Kiran Klaus Patel

A close analysis of two parallel organizations (the Reich Labor Service of Nazi Germany and the Civilian Conservation Corps of New Deal America) which fits into the broader study of how the major powers made use of the experiences of the Great War to deal with the Great Depression and then World War II. The author gives much focus to the ambitions of Konstantin Hierl, the head of the German organization. Hierl saw his mission as laying the foundations for the true school of Germany in regards to creating the new Nazi man and who fought for this agenda past the time when the RAD made symbolic, let alone economic sense, and had merely become another of the inefficient paramilitary organizations that drained German resources. This is as compared to how the CCC was always meant to be an emergency measure, and when the times that called it forth had passed it was allowed to fade away; having probably achieved more useful results.

I might also post a disagreement with the book's abstract. Rather than being an study of two organizations with "startling similarities," one finds two superficially comparable institutions where form cloaked radically different social content, once you got past the pictures of the fit, young men working in the outdoors.… (meer)