(This takes 2¼ minutes to read.)
Quoting Steve Cushion in On Strike Against the Nazis, pages 47–8:
On 12 September 1943, the [Axis] authorities informed the miners that they would be expected to work on Sundays, an announcement that produced widespread absenteeism and strikes in 11 pits: in the Nord, at Notre‐Dame, Desjardin, Bernard, Renard, Bonnel, Lenclos, Audiffret, Saint‐Marc and in the Pas‐de‐Calais, pit 24 at Courrières, 4 at Carvin and 7 at Wingles.
A second attempt by the occupants and the employers on 8 October caused a strike at Nœux‐les‐Mines and Bruay. The Wehrmacht occupied the mines that afternoon and set up heavy machine guns around the pit heads. Alongside the refusal to work on Sundays, the strikers raised other demands relating to their working conditions as well as health and safety.
One such list of demands addressed to the mine management:
- Linking of wages to the cost of living, that is a 50% increase, with all bonuses consolidated into the basic wage
- Increased food provision, 800 grams of bread per day, 300 grams of meat, double the cooking fat provision and an increase of 25 kilos of potatoes per week.
- No working on Sundays and public holidays.
- The end to fines and other punishments that we suffer too often.
- More and better soap, overalls and espadrilles whenever we need them.
- Real measures of health and safety in order to end the accidents which we suffer too frequently.
- The freedom of all prisoners and deportees from both this strike and from 1941.⁹¹
On 10 October, the clandestine union organisation called a general strike in the mining basin. It was particularly well followed in the Pas‐de‐Calais in the mines of Béthune, Bray and Lens. In the Nord, it affected the pits Saint‐René, Sainte‐Marie, Vuillemain, Desjardin, Delbroye in the Douaisis, Aremberg, Sabatier, Thiers, La Grange and la compagnie Vicoigne in the Valenciennois.
Before work started again on 20 October, 50,000 miners took part in the strike, suffering 800 arrests. The threat of Sunday working was abandoned, the miners’ wages were increased by 18% and they were given an issue of shoes and overalls. The Reich lost 280,000 tons of coal and the railway workers from the depots in Lens and Béthune launched a solidarity strike on 16th October.⁹²
There was also widespread industrial action on 11 November 1943, anniversary of the surrender of the [Second Reich’s] forces at the end of the First World War, which must have been particularly irritating for the occupying authorities, deliberately so. There was a 24 hour strike in the engineering factories in Tourcoing, with a one hour strike from 11am to 12 noon in most industries in Lille, Tourcoing and the Sambre basin.⁹³
The PCF did not have a great influence among the railway workers of the Forbidden Zone; they stayed loyal to their pre‐war reformist representatives, above all to Augustin Lamand from Lens. However, Lamand and his SFIO comrades were not the typical bureaucrats, but honest trade unionists who had entered the resistance early on.⁹⁴
They distributed propaganda leaflets and clandestine newspapers, they organised solidarity with the miners and maintained communication between the Forbidden Zone and the rest of France. A group of railway workers helped the armed groups by training them to derail trains and sabotage the railway. Their October 1943 strike lasted 5 days.
(Emphasis added.)
Click here for events that happened today (May 1).
1925: The Third Reich’s future head of state received a letter notifying him that he had failed to file tax in 1924 and in the first quarter of 1925.
1932: Joachim von Ribbentrop joined the NSDAP.
1933: The NSDAP, unable to cope with the 850,000 new requests for membership, called a moratorium on recruitment until May 1937, except for those already in affiliated organisations (SA, SS, HJ &c.). As well, the noted academic, Carl Schmitt, Professor of Law at Berlin University, joined the NSDAP. It was through his influence that so many German academics and lawyers would be exulted to accept the new order.
1934: Heinrich Himmler gave SS leader Theodor Eicke the task of reorganizing all concentration camps, using Eicke’s former direct responsibility, Dachu concentration camp, as a model.
1936: As the Kriegsmarine commissioned fleet escort ship F5 into service, and cruiser Köln began two months of operations off Portugal, the NSDAP introduced ambitious new plans for controlling the population. Key among these were the dividing of the population into blocks of forty to sixty households under local controllers (not necessarily a party member) responsible for the political outlook, education and morale of every inhabitant, member or not.
1937: Berlin declared that all German children were to be raised as loyal Fascists. Imperial destroyer Kashi transferred to the Manchukuo Navy and was renamed Haiwei. She would serve as Manchukuo’s flag ship.
1938: General Franco demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender in the Spanish Civil War when Dr. Negrin tried to sue for peace.
1939: Berlin promoted Hans‐Joachim Marseille to the rank of Fahnenjunker‐Gefreiter, and the Kampfgeschwader 55 wing formed with two groups; Major General Wilhelm Süssmann became its first commanding officer.
1940: Rudolf Höss became Auschwitz’s first Commandant in reoccupied Poland. Washington urged Fascist Italy to stay out of the European War; Rome’s response noted that the Third Reich was undefeatable. Berlin also delayed its reinvasion of France to May 5, 1940, and promoted Otto Skorzeny to the rank of Unterscharführer as Imperial troops began to march toward Yichang, Hubei Province, China. Lastly, a Fascist bomber crashed in Essex, England, killing the crew along with two civilians, and wounding a further 150 people.
1941: The Groß‐Rosen concentration camp, formerly a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, became an independent camp. Axis submarine U‐552 sank British passenger liner Nerissa one hundred miles north of Ireland at 0027 hours, slaughtering 207 but leaving 83 survivors. Axis tanks attacked Tobruk, Libya at 0715 hours, Axis submarine U‐103 sank British ship Samsø two hundred miles off Sierra Leone at 1834 hours, and Axis bombers began attacking Liverpool, England at 2215 hours. Additionally, Generalleutnant August Krakau succeeded Robert Martinek as the commanding officer of the 7th Mountain Division.
1942: In Berlin, the German High Command recorded that units on the Eastern Front were currently 308,000 men understrength. Meanwhile, the Imperial Japanese 18th Infantry Division captured Mandalay, Burma.
1943: Karl von Le Suire became the commanding officer of 117th Jäger Division as the Kriegsmarine commissioned U‐1059 into service with Oberleutnant zur See Herbert Brüninghaus in command. It assigned her to 5th Submarine Flotilla for training.
1944: The Organizational Division of the German Prisoner of War Office reported that a total of 5,165,381 Soviet prisoners were in the Reich’s captivity.
1945: Joseph Goebbels and his wife suicided in the garden of the Chancellery in Berlin after poisoning their six children with cyanide. Near Plön, Karl Dönitz took his new post in accordance with his (former) Chancellor’s will and immediately ordered the strongest resistance in the east, as tens of thousands of civilians struggled to stay ahead of oncoming Soviet forces. Axis pilot Willi Kriessmann ferried an Ar 234 jet bomber to Luftwaffe bomber group Kampfgeschwader 76 as the Axis lost Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt (in Bad Tölz) and the column of prisoners of war that SS‐Feldgendarmerie personnel forced out of the Marlag und Milag Nord POW camp (in Westertimke) to the Allies. Vice Admiral Yoshiharu Kobayashi became the Maizuru Naval Arsenal’s commanding officer in Kyoto Prefecture while Axis concentration camp authorities ordered the execution of Kurt Schuschnigg and the Axis’s 12.Armee retreated from Berlin to the Elbe River and attempted to begin negotiations with Yankee troops.
