GERMAN PHILATELY

PROPAGANDA POSTCARDS
(1935)

This page was last updated
16-Sep-2026 05:27

DER "DEUTSCHE"
VOYAGE of "der DEUTSCHE"
(Jul 1935)

BACKGROUND: This postcard was issued to commemorate a voyage of the M.S. Der DEUTSCHE by the NORD DEUTSCHE LLOYD Shipping company




This double-card commemorates a Kraft durch Freude (KdF, "Strength Through Joy") cruise aboard the "Deutsche", paired with an actual onboard dinner menu.

The text identifies it as part of "Urlauberfahrten zur See 1935 der NS-Gemeinschaft 'Kraft durch Freude' (Sea Vacation Voyages 1935 of the Nazi Community "Strength Through Joy"), with the cogwheel-and-swastika emblem of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF, German Labour Front). KdF was the DAF's leisure and recreation arm, founded in November 1933 under Robert Ley, created in the vacuum left after the Nazis dissolved Germany's independent trade unions that same year.

The KdF offered German workers heavily subsidized vacations, cruises, concerts, and sporting events, genuinely popular with many ordinary Germans who'd never before been able to afford travel, and simultaneously one of the regime's most effective pieces of soft propaganda: proof, in its telling, that National Socialism materially improved workers' lives (while, notably, these programs were progressively closed to Jews and other groups excluded from the "Volksgemeinschaft").

The pictured scene is a straightforward Bremen tourist view, looking through the Börsenpassage (stock exchange arcade) toward the Bismarck monument at Bremen Cathedral, likely handed out to passengers embarking from Bremen, the home port of Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL).

The menu makes the connection concrete: it's from the steamer "Der Deutsche," on Tuesday, 2nd Jul, 1935, flying the Norddeutscher Lloyd house flag. That ship had begun life in 1924 as the Sierra Morena, an NDL liner built for the South America passenger trade. The DAF chartered it in 1934, renamed it "Der Deutsche," and refitted it as a single-class ship carrying roughly 1,000 passengers and by 1935 the DAF owned it outright, with NDL continuing to operate it under charter. That single-class layout was itself part of the messaging: unlike conventional ocean liners with segregated first/second/third-class decks, KdF ships symbolically erased class distinction, presenting all passengers as equal members of the "national community."

The menu itself is plain, hearty North German fare rather than luxury dining, Holstein soup, homemade bratwurst with sour lentils and salt potatoes, afternoon coffee and cake, and for dinner Labskaus (a classic sailor's hash) with pickled herring, fitting the program's working-class, egalitarian self-image.