing the Nazi state to
reduce its pension costs.

Third and most important, by encouraging workers to adopt middle-class

practices as signifiers of racial privilege, such as cleanliness and leisure travel,
Strength through Joy moved beyond the violent destruction of organized
labour to incorporate wage-earners into the National Socialist ‘racial commu-
nity’ and dissolve the class loyalties that fostered ethnic disunity. Indeed racial
cohesion as the precondition for territorial expansion, to which KdF contributed
with its own peculiar version of consumerism, represented Nazism’s innova-
tion to European imperialism, for no longer would workers be considered the
biological or racial equivalent of colonized peoples. Instead, the Nazis would
rescue German workers, or at least the racially unobjectionable ones, from the
presumption of inferiority.

5

Nevertheless Strength through Joy’s ambition to

achieve the ‘racial community’ through tourism collided with the formidable
barriers of class and gender, limiting its appeal to the population that it so
eagerly sought.

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

541

5

See for example Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the

Colonial Context (New York and London, 1995), pp. 104–20; and Enzo Traverso, The Origins of
Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York and London, 2003), pp. 106–21. Traverso argues that
the regime’s phobia of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ did appropriate the ‘class racism’ of pre-1914 imperial-
ism by fusing its racial and political enemies. Nevertheless, he does not account for the fact that
Nazism’s populist nationalism, which condemned bourgeois ‘egoism’ as well as ‘Marxism’, pro-
claimed its own distinct imperial vision, which would transform German workers into ‘Volk com-
rades’ while destroying the ‘Jewish-Marxist’ poison of class conflict.

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Where Are the Workers? Where Are Their Families?

The Seaside Vacation as Solution

Strength through Joy became arguably the Third Reich’s most popular organi-
zation. Its success was due less to the shop-floor improvements, which its
officials prodded employers to initiate, and more to its ability to address
Germans as consumers, or at least as consumers of leisure. Between 1934 and
1938, the number of participants who attended its cultural events grew from
over nine million to over fifty-four million. By the end of 1938, its tourism
had enabled nearly forty-three million Germans to participate in its day outings,
weekend excursions, and longer domestic and overseas vacation trips, worry-
ing those in the Reich government who were most responsible for war prepa-
rations.

6

In 1936 in fact, not long after Hitler launched the Four-Year Plan to

free Germany from its dependence on imports critical to rearmament, the
head of the War Economy Staff, Colonel Georg Thomas, chastised Robert
Ley, the leader of the Labour Front. Strength through Joy, Thomas averred,
should strengthen the Volk in soul and body, but ‘under no circumstances’
should it ‘mushroom into an organized system of pleasure’ that threatened the
Third Reich’s immediate priority.

7

Despite KdF’s seemingly impressive growth, however, its leaders and pub-

licists were forced to acknowledge the limited impact of its programmes.
Reams of statistics in KdF periodicals testified to large numbers of hygieni-
cally and aesthetically ‘improved’ factories and shops, improvements that
employers were being prodded to undertake by the KdF office, the ‘Beauty of
Labour’. Yet these statistics did not reveal that workers were being coerced to
do the renovations in unpaid overtime.

8

Although low ticket prices encour-

aged many to attend KdF cultural events, tickets to other performances went
unclaimed, causing employers, whom KdF lobbied for subsidies, to hedge
their support over time.

9

Similarly, despite KdF’s claims as to the large number

542

Shelley Baranowski

6

On cultural events, see Otto Marrenbach, Fundamente des Sieges: Die Gesamtarbeit der

Deutschen Arbeitsfront von 1933 bis 1940 (Berlin, 1940), pp. 334–5. For a complete table on the
number of KdF travellers, see Hasso Spode, ‘Arbeiterurlaub im Dritten Reich’, in Carola Sachse,
Tilla Siegel, Hasso Spode, and Wolfgang Spohn (eds), Angst, Belohnung, Zucht und Ordnung:
Herrschaftsmechanismen im Nationalsozialismus (Opladen, 1982), p. 298. Although that figure
undoubtedly included repeat travellers, it was still impressive given the nation’s prewar population
of sixty-five million.

7

Wortprotokoll der 5. Tagung der Reichsarbeitskammer, 24 Nov. 1936 in Berlin, in Timothy W.

Mason, Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft: Dokumente u. Materialien zur deutschen Arbeiterpolitik
1936–1939 (Opladen, 1975), p. 182.

8

This was an especially prominent theme in the Deutschland-Berichte der Sopade (Frankfurt/

Main, 1980), for example, July 1936, pp. 886–7, and 5 Feb. 1938, pp. 174–5.

9

Deutschland-Berichte der Sopade, 2 July 1935, pp. 846 and 859; Die Deutsche Arbeitsfront, NS-

Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude an Direktor/Krupp, 11 Nov. 1937, Historisches Archiv Krupp,
Essen, WA 41/73–125.

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of workers on its tours,

10

and the fact that it enabled more wage-earners to travel

than had the Left’s touring clubs of the twenties, workers remained under-
represented among Strength through Joy tourists, especially on the longer
domestic trips and overseas cruises. Low working-class wages and identities
defined by the workplace rather than by leisure contributed their share to
keeping workers from travelling, as did the DAF’s failure to secure paid vaca-
tions as an across-the-board entitlement. The resistance of employers, no longer
constrained by trade unions or collective bargaining agreements, ensured that
German vacation policy remained less generous than in Britain, France, and
the United States, where legislative intervention or the relative influence of
organized labour forced employers to concede paid holidays, if only as a means
of securing cooperation.

11

As a result, civil servants and salaried employees,

who comprised much of the growth in leisure travel under the Weimar Republic,
predominated in Strength through Joy’s low-cost package tours, much to the
dismay of commercial travel agents, who complained that KdF had stolen
their customers.

12

Most seriously, Strength through Joy’s inability to dissipate class divisions

through tourism revealed an ancillary problem, its inability to deliver tour
packages to ‘racially valuable’ working-class families. As a rule, KdF’s travel-
ling wage earners turned out to be single, skilled, better paid, and above all
male, a fact that the above-mentioned material and cultural barriers only par-
tially explain.

13

KdF’s emphasis on the shop floor as the focus of organization

placed women workers at the margins of the DAF’s and KdF’s attention. This
emphasis was consistent with the DAF’s desire to address the source of class
conflict, the men who had formed the backbone of the Socialist and
Communist parties. More to the point, KdF adhered to the regime’s funda-
mentally bourgeois conception of the German family, updated to incorporate
Nazism’s racist agenda. That vision affirmed husbands as heads of households,

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

543

10

‘ “KdF”-Urlauber und ihre Berufe’, Peine Zeitung (16 April 1936), located in VVP 17, no. 2456,

Niedersäschisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Hannover.

11

On working-class incomes, see Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und

seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1997), p. 201, and Michael Schneider, Unterm
Hakenkreuz: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung 1933 bis 1939 (Bonn, 1999), p. 602. On cultural bar-
riers, see Keitz, Reisen als Leitbild, p. 253. And on the DAF’s attempts to pursue paid vacations, see
Hasso Spode, ‘Arbeiterurlaub’, 277–88. In Britain, the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 granted a
week’s vacation to five out of six wage-earners. See John L. Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and
Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester and New York, 2000), p. 59. In France, the Popular
Front government secured a two-week paid holiday in 1936. See Ellen Furlough, ‘Making Mass
Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comparative Studies of Society
and History, 40 (1998), 252–60. And in the United States, according to Cindy Aaron, Working at
Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York and Oxford, 1999), p. 238, the majority
of American industrial workers received a vacation with pay by 1940.

12

Semmens, Seeing Hitler’s Germany, pp. 103–04.

13

For further details, see Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass

Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 170–5.

539-559 GH-082773.qxd 18/9/07 2:05PM Page 543

while wives were essentialized as the mothers of racially-fit offspring, eschew-
ing wage labour in order to manage frugal and tidy Aryan homes.

14

Yet only

in response to criticism that Strength through Joy failed workers’ families did
its promoters come to appreciate tourism’s potential for advancing such a
vision. If the families of workers could consume leisure on a par with middle-
class families, whose travel had defined bourgeois consumption since the
nineteenth century, KdF’s claim to distinction over commercial tourism, its
ability to erode the barriers of bourgeois privilege, would prove valid. And, if
KdF was to follow the regime in promoting the family as central to the health
of the Volk, working-class families, and not just single male workers, had to
be accommodated.

15

Yet inasmuch as KdF wanted to reassure those such as

Colonel Thomas that its appeals to workers as consumers would not compro-
mise rearmament, its family leisure would need to reconcile the pleasures of
travel with the ethic of sacrifice.

Ironically, Strength through Joy turned aggressively to marketing variants

of tourism long associated with ‘luxury’ travel to draw in its prospective
clientele and to derive the maximum public relations benefit from doing so.
To dispense with the uncomfortable evidence of class distinction that had
often determined the assignment of cabins on its cruise ships, KdF commis-
sioned two new ‘one-class’ ocean liners, launched in 1938 and 1939 respec-
tively, the Wilhelm Gustloff and Robert Ley. In so doing it added to its
existing fleet of ships chartered from Hamburg South America and North
German Lloyd Bremen. To be sure, KdF’s attack on the stratified compart-
mentalization and the Victorian or Edwardian opulence of first class on ocean
liners was not entirely new. The French Line’s ‘one-cabin’ Chicago, launched
in 1908, eliminated first class while advancing the status of second and third,
starting a trend that other shipping lines adopted after World War I. Unlike
other ships, however, which created a new, ‘respectable’ tourist third class to
accommodate changing traffic patterns in the trans-Atlantic market, Strength
through Joy proposed to eliminate the classes altogether.

16

Nevertheless, the close association between family vacations and the all-

inclusive seaside resort, another trend that grew popular internationally during
the interwar period, carried much greater potential for addressing KdF’s gender
and class problem, inasmuch as the cost of cruises would probably have

544

Shelley Baranowski

14

See Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, pp. 110–80. Even labour shortages after 1936, which

pushed the regime to draft female labour and expand child care to promote it, did not discourage
KdF from adhering to women’s ‘natural’ role as mothers and housewives. The Beauty of Labour, for
example, cast employed women as mothers first and foremost, who worked only out of economic
necessity: ‘Wie sollen unsere Kindergärten eingerichtet sein?’, Schönheit der Arbeit, 3 (1938),
227–9.

15

Werner Kahl, Der deutsche Arbeiter reist! (Berlin, 1940), p. 34.

16

See Lorraine Coons and Alexander Varias, Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel in the

Interwar Years (Houndmills, 2003), pp. 25–64.

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remained prohibitive for families.

17

Ranging from Billy Butlin’s new holiday

camps in Britain, which provided vacations to families of modest means, to
the Royal Hawaiian hotel and resort in Waikiki, which pampered the wealthy,
interwar seaside resorts offered more than accommodation with bracing salt
air. They also provided multiple restaurants and forms of entertainment on
the premises so that guests would never have to venture beyond the resort
grounds. Aside from offering pleasure and convenience, the all-inclusive resorts
assured that owners and operators captured the spending of their guests.

18

Such resorts would serve KdF’s specific needs as well. They would steer its
tourists away from the well-established spas where regular patrons and pro-
prietors resented their presence, a recurring problem that forced KdF to send
its tourists to less-frequented sites. They also promised cost containments
that would permit wage earners and their families to spend vacations together
at bargain basement rates, thereby keeping the family consumption of leisure
within tolerable limits. Unlike other resorts and tourist destinations, where
children added to the costs of innkeepers and restaurant owners, all-inclusive
resorts would be planned from the ground up with children in mind.

19

Thus at the 1935 Nuremberg party congress, Robert Ley, who served as the

Nazi party organization leader as well as being the leader of the Labour Front,
announced plans for five Strength through Joy holiday camps on the Baltic
coast, one each near Königsberg, Danzig, Travemünde and Kolberg, and the
last on the Pomeranian island of Rügen. A projected 1.5 million holidaymakers,
each with a ten-day vacation, would be accommodated annually. According
to the KdF publicist, Werner Kahl, KdF’s seaside resorts would ‘make it possi-
ble to provide a family with children the vacation that they seek in nature, in
the sun, and in the sea air, which in the interests of the Reich’s healthy family
policy they simply must have.’

20

The Baltic projects were incorporated within

even more ambitious long-range plans that included sixty cruise ships,
twenty smaller KdF vacation hotels with twenty-four hundred beds each, and
five additional larger resorts—all told a recreation empire that would cater to
the leisure needs of the future German Herrenvolk.

Family Vacations and the Imperial Imagination at the Beach

The attractiveness of the Baltic coast for KdF lay in its rich history: it
emerged during the nineteenth century as a favourite vacation site for middle

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

545

17

In 1938, the cost per person for a cruise to Madeira departing from Hamburg was RM 120; Die

Deutsche Arbeitsfront Ns.-Gemeinschaft ‘Kraft durch Freude’ Gaudienstelle Bayerische Ostmark,
Hochsee und Landreisen, Kurzfahrten, Wanderungen und Segelsportkurse im Urlaubsjahre 1938, 5.

18

Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998),

pp. 240–59.

19

Kahl, Der deutsche Arbeiter reist, p. 34.

20

Ibid., p. 36.

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and upper class families, influenced by Romanticism’s veneration of nature,
and especially the sea. Its clientele included major political figures, Otto von
Bismarck among them, and cultural luminaries, such as Caspar David Friedrich
and Johannes Brahms.

21

The political makeup of the Baltic region was equally

congenial, for it yielded high National Socialist votes before 1933. Attentive
to the politicization of the last years of Weimar, observers could not help but
notice the numerous holidaymakers who demonstratively anchored their
imperial or swastika flags by their hooded wicker beach chairs and sand castles:
the British writer Christopher Isherwood, for example, observed a child of
five ‘stark naked, marching along all by himself with a swastika flag over his
shoulder and singing Deutschland über alles.’

22

The Baltic resorts had long

taken the lead among German spas in discriminatory practices, imposing high
spa taxes as a means of discouraging Jewish visitors.

23

Political and economic

considerations merged in the expectation that the new KdF resorts would stim-
ulate local economies, frequently a concern of Strength through Joy promoters
who arranged tours to ‘unspoiled’ but impoverished border regions. In this
case, the region was the ‘culturally endangered’ German east, now in need of
ethnic fortification against the ‘Slavic threat’ from Poland, that illegitimate
creation of the postwar peace settlement.

As the first to begin construction, the KdF resort at Prora (KdF-Seebad

Rügen) assumed pride of place in KdF’s brochures and periodicals, not least
because, according to Ley, the Führer himself conceived it. It was situated on
Prora bay on the island of Rügen, off the Pomeranian coast, between the spa
towns of Sassnitz and Binz, and scheduled to open in the spring of 1940. The
Labour Front’s construction crews broke ground in early May 1936 even
before the final architectural plans had been approved. From Prora’s launching
until the outbreak of war in 1939, when construction virtually ceased, KdF and
DAF publicists resorted to hyperboles to highlight their project’s uniqueness:
‘The words “KdF resort” have already become a concept known at home and
abroad, which binds the image of its construction’s imposing size with the total
novelty of its purpose’, wrote Otto Marrenbach. Prora was to be the ‘largest
hotel in the world’, proclaimed another announcement.

24

Typical of the superla-

tives, which the Nazi regime borrowed from American advertising for its own
underlying purposes, Hitler envisioned a vacation complex so large that it
would dwarf all others in existence; a complex that would serve both civilian and
military needs. Housing twenty thousand beds with a huge convocation hall

546

Shelley Baranowski

21

Klaus Granzow, Pommern: Ein Bildband der Heimat mit 159 Fotografien (3rd edn, Frankfurt/

Main, 1983), p. 23, and photo, p. 141; Spode, Wie die Deutschen ‘Reiseweltmeister’ wurden, p. 77.

22

Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (Harmondsworth, 1945), p. 88.

23

Frank Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist judenfrei’: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

(Frankfurt/Main, 2003), pp. 19, 108.

24

Marrenbach, Fundamente des Sieges, p. 361; Petra Leser, Der Kölner Architekt Clemens Klotz

(1886–1969) (Cologne, 1991), p. 215.

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as its axis, Prora would entertain holidaymakers to be sure, but it would also
be large enough to be transformed into a military hospital in the event of war.

25

Nevertheless, providing inexpensive holidays for working-class families was
its immediate concern. The resort was to become, in the words of the KdF
spokesman Werner Kahl, the ‘Eldorado of holidaymaking families with
children’, a seaside paradise that would ‘therefore remedy a notable deficiency
in the KdF trips so far.’

26

Ley claimed in a newspaper interview that a worker,

his wife and their children would enjoy a ten-day seaside vacation for the
remarkably low price of nineteen marks, which would include lodging, meals,
access to all recreational facilities and staged events, and even beach chairs,
towels and the spa tax.

27

The circumstances by which Strength through Joy acquired the land for the

resort seemed to confirm the Third Reich’s oft-repeated claim to having
achieved the ‘socialism of deed’. The timing of the construction, in fact, arose
from Ley’s desire to break ground for his project on the anniversary of the
abolition of the trade unions. According to Ley, the Labour Front and its sub-
sidiary would deliver the cultural privileges of the middle and upper-classes
by building a resort on an island well-known for its well-heeled and famous
summer sojourners, a rebuke to the Marxists who stirred up class hatred with-
out offering practical solutions for mitigating it. Yet, in adherence to the regime’s
practice of honouring workers while avoiding an assault on the class structure
as a whole, the resort was to occupy its own space on the secluded Prora bay,
courtesy of Malte von Veltheim, Prince of Putbus. It would not intrude upon the
established coastal towns, as this might have caused friction between KdF
and commercial tourists. An ardent Nazi and SA member, who typified the
rightward movement of Pomerania’s large landowners prior to the Nazi
takeover,

28

the prince signed over property to Ley from a nature reserve belong-

ing to his estates, virtually on a handshake and the testimony of a vaguely-
worded, hastily-drawn document.

29

A resort for male workers and their families

emerged from the financing of the Labour Front, putatively the workers’ rep-
resentative, and the patronage of one of Pomerania’s largest landowners.

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

547

25

Joachim Wernicke and Uwe Schwartz, Der Koloss von Prora auf Rügen (Königstein, 2003),

p. 34. The German-Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer was especially perceptive as to the impact
of mass advertising in the Third Reich. See his The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady
(London and New York, 2000), pp. 215–24.

26

Kahl, Der deutsche Arbeiter reist, p. 63.

27

‘Unterrredung mit Dr. Ley’, Hannoverscher Anzeiger (27 March 1938), NHH VVP, no. 2456;

Gritt Brosowski, ‘Die Nationalsozialistische Gemeinschaft “Kraft durch Freude” und das erste
“KdF”-Seebad auf Rügen’, p. 275, Fundus-Forum für Geschichte und ihre Quellen, 4 (1999) (PDF
document).

28

Shelley Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar

Prussia (New York and Oxford, 1995), pp. 145–76.

29

Hasso Spode, ‘Ein Seebad für Zwanzigtausend Volksgenossen: Zur Grammatik und Geschichte

des Fordistischen Urlaubs’, in Peter J. Brenner (ed.), Reisekultur in Deutschland: Von der Weimarer
Republik zum ‘Dritten Reich’ (Tübingen, 1997), p. 31.

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Prora’s distinctiveness as a Nazi social undertaking clearly emerges when

compared to plans developed during the Weimar period to service the leisure
needs of a working-class clientele. In the late twenties, two architects designed
an ambitious Thermenpalast (‘thermal palace’), a huge enclosed beach and
swimming area located in central Berlin that would have offered a summer
vacation all year round to those who could not afford a ‘real’ seaside sojourn.
Had the project been completed, it would have surpassed similar projects under
consideration in other European countries. In the heart of the capital city and
accessible to all at low cost—admission fees were to have been priced at
slightly above those of public baths—the Thermenpalast promised amenities
such as free entertainment, a laundry, a shoe repair shop, physiotherapy, and
spa treatments. Its high ceiling, brightly painted panoramic landscapes, airiness,
and indoor gardens would provide a self-contained experience seemingly far
removed from urban grime.

30

By contrast, Prora was to be far removed from

the city, particularly a metropolis such as Berlin, a Socialist and Communist
stronghold prior to 1933 and the site of numerous street battles between the
Nazis and the Left. Similar to the Labour Front’s plans for suburban settlements
and the Beauty of Labour’s interior designs for worker housing, which envi-
sioned modest yet well-lit and airy interiors, spacious enough for large families,
the Rügen resort would remove wage earners, albeit in this case temporarily,
from neighbourhoods with entrenched working-class subcultures and from
dark, cramped flats that fostered domestic dissention.

31

Thus by promoting rest-

ful and secluded family vacations, Prora would do its part to restore familial
harmony and male authority in working-class households, which unemployment
among proletarian men prior to the Nazi takeover had undermined.

32

Nevertheless, Prora’s domineering scale and imperialist mien disrupted KdF’s

depictions of cosy family harmony at the beach, even if its publicists acknowl-
edged no contradiction (Figure 25.18). Its chief architect, Clemens Klotz,
whose association with Ley dated back to the Kampfzeit and probably guaran-
teed his commission over eleven other competitors, had already anchored his
reputation with, among other structures, ‘order castles’ for the Hitler Youth and
the SS modelled on the fortresses of the medieval German crusader-colonizers
of the Slavic lands. Aside from Rügen’s focal point—a huge convention hall
for mass gatherings, which was given to the Hamburg architect Erich zu Puttlitz
by order of the Führer—the resort was essentially Klotz’s prize, a colossus that

548

Shelley Baranowski

30

Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, ‘The Thermenpalast (Thermal Palace), An

Outstanding German Water-Leisure Project from the 1920s’, in Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H.
Tabb (eds), Water, Leisure, and Culture: European Historical Perspectives (Oxford and New York,
2002), pp. 141–7.

31

Ronald Smelser, Robert Ley: Hitler’s Labor Front Leader (Oxford, New York and Hamburg,

1988), pp. 172–3; ‘Eine nachdenkliche Geschichte’, Schönheit der Arbeit, 2, 7 (Nov. 1937), 277–82.

32

See especially Pamela Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin,

1929–1933 (Cambridge and New York, 2004), pp. 80–120.

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would stretch nearly five kilometres, master the natural environment, and
express the regime’s anticipation of empire.

33

Although in a location that hardly resembled Hawaii or Tahiti, Prora’s prox-

imity to the continental living space of the future and its subtle evocations of
Germany’s lost colonies overseas underscored the global scale of German
desires. If ‘living space’ in the east was central to the Nazi and conservative
right and paramount to the Führer, who saw it as the bedrock of Germany’s
future global power, enthusiasts of overseas empire remained active and visible
throughout the interwar period. Solutions to the loss of Germany’s prewar
colonies varied, ranging from outright colonial revisionism to the extension
of informal economic influence. Deep-seated grievances against the postwar
peace settlement extended to the Entente’s justification for appropriating
German territories, which condemned Germany’s putatively ‘uncivilized’ con-
duct as a colonial master, and which deprived Germany of the moral authority
of a ‘civilized’ nation.

34

Indeed Prora curiously blended the overseas dimension

of German imperialism with the continental, for Le Corbusier’s architectural
drawings from the early thirties for a kilometre-long resort city on the Algerian
coast, with his emphasis on openness and sunlight, served as Klotz’s initial

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

549

Figure 25.18: The model of the KdF-
Seebad Prora as depicted in a contempo-
rary postcard.
www.ddr-im-www.de/index2.htm

via

‘Fotos’ link. Accessed 3 July 2007

33

For Klotz’s emergence, see Leser, Kölner Architekt, pp. 153–217; Barbara Miller Lane,

Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985), pp. 196–7;
and Jürgen Rostock and Franz Janicˇek, Paradiesruine: Das KdF-Seebad der Zwanzigtausend auf
Rügen (Berlin, 1995), pp. 46–55.

34

Marcia Klotz, ‘Global Visions: From the Colonial to the National Socialist World’, European

Studies Journal, 16 (1999), 57–9. For the survival of German maritime imperialism in the interwar
period, see Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, The Imperialist Imagination:
German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998), pp. 15–18; Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of
Empire: German Colonialism, 1919–1945 (Westport, 1964); Lora Wildenthal, German Women for
Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, N.C., and London, 2001), pp. 172–200; and Dirk van Laak, ‘ “Ist je ein
Reich, das es nicht gab, so gut verwaltet worden?” Der imaginäre Ausbau der imperialen Infrastruktur
in Deutschland nach 1918’, and Christian Rogowski, ‘ “Heraus mit unseren Kolonien!” Der
Kolonialrevisionismus der Weimarer Republik und die “Hamburger Kolonialwoche” von 1936’, in
Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Kolonialismus
(Frankfurt/Main and New York, 2003), pp. 70–90 and 243–62 respectively.

539-559 GH-082773.qxd 18/9/07 2:05PM Page 549

inspiration.

35

Despite subsequent revisions to the design, Prora departed

markedly from spa architecture elsewhere on the Baltic coast, for its design
and isolated location had more in common with post-1960 package tours to
high-modern beach resorts in the Third World.

36

Before construction began,

in fact, the resort’s land, which had previously consisted of unpopulated
forests and dunes, became the site for a vicarious experience of the tropics
through film: The Call of the Jungle, a Universum Film (UFA) production
directed by Harry Piel, featured wild animals, on loan from zoos, befriended
but tamed by the hero. Once construction of the resort was under way, however,
its physical structures would colonize the ‘jungle’ for real, while the influx of
tourists would ‘civilize’ it.

37

Most of the resort’s structures adopted the steel and concrete functionalism

that the Nazi regime employed in industrial buildings; so much so that Ley’s
bitter enemy, the ‘blood-and-soil’ anti-modernist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg,
complained that Prora amounted to little more than a soulless, urbanized ‘mass
enterprise’.

38

Klotz’s final plans called for eight identical residence complexes

extending along the beach, each with six stories and eleven sections. Four halls
were to be symmetrically positioned on either side of the convention hall and
reception area. As in Le Corbusier’s proposed Algerian resort, an ‘interior
avenue’ traversed behind the hotel blocs, a dividing line between them and the
train station, garage, laundry, housing for the resort’s employees, and other
maintenance buildings.

39

The final design of the resort, which Strength through

Joy publicists touted as the most modern in the world, was sufficiently impres-
sive to win a grand prize at the 1937 Paris international exhibition, even though
construction was far from complete.

40

The products displayed in the German

exhibition hall in Paris testified to Nazism’s penchant, consistent with its
antipathy to American-style materialism, for infusing material goods with non-
commercial and spiritual value. Yet the recognition accorded to the Rügen resort,
as well as the prominent display of a model of KdF’s newest cruise ship, equally
lent substance to the Nazi regime’s claim to international audiences that its
variant of ‘socialism’ had raised popular living standards.

41

550

Shelley Baranowski

35

Unlike Germany of course, French tourism during the interwar period could develop its imperi-

alist messages through tourism to French colonies, as well as the through its Colonial Exposition.
See Ellen Furlough, ‘ “Une leçon des choses”: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France’,
French Historical Studies, 25 (2002), 441–73.

36

Wernicke and Schwartz, Koloss von Prora, pp. 35, 44.

37

Ibid., p. 45. See Ariane Heimbach, ‘Die Inszenierte Wildnis: Exotische Tierwelt im Film’, in

Jörg Schöning (ed.), Trivialen Tropen: Exotische Reise- und Abenteuerfilme aus Deutschland,
1919–1939 (Hamburg, 1997), pp. 164–5.

38

Spode, ‘Seebad für Zwanzigtausend Volksgenossen’, p. 32.

39

Wernicke and Schwartz, Koloss von Prora, pp. 36–7.

40

Ibid., p. 37.

41

Deutschland in Paris: Ein Bild-Buch von Heinrich Hoffmann (Munich, 1937), p. 88. For an

astute analysis of the complexities of German displays, see Karen A. Fiss, ‘In Hitler’s Salon: The
German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale’, in Richard A. Etlin (ed.), Art, Culture,
and Media under the Third Reich (Chicago and London, 2002), pp. 316–42.

539-559 GH-082773.qxd 18/9/07 2:05PM Page 550

The monumental neoclassical style of Prora’s focal point, the multipurpose

convention hall which Erich zu Putlitz designed in deference to the Führer’s
fondness for that style, egregiously departed from the functionalism that
characterized most of the resort’s structures and most clearly exposed the ten-
sion between the regime’s promotion of family leisure on the one hand and
mass mobilization on the other. Although it had more in common with Speer’s
architectural plans for the reconstruction of Berlin than Prora’s utilitarianism,
the hall was to stage the völkisch mass rallies deemed crucial to building the
popular commitment necessary to enabling the regime’s future military achieve-
ments, despite its potential for subdivision to allow for concerts, plays, and art
exhibits. Four hundred thousand square metres in size, and designed to hold
all twenty thousand holidaymakers at once, the largest such hall in Germany,
the centre would accommodate parades, demonstrations, and other forms of
live propaganda. Its planned construction, which anticipated the use of a cast
in-situ skeleton frame with brick infill and pre-stressed reinforced ceiling slabs,
followed the most advanced engineering practices of the period.

42

A dock of

six hundred metres in length with slips large enough to anchor two of KdF’s
cruise ships enhanced the possibilities for fascist spectacle at the resort’s
centre.

43

Such evidence of völkisch communitarianism, discipline, and regi-

mentation in Prora’s built environment testified to the uneasy juxtaposition of
Nazism’s putative respect for the sanctity of the patriarchal family and the
family’s dissolution in the great mass of Volk comrades.

Not surprisingly, Prora’s size was to have a major impact on its natural sur-

roundings. Contrary to reports in the press, which insisted that the construction
would respect the natural environment, Klotz authorized the removal of one
hundred and fifty thousand cubic metres of woods that had once occupied the
space between the beach and the resort.

44

Rather than honouring Rügen’s his-

tory or the distinctiveness of the local environment, Klotz planned gardens in
place of the woods which, although they might have been soothing and attrac-
tive, would have obstructed the panoramic views of the sea that holidaymakers
would enjoy. A wide promenade would wend its way along the beach in front
of the gardens, protected by a retaining wall instead of sand dunes. In addition
to assuming their new role as thoroughly modern flâneurs, working-class fami-
lies would in the process become masters and mistresses of their environment.
Much like middle-classes holidaymakers, they would gaze into the horizon as
well as upon their fellow tourists.

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

551

42

Reichsamtsleitung Kraft durch Freude, Unter dem Sonnenrad: Ein Buch von Kraft durch Freude

(Berlin, 1938), p. 127; Corinna Dean, ‘Bidding for Prora—vacation housing for Third Reich Workers
in Rügen, Germany: Marginalia’, Architectural Review, May 1995 (online version accessed 14 May
2007, via Look Smart Find Articles).

43

Wernicke and Schwartz, Koloss von Prora, p. 40.

44

Brosowski, ‘Nationalsozialistische Gemeinschaft’, p. 286.

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As the docks for KdF ships revealed, the National Socialist imperial imagi-

nation implicitly shaped Prora in yet another way: in the desire of KdF planners
to reproduce elements of its newest cruise ships, the Wilhelm Gustloff and
Robert Ley, then under construction. As a weapon in the Reich’s anti-Entente
arsenal, KdF cruises seemed to rival Britain’s presence on the high seas and
evoked memories of prewar Weltpolitik, in which Germany had once challenged
Britain’s naval supremacy. Now, however, opening the sea lanes to German
workers, in the eyes of KdF promoters, legitimated Germany’s claim to global
preeminence by other means, demonstrating the regime’s success in eliminating
management–labour conflict and raising living standards without raising
wages.

45

By 1936, the same year that construction began at Prora, Strength

through Joy cruises had carried three times as many passengers as the commer-
cial German and British shipping lines taken together.

46

So, like the cabins of

KdF’s majesterial new ocean liners which would all have portholes facing the
sea, each guest ‘cabin’ at Prora would face the Baltic. The structure and windows
of the ‘community houses’ evenly spaced between the lodging blocs and extend-
ing vertically down to the sea were curved and elongated so as to recall a ship’s
stern. Similarly, the resort’s infrastructure, its sources of heating and electricity,
were to be centralized in the manner of a ship’s hull. The manager of Prora’s
technical functions, Ley envisioned, would be called ‘captain’. Finally, bad
weather would not hinder access to meals, events, and entertainment. Except for
the beach itself, resort venues and the walkways to them would be enclosed
as on board ship.

47

The vicarious experience of sailing on the high seas promised by Prora’s

ship-on-land design might at first glance seem absurd. KdF’s ships, after all,
sailed to exotic and distant ports of call, such as Madeira, the Azores, Italy,
Greece and Yugoslavia, voyages facilitated by agreements with dictatorships
sympathetic to the Third Reich. Cruises to Libya, then an Italian colony, allowed
German tourists to ride camels across the desert, gaze upon sun-bleached
Arab settlements, and directly ‘experience the enchantment of an alien world
through dance, demonstrations of wild games on horseback and the strange
music of the sun-tanned sons of the desert.’

48

Prora’s prospective holidaymakers,

552

Shelley Baranowski

45

On this topic see Daniela Liebscher, ‘ “Geburtsstunde einer neuen Internationale?” Die

Wechselbeziehungen zwischen der faschistischen Opera Nationale Dopolavoro, der NS-Gemeinschaft
“Kraft durch Freude” und der internationalen Sozialpolitik der Zwischenkriegszeit’ (Dissertation,
Tübingen, 2003). As Liebscher argues, both Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany attacked
the reformism of the International Labour Office in Geneva, which gave labour organizations an
equal voice and advocated higher wages. See also her article, ‘Mit KdF “die Welt erschliessen”: Der
Beitrag der KdF-Reisen zur Außenpolitik der Deutschen Arbeitsfront 1934–1939’, 1999: Zeitschrift
für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, 14 (1999), 42–72.

46

Rainer Schauer, ‘Denuncianten, Bier und Wein: Ein Urlaubskonzept für die Verführung des ganzen

Volks: Kreuzfahrt im Dritten Reich’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 298 (22 Dec. 2005), R2.

47

Wernicke and Schwartz, Koloss von Prora, pp. 44–5.

48

Unter dem Sonnenrad, p. 113.

539-559 GH-082773.qxd 18/9/07 2:05PM Page 552

on the other hand, would remain safely ensconced within Germany’s borders,
perhaps accepting a domestic seaside vacation as the next best thing to a cruise
they could not afford. Still, Strength through Joy’s seaside vacations advertised
a future of possibility. In addition to anticipating the ‘high’ standard of living
that the Herrenvolk would permanently enjoy once living space was secured,
the amenities at Prora would expose its clientele to a modern lifestyle and offer
an inexpensive respite for workers’ families, who bore the consequences of
rearmament and autarky in frozen wages, austerity and endless labour on the
job and in the home.

Intimacy and ‘Luxury:’ Family Togetherness at Prora

As with other interwar seaside resorts, Prora’s conception and design implicitly
embraced the elements of modern leisure, which celebrated light, fresh air
and sunshine as the elements of good health and well-being. Yet beaches and
suntans conveyed potentially subversive messages that could undermine Nazi
and KdF values, which privileged monogamy and ‘traditional’ domesticity.
Strength through Joy spokesmen often condemned unrestrained sensuality and
pleasure-seeking for its own sake because they allegedly weakened the obliga-
tions of individuals to family and Volk. The popularization of the suntan, by the
French fashion designer Coco Chanel in the twenties and numerous Hollywood
film stars thereafter, not only joined health to the material ‘good life’, it also
implied the liberation of women from the constraints of acceptable femininity.
In fact, the apparent adventurousness of young single German women on KdF
cruises to Italy and Greece regularly concerned KdF promoters and Gestapo
spies, who suspected sexual dalliances between female tourists and locals and
perceived a threat to racial purity.

49

New definitions of freedom promised the

equally unsettling liberation of men as well: stories of male travellers seeking
the companionship of ‘childlike’ brown-skinned, non-European women in their
visits to exotic South Pacific islands had become a staple of European trave-
logues.

50

Nevertheless, the sunshine and fresh air lifestyle proved sufficiently

malleable, inasmuch as the Beauty of Labour’s shop floor improvements and
domestic interior designs stressed the healthful properties of openness and
light. Refreshing recreation, like healthy workplaces, would guarantee higher
productivity, reproduction and longer working lives. Even more important, if
the sea, sand and sun conveyed tourism’s potential for transgressing normative
moral codes, Prora’s location offered the same without the risk of racial mixing.
Unlike cruise ships docked at sunny, southern European ports of call, which

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

553

49

For more detail, see Baranowski, Strength through Joy, pp. 180–2.

50

These themes are explored brilliantly by Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex since

the Grand Tour (London, 2001), especially pp. 170–215.

539-559 GH-082773.qxd 18/9/07 2:05PM Page 553

provided opportunities for interaction between German tourists and their
hosts, the Rügen resort promised self-sufficiency and self-containment.

Strength through Joy was sensitive to the budding consumer tastes of the

interwar period, but it was also high-minded in its anti-commercialism and
anti-materialism, and paid increasing attention to personal comfort and enjoy-
ment. From its beginnings, KdF spokesmen insisted that its tourists would
experience aesthetic, educational, and ‘spiritual’ rewards: ‘Our vacation trips are
not commercial undertakings,’ asserted one KdF periodical, ‘but the occasion
[sic] for the highest idealism.’

51

Yet if Strength through Joy never totally

abandoned that message, it soon recognized that elevating workers to the sta-
tus of racial comrades required that they share in the material comfort that its
middle-class tourists regularly demanded, particularly in light of the evidence
of worker restiveness at longer hours and stagnant wages. Whereas the Beauty
of Labour envisioned sanitary and functional working-class flats that would not
encourage unrealistic desires for expensive goods advertised by ‘film people’,

52

Prora’s furnishings represented a partial accommodation to tourists’ expecta-
tions. KdF promised that the resort would bathe working-class families in what
for the time seemed like unimaginable luxury, while respecting their desire
for personal space and privacy. Eager to trumpet the honour that the regime
accorded to labour and deny KdF’s reputation as catering to an undiscrimi-
nating and uncouth herd, KdF planners promised the fulfilment of personal
and familial desires. To be sure, the guestrooms in Prora’s Spartan residence
halls were modestly sized, averaging no more than twenty-five square metres.
Yet a door between cabins allowed separate but discreetly connected quarters
so that parents and as many as four children could share a common space.
Moreover, the Beauty of Labour’s interior designs stipulated that each room
should come equipped with a sink with hot and cold running water, a table
and chairs, wardrobe, upholstered sofa, and an oversized window to allow an
expansive view of the outside and the illusion of space inside. A rarity even
for the vacation hotels of the elite, central heating would warm each guest room.
In addition to assuring comfort for holidaymakers, that convenience would
enable the resort to remain open nine months of the year.

53

As in their descriptions of the appointments on KdF cruise ships, KdF publi-

cists lovingly described Prora’s unparalleled amenities, which would in their
view compare favourably to upper-class watering holes.

54

Each community

house would have a dining room large enough to accommodate the guests of
two residence halls, a kitchen and smaller café, a terrace, as well as a reading

554

Shelley Baranowski

51

NSG Kraft durch Freude, Gau Pommern, Monatsprogramm no. 1 (1 Dec. 1934), 5–9.

52

‘Eine nachdenkliche Geschichte’, 277–82.

53

Rostock and Jani

ek, Paradiesruinen, p. 58.

54

For contemporary descriptions, see Kahl, Der deutsche Arbeiter reist, pp. 60–3; and Unter dem

Sonnenrad, pp. 127–32.

539-559 GH-082773.qxd 18/9/07 2:05PM Page 554

and game room. Aside from the multi-purpose convention centre, Prora would
include a cinema, billiard rooms and bowling alleys, and a café seating two
hundred and fifty atop an eighty metre tower. Allowing a birds-eye view of
the resort and the surrounding region in keeping with the panoramic emphases
of tourism, the tower would be taller than the radio tower in Berlin.

55

A nursery

would entertain small children while their parents, wives especially, enjoyed
adult activities.

56

In addition to a huge outdoor salt-water swimming pool, at

least one version of Klotz’s plans envisioned two large sports halls, one to the
north of the convention hall and one to the south, both of them containing
indoor pools with wave-making machines that would be the ‘largest in
Europe’.

57

The train station dedicated exclusively to transporting holiday-

makers to Prora was not the only evidence of the regime’s determination to
encourage the mobility of the masses. A parking garage on the premises was
designed to hold three thousand vehicles, and not merely those of the resort’s
employees. As Prora was to enable a family vacation for Germans of modest
means, so too would Strength through Joy’s investment in personal transporta-
tion. The Volkswagen, or ‘KdF-Wagen’, which the Führer himself promoted
as the inexpensive, mass-produced automobile for workers and their child-rich
families would serve equally well to take them on vacation, whether on camp-
ing trips or to Prora.

To sustain the intimacy of its guestrooms, Prora’s variety and ultimately even

its size provided space for holidaymakers to satisfy their private recreational
desires, despite its mass provisioning to be delivered in its relentlessly standard-
ized residence halls and community houses. According to KdF publications,
already under pressure to contest KdF’s reputation as the purveyor of Fordist
tourism for the hoi polloi, Prora would guarantee that its tourists would have
enough personal space. Each holiday maker, according to a lavish and well-
illustrated book that KdF released in 1938, would claim fifteen square metres
of the beach to him or herself, not including the space available in the woods
behind the resort. Such a projection would have provided sixty square metres
for a husband, wife, and two children. Moreover, the diversity of activities would
distribute holidaymakers to such an extent that no one would feel cramped or
regimented.

58

At Rügen, a modest degree of comfort, intimacy, and privacy

for the Herrenvolk was to be honoured out of deference to consumer sensibil-
ities, even as Strength through Joy simultaneously developed Prora’s potential

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

555

55

‘KdF.-Bad auf Rügen wird Wirklichkeit: Ferien-Eldorado der 20000-Fernheizwerk und

“Wolkan-Restaurant” ’ (22 Feb. 1937), NHH VVP 17, no. 2456. Unfortunately, the name of the
newspaper in which this article appeared was indecipherable.

56

Hugh R. Wilson to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 11 Aug. 1938, with enclosed report on Strength

through Joy, 35, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box32, Germany: Hugh R. Wilson: March–Nov.
1938 (i301) Index. Accessed 14 May 2007.

57

Wernicke and Schwartz, Koloss von Prora, p. 40; Rostock and Janiceˇk, Paradiesruinen, pp. 58–9.

58

Unter dem Sonnenrad, pp. 129–30.

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for fascist mobilization. In all likelihood, had KdF actually completed the resort,
its holidaymakers would have undermined the efforts of KdF event planners
to discipline and politicize, much like KdF’s cruise passengers and domestic
tourists, who rarely passed up the opportunity to pursue their own desires, to
the dismay of their tour leaders. Yet if such assertiveness proved incompatible
with regimentation, it did not mean the rejection of Nazism.

Pleasure and Exclusion: KdF and Nazi Racial Policy

Touted by the Labour Front as the most prestigious building project in the
Reich, the Prora resort engaged forty-eight construction firms of various sizes
and employed two thousand workers, rivalling the Autobahn in its scale.

59

By

the outbreak of war, the DAF had invested nearly one hundred million marks.

60

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939, however, brought KdF’s
tourism programmes to a halt, including the Rügen project. Workers were
either redirected to the construction of the Peenemunde rocket factory on the
Usedom peninsula nearby, or to the West Wall that fortified Germany’s fron-
tier against France. Only the Polish and Russian forced labourers brought in
later to complete the roofing constituted an exception. Although seven out of
Prora’s eight residence blocs and the south reception building had been com-
pleted, except for the interior finishing work, the resort’s centrepiece, the con-
vention hall, had barely begun. Plans for the garage disappeared altogether.
Weekly savings plans for the Volkswagen remained active as a source of capital
that the regime could exploit, yet the acceleration of rearmament after 1936
postponed the campaign to motorize the masses. During the war, Prora tem-
porarily housed hundreds of German refugees, such as the victims of the bomb-
ing of Hamburg in July 1943 or expellees fleeing the eastern Prussian provinces
ahead of Soviet forces. Although, after 1945, island residents plundered silver-
ware and linens and Soviet troops destroyed part of the facilities, hauling off
whatever was useful as reparations, Prora was subsequently used as a military
installation by the German Democratic Republic. Since unification in 1990,
portions of the complex have housed two museums, a youth hostel, and the
improbably named Miami Discotheque. Local resistance foiled a buyer’s
attempt to reopen Prora as a hotel.

61

Regardless of the debate about its status, the Rügen resort remains a monu-

ment to the Nazi regime’s pursuit of a modest consumption that would conform

556

Shelley Baranowski

59

Brosowski, ‘Nationalsozialistische Gemeinschaft’, 131.

60

Robert Ley, ‘Zwei Jahre “Kraft durch Freude” ’, in Ley, Deutschland ist schöner geworden

(Munich, 1942), p. 77.

61

See Peter Monteath, ‘History, Memory and the Colossus of Rügen’, Debatte, 9 (2001), 39–55,

esp. 47ff.; Steve Rose, ‘Mein camp’, The Guardian (21 March 2005); Michael Rutschky, ‘Im Kraft-
durch-Freude-Bad Prora’, in Stephan Porumba and Hilmar Schmundt (eds), Böse Orte: Stätten
nationalsozialistischer Selbstdarstellung—heute (Berlin, 2005), pp. 58–71.

539-559 GH-082773.qxd 18/9/07 2:05PM Page 556

to its social, familial, and racial agendas. Acutely aware that the economic hard-
ships of Weimar contributed significantly to its elevation to power, the Nazi
leadership was attentive enough to Germans’ dreams and desires to find low-
cost ways to satisfy them without damaging its immediate goals: a flexibility
of sorts that encouraged KdF functionaries to engage in fantasies of their
own. As its own creation, furthermore, the Third Reich could terminate KdF’s
travel programmes when war finally came, although not without promising
that the Reich’s putatively rapid victory would soon reinstate them. Finally, if
Strength through Joy’s appeal to workers as consumers seemed a novel way to
buy their loyalty, as well as testimony to the regime’s recognition that police
terror and concentration camps would alone not suffice in that task, KdF’s still-
born dream of family vacations for workers underscored the spottiness of its
record. For all the ambiguities and limitations, however, Nazism’s hesitant nods
to consumer desires complemented its radical ‘biopolitics’, its institutional-
ized, technocratic and medicalized intervention to purify the ‘racial body’
(Volkskörper) of ‘undesirables’.

62

Indicative of KdF’s growing recognition

of consumption as a privilege bestowed on working-class initiates of the mas-
ter race, Prora and the leisure policy that it represented highlight an under-
appreciated but insidious component in the Nazi regime’s pursuit of popular
acquiescence to its racial policy. Consumption, or at least the possibility of it,
helped to segregate racially and politically reliable Germans from the Third
Reich’s political and racial enemies.

KdF’s contribution to Nazi racial policy started with its exclusion of Jews

and other ‘undesirables’ from its tours, which complemented the increasingly
radical practice of commercial tourism, wherein local Nazi officials excluded
Jews even from resort towns and spas that had previously tolerated them.

63

That contribution grew immeasurably through KdF’s ability to enhance the
regime’s popularity during the thirties. Strength through Joy’s vacation travel,
especially its cruises, introduced German travellers to destinations where
popular living standards fell below those at home. Visits to Portugal, southern
Italy and North Africa, where poverty was clearly visible, encouraged tourists,
including many of the workers among them, to appreciate the relative material
well-being with which the Third Reich had provided them, to attribute poverty
to racial difference, and to recognize themselves as members of a racial elite,
even though many of the same tourists ignored or playfully flouted KdF’s
officious, heavy-handed direction. Although the number of KdF cruise pas-
sengers was markedly lower than those who participated in its domestic trips,
photo albums, postcards, tourist recollections in newspapers and periodicals,

The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

557

62

As Edward Ross Dickinson argues, ‘Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our

Discourse About “Modernity” ’, Central European History, 37 (2004), 1–48, ‘biopolitics’ has
emerged as the new ‘master narrative’ of modern German history.

63

Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist judenfrei’, pp. 116–41.

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and word of mouth created a substantial ripple effect.

64

In mid-1936, com-

menting on reports from their informants inside Germany, the exiled Social
Democratic leadership conveyed its concern over KdF’s mushrooming leisure
empire and its popularity among workers, even as they noted widespread cyni-
cism regarding the regime’s claims to honour workers with low wages, vacation
trips that remained beyond the financial reach of many, the gratuitous sense
of entitlement of party functionaries on KdF’s cruises, and the resistance of
hotels and restaurants to KdF tourists.

65

Yet KdF’s fostering of a consumerist imagination with its promise of future

abundance, so evident at Prora, was arguably its most significant contribution
to the Nazi culture of exclusion. The contrast between KdF’s sustained growth
and mushrooming ambitions on the one hand, and the claustrophobic lives of
Nazism’s ‘enemies’ on the other became increasingly marked, as the experience
of Victor Klemperer, the German Jewish professor of Romance languages,
illustrates.

66

Because of his conversion to Protestantism and marriage to

an Aryan, Klemperer did not immediately lose his chair at the Technical
University of Dresden. Although finally forced to retire in 1935, and to haggle
endlessly over the size of his pension, Klemperer and his wife Eva could for
a time maintain a middle-class lifestyle, owning a cat, purchasing a cottage on
the outskirts of the city and buying a car, both of which gave a sense of freedom
despite the hideous expense of maintenance. Nevertheless, as Klemperer acutely
observed the seeping poison of Nazi repression, he revealed his mounting
dread of a future of poverty, marginalization and the threat of physical harm.
By Kristallnacht in November 1938, an escalation of anti-Semitic violence at
a time when Strength through Joy’s new cruise ships were being launched and
the construction at its Prora resort steamed ahead, the Klemperers’ modest
familial pleasures were under assault. After the outbreak of war, when KdF
assured its clientele that its pleasures had only been postponed until a German
victory,

67

the Klemperers endured ever increasing restrictions on their freedom

of movement, Victor’s stint in jail and the loss of their possessions, and the
imminent prospect of his deportation was forestalled only by the Allied bomb-
ing of Dresden. If indeed biopolitics threatened to infect every aspect of life in
the Third Reich, although not without resistance,

68

the politics of consumption,

558

Shelley Baranowski

64

Again for further detail, see Baranowski, Strength Through Joy, especially pp. 162–98.

65

Sopade (3 July 1936), 879–87. Written a month after construction on the Rügen project began,

Sopade called attention to the planned five resorts and the prospective fleet of thirty cruise ships.

66

Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941, trans. Martin

Chalmers (New York, 1998).

67

‘Nach den Glücklichen Inseln: Mit dem KdF.-Flagschiff “Robert Ley” nach der fernprächtigen

Welt von Madeira und Teneriffa’, ed. Karl Busch with an introduction by Bodo Lafferentz (Berlin,
1940), found in the Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz, Bestand 714, no. 3838.

68

The complex interplay between the regime’s directives from on high and their local enactment

is an important theme in Mouton’s From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk.

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with their subtle appeals to desire, proved every bit as divisive, promising
pleasure for the racially acceptable and horror for the regime’s enemies.

Abstract

Despite its promise to deliver vacation packages to German workers,
the huge Nazi leisure organization Strength through Joy (Kraft durch
Freude, or KdF) fell short of its claim, failing especially to attract
working-class families to its tours and sea cruises. To remedy its defi-
ciency and to better support the racial and social policies of the Nazi
regime, KdF began constucting a 20,000-bed resort on the Prora inlet
of the Baltic Island of Rügen in May 1936. The resort aimed to pro-
vide inexpensive seaside vacations for male workers, their wives and
children, a modest form of consumption that would open an important
bourgeois leisure practice to wage-earners and provide respite for
‘racially valuable’ working-class families. The plans for the resort com-
bined space for fascist mobilization with architectural details and
vistas that reflected the Nazi regime’s imperialist ambitions. Yet in
its variety of leisure activities, the layout of its guestrooms, and the
amenities promised to its holidaymakers, the ‘KdF-Seebad Rügen’
also promoted family intimacy in an environment far removed from
urban, conflict-ridden, working-class neighbourhoods. The resort
would thus advance the socially harmonious Volksgemeinschaft that
the regime sought and give a foretaste of the abundance to come once
Lebensraum was obtained, while simultaneously demonstrating that
holidays in the present and abundance in the future would be limited
to the Herrenvolk. Construction ceased when war broke out in 1939.
Nevertheless, the Prora project, like KdF itself, illustrated the man-
ner in which the Nazi regime used consumer desires and visions of
family intimacy to advance its racism.

Keywords:

Strength through Joy, Kraft durch Freude, mass tourism, KdF-Seebad

Rügen

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