I’m making my way through Adam Tooze’s acclaimed, but very, very long ‘The Wages of Destruction: The Making & Breaking of the Nazi Economy’. When, on p.144 I came across the rather amuzing passage:“In 1939 only 30,000 male school leavers entered the workforce as unskilled labourers, as compared to 200,000 in 1934. For many working-class families, the 1930s and 1940s were a period of real social mobility, not in the sense of an ascent into the middle class, but within the blue-collar skilled hierarchy, prompting one author to speak of the ‘deproletarianization’ of the German working class.”

I hear that in the 1950s Germany wage-labour still existed. Though, I’m happy to be corrected.