Raem, Heinz-Albert: Katholischer Gesellenverein und Deutsche Kolpingsfamilie in der Ära des Nationalsozialismus, Mainz 1982

Heinz-Albert Raem: Katholischer Gesellenverein und Deutsche Kolpingsfamilie in der Ära des Nationalsozialismus.

With 125,000 members in 1931, the Catholic Journeymen’s Association (KGV) belonged to the leading German Catholic associations. The KGV rejected National Socialism on principle before 1933 and considerable forces within the Nazi movement aimed to destroy the orgnanzation in the first weeks after seizing power. The brutal attacks on the participants of the Munich Journeymen’s Conference in June 1933 demonstrated this intent to the Catholic public in a drastic way. Only through changing the KGV’s name to the »Kolping Family« was it possible to save the association.

Heinz-Albert Raem bases his study largely on voluminous, previously unused source materials. He outlines the association’s laborious, often dazzling-appearing efforts to reach a clear organizational line after the Nazi regime was established. Finally, Raem recreates blow-by-blow the destruction of the German Kolping Family by the Nazi rulers, from the German Labor Front’s (DAF) prohibition on redundant membership in other unions and bans at the provincial level to the suppression of the association’s work through a multitude of official ordinances and decrees.