WOMEN IN THE THIRD REICH

How difficult it is to draw clear-cut

lines between the victims and the
accomplices in the Third Reich,
womens history has, until recently,
been far less nuanced; German
women seem so obviously to have
been the victims of Nazism.
Indeed, one of the aims with which
the Nazi movement came to power
was the removal of women from all
areas of public life, both economic
and political; Emancipation from
emancipation was the Nazi slogan
and for women this meant, at least
in the purity of Nazi ideology, that
women must be confined to the
separate sphere prescribed by

the unique qualities of their own

biological nature, namely the
home and the family. It has been
argued that women were treated
primarily as objects in the Nazi
regime, reduced to those functions
of their bodies which could serve
the Nazis racial goals. Denied even
the most elementary autonomy
required to assume the role of an
active subject in Germany, women
could scarcely, so this
interpretation runs, be responsible
for any of the Nazi regimes
enormous crimes. Only men could
assume this guilt, because under
the Nazis, only men were allowed,
in any meaningful sense, to be

historical actors. The Third Reich

was a male dictatorship which
oppressed all women. AntiSemitism and racism were male
ideologies, alien to womens
caring, feminine nature.
Diametrically opposed to this view,
which has been advanced most
adamantly by Gisela Bock, is the
position taken by Claudia Koonz in
her book, Mothers in the
Fatherland. Koonz suggests that,
far from being the victims of
National Socialism, many women
were accomplices of Nazism
because the emotional work they
performed within the private
sphere of the family contributed to

the reproduction and stability of

the Nazi system. Womens
historians have, however, begun to
realize that most women in the
Third Reich cannot simply be cast
in the role of victim or
perpetrator. Early discussions of
womens position under Nazism
failed to recognize the complexities
of Nazi policy toward women. Eve
Rosenhaft observes, for example,
that
it is no longer possible to assert
simply that National Socialism
pursued a conservative (or
reactionary) policy of returning
women to the home. On the
contrary, within the context of a

general determination to
subordinate women to
institutionalized male power, the
Nazi system identified a place for
women at work as well as in the
family. What was peculiar to
National Socialism was its intention
to rationalize the process of
deciding which women should
perform which functions.
After 1933, women were expelled
from positions of influence in the
state administration. In the Third
Reich, women were either barred
altogether from state employment
or else permitted only a very
limited access. But even in the
public sector, Nazi efforts at

masculinizing employment were

by no means thorough or complete.
Ursula Nienhaus research shows,
for example, that significant
numbers of women continued to
work in the Postal Service after
1933. Some 250 of these women,
all active National Socialists, even
managed to achieve higher level
positions where they exercised
considerable authority over other
women, including the female
forced laborers who did the heavy
lifting and carrying during the war.
The thousands of women who
worked in the Postal Service, which
also controlled the German
telephone system, helped to

ensure the performance of

communications functions that
were vital to the German war
effort. Some even helped the
Gestapo by listening in on
telephone conversations between
individuals who were under police
surveillance. In short, these women
actively worked for the Nazi
regime. The Nazis could not
exercise the same direct influence
over female employment in private
industry. The system of marriage
loans introduced in 1933 tried to
draw women out of the workforce,
but the economic needs of
employers as well as of hardpressed working-class families, still

coping with the effects of mass

unemployment proved more
decisive. During the 1930s, not
only did the numbers of married
women working in industry and
commerce not decline but the
numbers of married women
working actually increased
between 1933 and 1939. The
rationalization of German industry
in the 1930s and 40s demanded an
adequate supply of unskilled or
semi-skilled assembly-line labor.
Nazi officials and industrial
managers argued that womens
physical and mental characteristics
made them ideal candidates for the
boring, monotonous repetition of

assembly-line labor. And womens

assembly-line work appeared to
pose no serious threat to womens
health or reproductive capacities,
so long as it was flanked by
maternal welfare schemes which
would ensure that German women
continued to produce healthy
Aryan children as well as industrial
goods. In 1942, the German Labour
Front (DAF) even supported a plan
for a national maternity law
(Mutterschutzgesetz). But Aryan
womens bodies could be protected
from extreme physical exploitation
because large numbers of nonAryan females were forced to slave
in German war industry with no

regard to their physical well-being

or even their survival. Most
industrialists were prepared to
support maternal welfare programs
for Aryan working mothers as long
as National Socialist racial policy . .
. procured a sufficient work force,
composed of both men and
women, to whom considerations of
population policy did not apply.
Despite the obvious racial
privileges enjoyed by Aryan
women, Gisela Bock still insists that
all women, Aryan as well as non
Aryan, were victimized by the
sexist-racist Nazi regime.
Racially inferior women were
certainly worked to death

(Vernichtung durch Arbeit) or

simply exterminated. But even
Aryan women judged by the Nazis
to be biologically unworthy were
subjected to forced sterilization
(which, Bock argues, was far more
traumatic, physically and
psychologically, for women than for
men). And Bock argues that the
harsh penalties for abortion or the
use of birth control victimized even
the women judged to be
biologically worthy by forcing
them into compulsory
motherhood. Adelheid von Saldern
shows, however, that Bock fails to
recognize important distinctions
between different categories of

women. A middle-class German

woman denied access by Nazi
population policies to abortion or
birth control was hardly the same
kind of victim of Nazi racism as a
Jewish woman murdered in an
extermination camp. And while
Nazi racial policies may have been
formulated largely by men, women
frequently implemented them. The
women who continued to function
as social workers and healthcare
professionals after 1933 were
increasingly caught up in the Nazis
use of the health and welfare
services for eugenic screening and
regulation. These women became
active participants in the Nazi

killing machine. It would appear,

then, that at least some women
cannot claim the blessing of
having been born female so far as
responsibility for the crimes of the
Nazi regime is concerned. Yet even
the acknowledgment that certain
women were perpetrators as well
as victims, that in the
concentration and death camps,
some women treated other women
with particular cruelty still leaves
us with an incomplete picture of
women under Nazism. The position
of women who were not the explicit
victims of biological and racial
persecution must be seen as
complex and contradictory, a site

of contradictions (Gemengelage)
where subordination and
oppression were often mixed
together with new possibilities and
hopes. In her study of the League
of German Girls (BdM), for
example, Dagmar Reese has
discovered that the Nazi regimes
invasion of the most intimate
reaches of private family space
supported young womens own
desires for escape from parental
and familial controls.
the BdM as a time of personal
growth and achievement over
which Nazi sexism seems to have
cast hardly a shadow. In the

League of German Girls, young

women were able to make careers
for themselves as group leaders,
not because of their ideological
enthusiasm but as a result of their
organizational capacities and
leadership skills; indeed, their
experiences in the BdM prepared
some of these women to become
socially and politically active in the
post-war years. Reese concludes
that the Nazi regime was able to
instrumentalize these young girls
desires in the expansion of its own
power; at the same time, these
young women became willing
accomplices (willigen
Komplizinnen) of the Nazi regime,

actively, if unconsciously,
participating in the construction of
Nazi domination by fulfilling their
own personal needs. The most
recent work in womens history has
thus begun to produce a
differentiated description of
womens complicated and
contradictory relationships with
Nazism, which will no longer allow
us to speak of women as if they
possessed a homogeneous
collective identity. However,
womens history has not yet
managed to negotiate the difficult
passage to gender history.
Certainly, references to Nazism as
a particularly sexist gender

regime abound in current

discussions of women in the Third
Reich. Yet a comprehensive history
of gender relations in the Third
Reich, examining Nazi
representations of both
masculinity and femininity,
their interactions and mutual
exclusions, has not yet emerged
from the new womens history
Nazi Germany is considered a
period of great hullabaloo not just
in the history of Germany but the
whole world actually. The period
witnessed phenomenal (not
positive in most cases) in society,
polity, culture etc. of the nation.
The regime also witnessed changes

in the condition, perception and

construction of women and led to
construction of a new gendered
identity restricting the visible space
for women. This identity has
elements of economic disruption,
political mobilization and racism all
intertwined together to form a
gendered ideology. Here we will
discuss how such phenomenal
changes came about in the Nazi
regime.
According to gisela bock When
historians deal with women in
modern Germany, they generally
do not consider racism or racial
discrimination against women,'
while the literature dealing with

anti-Jewish racism and the

Holocaust generally does not
consider either women's specific
situation or the added factor of
sexism. The extent to which the
racist tradition was concerned with
those activities which then and
now are considered "women's
sphere-that is, bearing and rearing
children-has also not been
recognized. women's historians
interest in the "scientific" or
eugenic form of racism. The race
hygiene discourse since the end of
the nineteenth century deals with
women much more than do most
other social or political theories,
since \women have been hailed as

"mothers of the race," or, in stark

contrast, vilified, as the ones guilty
of "I-racial degeneration." Then,
too, definitions of race hygiene
made at the time show some
conscious links between this field
and women's history, describing it,
for instance, ("procreation
hygiene")
Charu gupta points out that with
the coming of National Socialism,
the process of female emancipation
was reversed, her degradation and
depersonalization became an
element of German ideology' The
desirability of motherhood for all
German women became the
central issue and family was seen

as the germ cell of the nation, class

or volk. .according to charu gupta,
Women appeard in the Nazi world view,
primarily as motherseither as Aryan
mothers, to be encouraged to have
more children and to be made fit to do
so by the new emphasis on physical
training which the Nazis introduced in
schools, workplaces and organisations
such as the League of German Girls; or
as 'inferior' mothers, as Jewish, gypsy,
handicapped or other 'degenerate'
mothers and potential mothers, to be
discouraged or prevented from having
children and to be rigidly separated from
the favoured majority of the
population. this went hand in hand with
an extreme separation of spheres for

men and women. There was a

distancing of the household from the
'productive' sphere. The notion of
'private woman' and 'public man';
masculine/feminine; strong/weak
dichotomy; was a part of this concept of
sexual polarity. The married pair came
to be viewed as complementary:
husband representing strength,
domination, the world; the wife
weakness, sexuality, subordination, the
home, i e, her supposedly 'natural' or
'biological' domains. This stereotypical
role clearly fixed women's position in the
home and in the family
When the Nazis came to power, they
were confronted by a declining birth
rate. They stated that the problem
stemmed from the women's movement.

Such women's organizations based on

bourgeois liberalism were abhorrent to
the Nazis. It was believed that the
women's movement was part of an
international Jewish conspiracy to
subvert the German family and thus
destroy the German race. The
movement, it claimed was encouraging
women to assert their economic
independence and to neglect their
proper task of producing children. It was
spreading the feminine doctrines of
pacifism, democracy and
'materialism'. This also went hand-inhand with the Nazi image of seeing the
woman as a mother and not as a sexual
parasite. She was the breeder of races:
'To breed means to create, by means of
deliberation and planned utilisation of all
aids, a generation which at least is not
below the value of the progenitor, and if

possible, will improve the stock from

generation to generation!' In fact, in
Mein Kampf Hitler glorified the brutality
of marital union for the sake of breeding.
Going by the method of the cattle
breeder, Richard Walter Datre (Hitler's
Reich leader of the peasants and
minister of agriculture) divided girls into
four classes: those wellsuited for
procreation, those less well-suited,
those hardly suited, and those unfit for
procreation
According to martin Durham, In
Hitlers mien Kamp There is no
chapter specifically devoted to the
question of womens role in either
the movement or the future state,
but the work does, however,
address the relationship of women

and Volk at several points. In this,

he shows the influence of two
forces that were of importance not
only in Germany and would have
lasting influence on the extreme
right as a whole. The first was
moral conservatism, espoused in
Germany by Protestant and
Catholic organizations, in which the
separation of sexuality and
marriage was seen as emblematic
of a decadence which threatened
both family and nation. The second
was eugenics, the scientific school
founded in the late nineteenth
century by Francis Galton for the
improvement of human stock.
Nationalists were pro-natalists,

concerned that their nation was not

successfully keeping up with the
birth-rate of potential rivals. Where
eugenics differed from pro-natalism
was in denying that an increase in
numbers was sufficient. For
eugenicists, what mattered was
that only those they categorized as
fit should procreate. This was
positive eugenics, alongside which
was to be found negative eugenics,
the discouragement of breeding
by those defined as unfit. Neither
moral conservatives nor
eugenicists are necessarily fascists
and, as we will see, we should not
assume that fascists are
necessarily proponents of

traditional morality or selective

breeding. The populations of large
cities were being increasingly
affected by syphilis, it declared,
with the inevitable consequence
that the vices of the parents were
revealed in the sicknesses of the
children. What was needed was a
fight against prostitution and false
prudery. The young needed to be
helped to marry early, not only so
that prostitution could be curbed
but because the purpose of
marriage was to serve one higher
goal, the increase and preservation
of the species and the race.
According to martin durham,
According to Hitler- Theatre, art,

literature, cinema, press, posters,

and window displays must be
cleansed of all manifestations of
our rotting world and placed in the
service of a moral, political and
cultural idea. Public life must be
freed from the stifling perfume of
our modern eroticism The right of
personal freedom recedes before
the duty to preserve the race.
Thus according to him, defective
people should be prevented from
propagating equally defective
offspring and, if necessary, the
incurably sick will be pitilessly
segregated. Hitler linked women
with the anti-Semitism and antiblack racism that suffused the

German extreme right. In modern

Germany, he declared, hundreds
of thousands were seduced by
Jews who, with satanic joy lurked
in wait for the unsuspecting girl
whom he defiles with his blood,
thus stealing her from her own
people. Alfred Rosenberg held that
the state was based on male
warriors and as such should not be
influenced by women while a
second, Gottfried Feder, declared
that women should be rescued
from Jewish notions of equality in
order to be restored to their proper
position of maid and servant. The
NSDAP was clearly a party that saw
women above all as mothers. This

did not mean, however, that it did

not want women as members, even
though in January 1921 its first
general meeting decided that no
women would be allowed to run as
candidates. In the very earliest
period of the party, women may
have reached 10 per cent of its
membership (in Munich in 1921 the
figure was almost 14 per cent) but
this fell away to around 5 per cent
by 1922. From early on, however,
in addition to those women who
belonged to the party, womens
groups were also set up to help its
work in particular localities. Among
the activities these groups
engaged in was the provision of

canteens for SA men, the making

and mending of uniforms, and
bandaging the men after clashes
with opponents. Women also went
door to door collecting for less well
off members and, during election
time, canvassed for the party.

Women appeared in the Nazi world

view, primarily as motherseither
as Aryan mothers, to be
encouraged to have more children
and to be made fit to do so by the
new emphasis on physical training
which the Nazis introduced in
schools, workplaces and

organizations such as the League

of German Girls; or as 'inferior'
mothers, as Jewish, gypsy,
handicapped or other 'degenerate'
mothers and potential mothers, to
be discouraged or prevented from
having children and to be rigidly
separated from the favored
majority of the population. Thus
reproduction, or as Gisela Bock
prefers to call it, 'the reproductive
aspect of women's unwaged
housework', was directly affected
by state policy. In context of Nazis,
race and gender, racism and
sexism are closely connected with
each other. The issue of
motherhood went hand in hand

with compulsory sterilization and

had a close bearing to a sort of
'race hygiene' culture. Gisela bock
also points out that most of the
scientific and pseudoscientific
superstructure of eugenic racism,
especially its mythology of
hereditary character traits, is
concerned with the supposedly
"natural" or "biological" domains in
which women are prominent-body,
sexuality, procreation, educationthe heretofore "private" sphere. For
many reasons, eugenics and
racism in general are significant to
women's history. After a long
hiatus, the result in part of Nazism,
interest in the history of women in

Germany has seen a revival during

the past half-decade or more.
However, this interest has focused
almost exclusively on the historical
reconstruction and critique of those
norms and traditions that
underlined women's "natural"
destiny as unwaged wives,
mothers, and homemakers. Those
with this perspective see National
Socialism as either a culmination
of, or a reactionary return to, belief
in women's "traditional" role as
mothers and housewives; motherhood and housework become
essential factors in a backward,
pre- modern, or precapitalist "role"
assigned to women.' under the

Nazi regime women counted

merely as mothers who should bear
and rear as many children as
possible, and that Nazi
antifeminism tended to promote,
protect, and even finance women
as child bearers, housewives ,and
mothers. The Nazis were by no
means simply interested in raising
the number of childbearing women.
They were just as bent upon
excluding many women from
bearing and rearing children-and
men from begetting them-with
sterilization as their principal
deterrent.
The obsession with motherhood
comes out clearly in Nazi writings.

Just as men served the state by

fighting, so women served by
bearing children. The theme of
childbirth as an analogue to battle
was a popular one in Nazi ideology
'Every child that a woman brings
into the world is a battle, a battle
waged for the existence of her
people. This went hand in hand
with an extreme separation of
spheres for men and women. There
was a distancing of the household
from the 'productive' sphere. The
notion of 'private woman' and
'public man'; masculine/feminine;
strong/weak dichotomy; was a part
of this concept of sexual polarity.
Oppression of women in Nazi

Germany in fact furnishes the most

extreme case of anti-feminism in
the 20th century. There was a
multiplicity of responses towards
women and the family, i e, multiple
exploitation and simultaneous
repressive protection
When the Nazis came to power,
they were confronted by a
declining birth rate. They stated
that the problem stemmed from
the women's movement. Such
women's organizations based on
bourgeois liberalism were
abhorrent to the Nazis. It was
believed that the women's
movement was part of an
international Jewish conspiracy to

subvert the German family and

thus destroy the German race. The
movement, it claimed was
encouraging women to assert their
economic independence and to
neglect their proper task of
producing children. In the late
nineteenth century, a theory of the
possibility, even necessity, of
"eugenic," "race hygienic," or
"social hygienic" sterilization
emerged, which argued that those
considered transmitters of
"hereditary" forms of "inferiority"
should be pre- vented from having
children. Presumably lacking in
social value and usefulness, they
and their offspring were seen as

not serving the interest of the folk

or the "racial body. by the end of
World War I, when German
aggrandizement and stability
seemed at its lowest, such
sterilization was widely and
passionately recommended as a
solution to urgent social problems:
shiftlessness, ignorance, and
laziness in the work force; deviant
sexual behavior involving
prostitution and illegitimate births;
the increasing number of ill and
insane; poverty; and the rising
costs of social services.
Recommendations for sterilization
came from elements of the right
and of the left, from men and

women etc. toward theories of

heredity, and from those with a
more environmental orientation.
This type of reasoning, with all its
subtle appeal to naive belief in
modern science, social rationality,
and planning has been called
"scientific racism"; it transcends
the more traditional and more "gut
racism. . The use of eugenic
sterilization was intended both to
control procreation and, by defining
and proscribing its unacceptable
opposite, to impose a specific
acceptable character on women
and men: the hardworking male
breadwinner, his hardworking but
unpaid housewife, and children

who were a financial burden to no

one but their parents. This was the
"valuable life" as gender-specific
work and productivity, described in
social, medical, and psychiatric
terms. . The decline of the German
birthrate after the 1870s, reaching
an international low point in 1932
and perceived as a "birth-strike"
after about 1912, was attributed
mainly to women. Mentally and
financially poor and the restless
were seen as copulating and
propagating indiscriminately, as in
a "witches' sabbath," transmitting
to their offspring by the mechanism
called heredity their poverty and
restlessness and their search for

income from public welfare funds.

Nazi pronatalism for "desirable"
births and its antinatalism for "undesirable" ones were tightly
connected. On May 26, 1933, two
penal laws were introduced that
prohibited the availability of
abortion facilities and services.
More important Bras the stricter
handling of the old anti abortion
law. Doctors and midwives were
obliged to notify the regional State
Health Office of every miscarriage.
Gerhard Wagner, abortion of
"defective" pregnancies on the
grounds of race hygiene was
secretly practiced with Hitler's
approval; it was introduced by law

on June 26, 1935.":' It was legal

only with a woman's consent, but
after being declared of "inferior
value," she was sterilized, too,
even against her will, anti after
1938 she could not e\.en decide to
revoke her initial consent. In 1938
"gene care" anti "race care"
merged. Abortions of Jewish
women were "permitted. In 1933,
the government passed a law
against "habitual delinquents" that
provided for castration in specified
cases.35 While it concerned men
only (2,006 up to 1940), castration
of women by destruction of the
gonads (beyond tuba1 ligation of
the ovaries) was introduced in

1936, when sterilization by X-rays,

known to have castrating effects,
was included in the sterilization
law." Later, officials favored this
procedure as an easy-to-handle
method for mass sterilization of
camp inmates without their
knowledge.

According to Elizabeth Heinemann

The last twenty-five years have
seen remarkable advances in our
understanding of sexuality under
Nazism. Three major developments
can account for this sea change.

One is a growing interest in the

scientific bases of Nazi racism,
specifically, the science of
eugenics. A second is the
emergence of women's history. The
third is the lowering of taboos
about studying sexuality and,
particularly, sexual minorities. As a
result, some subfields within the
history of sexuality in Nazi
Germany are now well developed.
Richard Evans observed that "the
most popular, the most widely
repeated and (probably) the most
generally accepted" explanation for
women's support of Hitler was their
"supposedly inherent irrationality."
Probed a bit further, "irrationality"

revealed itself as sexual desire.

Evans pointedly observed that
commentators who approached
everything else Hitler said with
skepticism had "taken Hitler's
comments in his mob oratory
[alone] at their face value, given
them a Freudian twist, and
presented them as a serious
attempt to penetrate the secret of
Hitler's appeal. Annemarie Troger
needed only to point out those men
had voted for Hitler in greater
proportions than had women to
discredit the thesis that erotic
desire led women to "bring Hitler to
power. In Male Fantasies, literary
scholar Klaus Theweleit did not

adopt a psychoanalytic approach to

describe neither man nor women
"seduced" by Nazism but, rather,
Freikorps men whose proto fascist
violence expressed their fear of
castration by Red (Communist)
women. Significantly, the men to
whom fascism appealed were not,
in Theweleit telling, victims
metaphorically "seduced" by
Nazism; rather, they were
perpetrators of very
un-"metaphoric" violence.
Furthermore, their pathology
emerged not from homosexual
desire but from misogyny. Men of
the Freikorps feared the "disorder"
that women created not only

through their role in proletarian

revolutionary movements but also
through their indeterminate, fluid,
messy bodies that is, through their
very womanliness. Men of the
Freikorps battled "feminine"
messiness in women by composing
violent fantasies about the
destruction of women; they battled
"feminine" messiness in
themselves by creating brutally
"orderly" selves.
Thus women were relegated to an
inferior though glorified position in
the domestic sphere. This
restriction has all- social, cultural,
economic and racial features.
Women in nazi germany became a

site of the project of display both

german nationalistic pride and
Aryan racial superiority. Children in
Nazi Germany were repeatedly told
that women were radically different
from men. The fight for equal rights
for men and women that had
become part of democratic
struggles everywhere was wrong
and it would destroy society. Girls
had to maintain the purity of the
race. They had to be the bearers of
the Aryan culture and race. All
Aryan women who deviated from
the prescribed code of conduct
were publicly condemned, and
severely punished. Thus we see
women consciously or

unconsciously, willingly or
unwillingly became part of the
nationalist project of the third
reich.