Even the most ruthless autocrats have to keep their people entertained; it’s better that they’re content and distracted rather than taking their frustration out on the government. Strength through Joy was an initiative that had an appealing façade, but like with the unemployment reduction, a closer look reveals results that are far less impressive.

Yet commercial tourism did not easily lend itself to the promotion of the [Third Reich’s] goals. Despite the rapid ‘synchronization’ of local and regional agencies that promoted tourism and the conspicuous inclusion of [Fascist] commemorative sights among domestic tourist destinations, [Fascist] commercial tourism emphasized well‐travelled vistas, spas and coastal resorts, unwilling to place ideology before tourist desires.⁴

Even more glaringly, the cost of commercial travel remained prohibitive for wage earners, whose integration into the ‘racial community’ the [Third Reich] considered central to its vision.

[…]

Despite KdF’s seemingly impressive growth, however, its leaders and publicists were forced to acknowledge the limited impact of its programmes. Reams of statistics in KdF periodicals testified to large numbers of hygienically 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 encouraged 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 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 underrepresented 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 vacations as an across‐the‐board entitlement.

The resistance of employers, no longer constrained by trade unions or collective bargaining agreements, ensured that [Fascist] 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 travelling 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 partially 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 régime’s fundamentally bourgeois conception of the German family, updated to incorporate [Fascism’s] racist agenda.

That vision affirmed husbands as heads of households, while wives were essentialized as the mothers of racially fit offspring, eschewing 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 régime 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 compromise rearmament, its family leisure would need to reconcile the pleasures of travel with the ethic of sacrifice.

(Emphasis added.)