(Mirror. Addendum.)

They were nearly all small. In only 6 cases did more than 80 people take part; the average was probably around 30. In every case the strike was confined to a single workplace, in larger firms to a single department. This brings out clearly one particularly important point: police terrorism had robbed the working class of its ability to achieve spontaneous active solidarity on all but the smallest scale.

Without their own organisations, groups of workers in such conflicts were heavily isolated from each other. The strikes were also all short-lived — the Gestapo, state and party officials were always on the spot the same day, often within hours.

The strikes all seem to have been about questions of wages and working conditions; sometimes specific acts of chicanery by employers or by the labour exchanges furnished the occasion. Some strikes were defensive, others, it seems, offensive efforts to gain improvements; and there are trustworthy references to offensive strikes in other sources from these years.

The tabulation is too sketchy to permit a more substantial analysis, but one thing does clearly stand out: in the light of the prohibition on strikes, of the permanent repression and surveillance, of the fact that there was no doubt that the Gestapo would arrest strikers, it called for a very high degree of determination and solidarity to down tools.