Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung Internet-Supplement ...

12 BzG-Supplement No. 1/2000
Richard Croucher
Perhaps there was something of a missed opportunity here. If so, it could be
interpreted as a small part of the wider opportunity unions missed to put their ideas
for social reorganisation into effect in this period which has been suggested by some
historians such as Michael Schneider. 18 Schneider felt that by the standards of the
unions’ own pretensions and the mood of the population, initial instinct would lead
one to accept that this was in fact the case.
Yet he absolves the German unions from that charge in view of the context: they
had to face occupying powers.
Schneider argues that the British Labour Government may have been sympathetic
to the unions’ plans, but they were neither willing nor able to defy the Americans to
whom ideas of a ‘social state’ were quite alien. The argument is plausible, but was
not tested at the time because the British did not attempt to persuade the Americans
of the German union case. Nor were they lobbied to do so by the TUC. It has been
suggested that the TUC did not support the German unions in their demands because
of their subordination to the British Government. 19 In the case of the TUC’s rejection
of Boeckler’s demand for one all-embracing union federation, McShane argues that
this was related to the TUC’s view of the German character, since it stressed the German
tendency ‘to blindly obey instructions from Headquarters’ 20 Yet these general
explanations may be complemented by a quite particular one: Gottfurcht took the view
at a critical stage in developments that Luce should not be challenged across a broad
front.
Gottfurcht’s exchange with Luce may have reflected his perception of TUC attitudes
and policies towards, and links with, the British Government but is significant for
its apparent consequences. The exchange certainly seems to have had the effect of
making Gottfurcht less prone to criticise the Military Government, and may also have
brought a corresponding increase in Luce’s confidence in his own views. After the
debate, Gottfurcht’s reports to the TUC on the German situation became in general
less critical of the Military Government’s activities. His report of May 1949, for
instance, placed great emphasis on the question of Manpower Division’s Labour
Advisors, who were being reduced and whose roles were being taken over by others,
who had, he felt, shown their hostility to trade unions in the past. 21 In this sense, it
confirmed his earlier views on the relatively positive attitudes of the Manpower
Division. The later reports were more concerned to secure appropriate staffing of the
occupation government than to criticise their policies. By the time that Gottfurcht
resigned from his position as TUC-DGB liaison officer, Tewson agreed with Ludwig
Rosenberg of the DGB that there was less need to carry on the liaison in the same
way, even though he wished to carry on the ‘intimate’ relationship with the DGB. 22
Tewson wrote just over two years after the Gottfurcht-Luce exchange, but discussion
in the interim had tended to shift in the general direction of trying to assist the German
unions in their attempts to gain restitution of their pre1933 property, and away from