Women and National Socialism

I am interested in looking at the positions and roles of women during the period of National Socialism in Germany. I have not come across much in relation to this issue. There are particular groupings about whom there are some writings. For example, there are many survivor stories written by women that give details of the treatment they received in concentration, forced labour, or death camps at the hands of female Kapos, guards, or SS members. There are biographies available of some of the women who were arrested as war criminals for their roles in the camps. There are also stories of women prisoners bonding with one another in ways that allowed them to survive intolerable situations. I have not yet seen anything though that attempts an integration of these locations within the landscape of the world created by the National Socialists.

From the reading I have been doing, it seems clear that German women were generally relegated to a role of traditional domesticity: have lots of babies for the future of the Aryan race and take care of the men and the household. Of course a general tenor and ideology do not reveal the actual lived experience of, in this case, the women of the period. As in all western societies in the early 20^th century the roles and possibilities for women in Germany were becoming more diverse. In 1929 Elsa Herrmann published a book entitled, ”This Is The New Woman,” which described new positions for women in the more experimental Weimar period. Herrmann viewed “the new woman” in much the ways that other women of that period were beginning to articulate in, for example, England and the United States. To her the “woman of yesterday” was entirely focused on the future: to marry, have children, support her husband’s ventures in profitable ways, and see her sons settled in their careers and her daughters well-married. The “woman of today,” Herrmann states, lives entirely in the present, refusing to see herself either a means to the success of others or as dependent upon parents or husbands. Rather, “the new women has set herself the goal of proving in her work and deeds that the representatives of the female sex are not second class persons existing only in dependence and obedience but are fully capable of satisfying the demands of their positions in life.”

Herrmann’s brave words were a reflection of the undoubtedly increased possibilities for German women in the Weimar Republic. Women were elected to the Reichstag and were prominent in all cultural arenas. However, with the advent of National Socialism these nascent developments were aborted. In 1926, three years before the publication of Herrmann’s book, a Nazi activist, Elizabeth Zander wrote an article for the National Socialist’s organ The Volkischer Beobachter entitled, “Tasks Facing the German Woman.” Her over-heated prose articulates the roles of mother and help-mate to men favoured by the male-dominated, highly conservative Nazi hierarchy. Some examples: “We women must, through our quiet, honest work, inspire the German male to do noble things once more! The German women shall and must again be worth sacrificing for.” Moreover, “German youth demands the careful hand of the mother, needs her kind, understanding eye when the great desire shines forth from the eyes of youth: ‘German mothers, lead us to the pure heights of truth.’” Some of the “heights of truth” to be taught: clean living, “as strength lies only in purity,” and, learning to love one’s people above all means also learning to hate all the enemies of one’s people. Be pure and learn how to hate: a singular agenda for mothers with their children!

In his book “The Germans” Gordon A. Craig dedicates a chapter on the roles of women in Germany over the centuries. He writes about the negative effect of the above positions given to women during WWII on the war effort itself. In 1943 Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and munitions twice made a case for mobilizing the approximately five million German women then available for war work but who were doing none. Foreign, mainly slave labourers were utilized in the armament plants throughout Germany and German held territories. The conditions under which they were held and their natural resistance to aiding the German cause significantly undermined the efficacy of their work. Speer recognized that German women could be utilized to much greater benefit in these roles, and moreover, could release up to three million German male workers for military service. On both occasions his proposals met strong opposition from other senior Nazis who convinced Hitler that factory work “would inflict physical and moral harm upon German women and damage their psychic and emotional life and possibly their potential as mothers.” Speer’s proposals were denied.

Last night I saw Haifaa Al-Mansour’s film Wadjda, set and filmed in present day Saudi Arabia. Wadjda, a ten-year old girl with a spirit and mind of her own, enters a Koran contest at her school with the goal of buying a bicycle with the prize money. The story line is fairly straightforward but the power of the film comes from the clear depiction of the circumscribed lives of girls and women in this society built entirely on the supremacy of men. Women and girls labour under the black (sun absorbing) coverings that hide faces and bodies in the public domain. Women do not drive – and are thus dependent upon the availability and humours of the men who drive them, and, girls do not ride bicycles -- that physical experience could in some fashion damage their “virginity,” or harm their ability to have children.  As in National Socialist German a dominant ideology frames the roles of men and women in ways that favour the freedom of men as it limits that of women.

In any society and in any period women have many locations. In Germany during the period dominated by the National Socialists the position described briefly above is but one held by essentially middle-class women. As I have said at the beginning of this post, I aim to look more closely at the lives of these women and of others who were subjected to the ideologies of National Socialism in other ways and at what their locations reveal with respect to power and the uses of power.