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Winterhilfswerk collection can

Written by Gilles Lanners

About the Winterhilfswerk

This object was chosen because it symbolizes the forced participation of the Luxembourgish population in national-socialist charity, an important mainstay of the propaganda efforts.[1] The Winterhilfswerk (WHW) thus played an essential role in the national socialist ideology because it represented the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the society. It was founded in 1931, as a result to the economic decline following the crisis in 1929. After Hitler seized power, he incorporated the WHW in the national socialist structure. Thus, the WHW was an essential element in the national solidarity, which Hitler often addressed in his speeches.[2] Moreover, the creation of the WHW was directly linked to the Führer-Auftrag “Keiner soll hunger, keiner soll frieren.”[3] What is interesting to note is that, contrary to how the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, tried to present it later on, the WHW as an organ of welfare and safety of the population had already been active under the Republic of Weimar, and thus was not an invention of the national socialists.[4]

The can rattlers

The so-called can rattlers, who walked around with the cans and collected money, made sure that no one forgot to pay his part for the wellbeing of the population. This particular can was donated to the museum by the municipality of Schifflange. In an interview with the Musée de la Résistance, the Schifflange native Camille Robert explained that his family was forced to make donations to the WHW. He stated that it was very well traced which family payed how much and that, in case a family had not payed enough according to its social status, they were called to account and had to pay the missing amount of money. In some cases, the fact that someone was not able to pay his part to the WHW even led to this person losing his job.[5] Therefore, it can be stated that the social dimension of the Winter Relief was rather limited.

In his book Into the Darkness, Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, an American historian (and white supremacist) wrote down the following episode in relation to the WHW, after a visit to Germany in 1939:

Once a fortnight, every city, town, and village in the Reich seethes with brown-shirted Storm Troopers carrying red-painted canisters. These are the Winter-Help collection-boxes. The Brown-Shirts go everywhere. You cannot sit in a restaurant or beer-hall but what, sooner or later, a pair of them will work through the place, rattling their canisters ostentatiously in the faces of customers. And I never saw a German formally refuse to drop in his mite, even though the contribution might have been less than the equivalent of one American cent.[6]



[1] Tennstedt, Florian, Wohltat und Interesse. Das Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes: Die Weimarer Vorgeschichte und ihre Instrumentalisierung durch das NS-Regime, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13/2 (1987), 157.

[2] See for example: Führer-Reden zum Winterhilfswerk 1933-1936, Berlin 1937.

[3] Nobody shall suffer famine, nobody shall freeze.

[4] Tennstedt, Wohltat und Interesse,157.  

[5] Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, New York, 1959, 234.

[6] Stoddard, Lothrop, Into the Darkness, accessible online via Gutenberg Project: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300731.txt