As the war ended, surviving members of Germany's former trades union leaders set about re-establishing collective interest representation for the workers. Alongside uncertainties about future Allied policy or the employers' position, many unionists were worried about what the response of the Hitler Youth (HJ) generation would be. After all, no German aged 26 or less in 1945 could have had any experience of a trades union. Indeed, those born at the end of World War 1 and who thus entered the labour market during the slump, frequently went from unemployment to Reich Labour Service to military service to wartime call up without ever being part of a normal industrial workforce at all.Youngsters that did manage to gain some industrial experience knew only the emasculated Councils of Trust and the German Labour Front. If they managed to assert their interests in the boom conditions of the late 1930s and early 1940s they did so only on an individual, not an organised collective basis. In addition, the young generation knew nothing of Weimar's subculture of workers' political and cultural organisations, banned since 1933. Terror had made it in many cases too dangerous for parents to communicate an anti-Nazi view to their children even in private.

Particularly worrying for older labour leaders in 1945 were the many signs that the Nazis had been at least partially successful in creating out of young Germans a generation of willing followers. In the HJ, in national service and in wartime military service the Nazis drilled youngsters from all social backgrounds to accept the discipline of hierarchical organisations. At the same time, the Nazis' propaganda and social policy enjoyed considerable resonance.