Conclusion

Abstract

In 2009, the German neo-Nazi party NPD went public with their plans to open a KdF-museum in an abandoned furniture store in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony.¹ This site was of great symbolic significance. The city of Wolfsburg is home to the headquarters of the Volkswagen company, and, in fact, both company and town had been founded together by the Nazis in 1938. The entire undertaking ran under the aegis of the German Labor Front. The newly established town was called “Stadt des KdF-Wagens” [“City of the KdF Car”] during the Third Reich, this name being an explicit reference to Volkswagen’s prestige project, the construction of the so-called “KdF car,” the predecessor to the VW Beetle.² The building in which, in 2009, the NPD envisioned creating the new museum was located quite prominently, close to the main Volkswagen plant. While the plan never came to fruition,³ it caused much dismay and provoked significant public protest. This plan and the reactions to it show, first, on the most basic level, how much Kraft durch Freude is still remembered in Germany. Second, how the decision of the neo-Nazi party to commemorate KdF in a museum highlights how the leisure organization’s work continues to be seen as a “positive” achievement of the Third Reich.⁴ For the NPD, a museum commemorating KdF would have been an ideal way to celebrate the larger Third Reich and especially its “achievements” in the field of social politics; the party may have been able to use the museum as a way to “win over” today’s Germans to their political and ideological platform. Equally, those protesting against the museum may also have been worried, not just about this manifestation of neo-Nazism, but specifically about the potential “advertising power” of the KdF, precisely because they too might in fact have considered KdF to have been a somewhat positive element of what was overall a criminal and mass-murderous regime. In other words, both in the plans for, and counter-reactions to, the museum, we can discern a certain consensus about the powerful propagandistic effect of the KdF “brand”— a power that seems still to endure (at least the NPD appear to think so, and the protesters against the museum may have also feared this).⁵