by Wendy Lower
The Weimar Republic saw an explosion of ragtag movements, vigilante groups, and organized parties of all stripes. In Munich alone, the nascent Nazi Party was among forty such movements in the early 1920s. Most proudly called themselves völkisch, a term that suggests “of the people,” but in this case “people” referred exclusively to Germans. These popular movements were unabashedly nationalistic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. They sought unity through racism, and rejected liberalism and parliamentary democracy as foreign encroachments on an imagined Germanic way of life where peace and order reigned. Drawing on a romanticized view of the past, those who exalted the Volk prized the union of German blood and soil and the steely resolve of the warrior. In the postwar humiliation of a defeated Germany, myths of a national rebirth and the search for a savior to restore the country’s honor were especially appealing to the youth and rural poor who flocked to the numerous people’s parties.
German women’s involvement in the formation of right-wing movements was probably minimal. Men were unwilling to relinquish their traditional dominance in politics, and women’s issues were seen as secondary, not national priorities. Weimar’s völkisch parties drew their strength from the men’s world of the battlefront and not the women’s world of the home front. Women were better represented in the established, prewar parties such as the Catholic Center Party and the Social Democratic Party. Only a radical, mostly urban minority backed the communist movement (famously co-led by Rosa Luxemburg, who was brutally killed after a failed uprising in Berlin).
Feminism lacked a dedicated women’s movement of the kind that would emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. In Weimar politics, culture, and society, the “Woman Question” appeared instead in more diffuse, contradictory forms—for instance, as organized campaigns about prostitution, contraception, sexual pleasure, welfare reforms, labor conditions, and assistance for German refugees from territories lost under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The movement that had found unity around the struggle to obtain the vote now erupted in a plethora of campaigns. Some, such as those that dealt with sexual liberation and experimentation, were explosively innovative; often the source of controversy, these campaigns inflamed the right as much as they emboldened the left.
Women’s organizations often claimed to be apolitical, but in fact their assertions of female or family values were far more than window dressing in the national parliament. Those values defined in the most intrusive, usually divisive manner what it meant to be German. The women’s section of the German Colonial League had long fought against racial mixing of Germans abroad, and the German Housewives Association trained young women to run a proper German household, one that exploited domestic servants, was stocked with German goods, and was scientifically managed by a staunchly patriotic housewife wearing a spotless apron. There were countervailing trends, such as the work of the Association for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, which assisted unwed mothers and managed homes for single women and their children. But even this radical pre–World War I movement contained a core of male and female medical professionals who increasingly turned to “racial science” to deal with social problems that concerned women.
The 1920s brought ordinary Germans an expansion of individual liberties and a greater degree of political power. Freedom of expression, leisure time, mobility, trade, access to the civil service—all were available in more abundance than ever before. Meanwhile, radio, magazines, and the automobile carried the tempo of the city, and often its tumult, to the countryside. It all turned out to be more than most Germans wanted, however. In the chaos and uncertainty of modernity and democracy, restoring order and tradition became more and more attractive. Counterrevolutionary movements besieged the fragile republic. Disgruntled patriots and disempowered monarchists refused to accept Germany’s defeat and continued their stubborn trench warfare, now brought to the streets of Germany and aimed at new foes, the red specter of communism and the Weimar “November criminals”—the signers of the Armistice in November 1918—who had “stabbed Germany in the back.” The old and the new Right blamed conditions on the home front, not the battlefront, for Germany’s defeat in the Great War, and the home front was seen chiefly in terms of two figures—the female martyr, emaciated by the Allied blockade that cut off food supplies to Germany, and the Jewish civilian, stereotypically dressed as a capitalist swindler or politician. Such myths and prejudices contributed to the political polarization and dysfunctional coalitions of the fragile republic. Deadlocks were broken by calling for new elections. Germans experienced near-constant campaigning and an exhausting political culture of agitprop with its crude fusion of mass advertising and bullying that sent them to the voting booths frequently. In the period between 1919 and 1932, twenty-one different coalition governments tried to rule. It was in this Germany—with the strife and insecurity of incessant electioneering, runaway inflation, and all the bewildering and exciting prospects of modernity—that most of the women who would participate in Hitler’s genocidal project grew to adulthood.
German women’s extreme turn to the right did not start with the Nazi Party. Of the thirty different official political parties of the Weimar era, women voted in the conservative majority, but not disproportionately for the Nazi Party, even when the Party’s popularity peaked at the voting booths in 1932. For female conservatives, the Nazi Party was actually the least attractive option, since the Nazis did not accept female members or place women on the ballot. Modern politicking, strategized in beer halls and taken to the streets, was men’s work. Women could march in the demonstrations and in uniform in the late 1920s, but they could not parade by the Führer himself. In the Party’s official history books, Red Swastika Sisters, as nurses who cared for the Stormtroopers were known, were memorialized sentimentally: there was a lot of blood spilled in those early days of the struggle, and many wounds had to be treated by those nurses of the movement. Idealized as nurturers, women who supported the Nazi movement of the 1920s were relegated to subordinate roles. All the same, some women were attracted to Hitler’s movement and took their own initiative in forming ancillary organizations, such as the Women’s Battle League (1926), which strove for the social and political integration of women in the national community. German women who followed Hitler’s cause did their part in the voting booth, in Party offices, and at home. One early female activist recounted the political awakening of women to the Nazi movement and their roles in the early clashes and elections:
Women could not remain uninvolved in this struggle, for it involved their future too, and the future of their children . . . Then we heard the first National Socialist [Nazi] speaker. We listened. We went to more meetings. We heard the Führer . . . Men stood in the front ranks. The women quietly did their duty. Mothers listened anxiously in many a night hour for returning footsteps. Many a woman peered through Berlin’s dark streets, looking for her man or her son who was risking his blood and his life in the struggle against subhumanity. Many a leaflet was folded so that SA [Stormtrooper] men could leave it in a mailbox. Many a valuable hour was spent in SA kitchens and rooms. Money was always being collected. The new faith was passed from mouth to mouth. No path was too long, no service for the party too small.
Though active supporters of the Nazi movement, German women cannot be blamed for actually voting Hitler into power. Hitler was not democratically elected; rather, he was appointed chancellor by a cabal of upper-class, older men who thought they could use the youthful upstart to crush the Left and restore conservatism.
As soon as Hitler was in office, he and his supporters exploited every opportunity and legislative loophole to transform Germany into a one-party dictatorship and a racially exclusive nation. Civil rights were suspended in February 1933, less than one month into his rule, and political opponents were arrested and thrown into prisons and the newly established concentration camp at Dachau. Trade unions were dissolved, Jewish shops boycotted, books burned. The entire civil service was “restored,” forcing those who we
re not of Aryan descent into “retirement.” Some eight thousand female communists, socialists, pacifists, and “asocial” women were among the persecuted. In March 1933, Minna Cammens, who had served in parliament as a representative of the Social Democrats, was arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. During her interrogation and detention she was murdered by the Gestapo. Female members of the Communist Party, too, were arrested and killed, or found hanging in their jail cells. The Moringen workhouse was transformed into the first camp in the Reich with female inmates, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were antiwar and refused to accept Hitler as their supreme savior. Lina Haag and other wives of prominent German Communist Party members were arrested with their husbands. When the Gestapo escorted Haag through the corridors of her apartment building at lunchtime, her neighbors all closed their doors “very quietly and carefully.” Haag spent five years in prisons and camps. Languishing in an isolation cell in a Stuttgart jail, she heard the desperate whispers of an inmate who had been sentenced to death. Another time, screams pierced the prison walls while a drunken Nazi guard sang a hit song of the era with a chilling refrain, “When you leave, quietly say good-bye.”
The increase in female prisoners meant an increase in female guards, who were recruited from the Nazi Party Women’s Organization. Female medical staff members were also deployed to camps; by war’s end, about one-tenth of camp personnel was female. At least thirty-five hundred women were trained as concentration camp guards, mostly at Ravensbrück, from where they were deployed to the various camps, including Stutthof, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. Those who volunteered for the gruesome work saw these mass-murder sites as places of employment and opportunity. The uniform was impressive, the pay was good, and the prospect of wielding power was appealing. Some of the women who became guards had criminal records of their own or were prisoners in the Reich and transferred to guard duty as a way to rehabilitate themselves in the Nazi system. During the war many were pressed into this kind of service to fulfill compulsory labor duty.
Once the female recruits completed their training, took their oaths, and entered the camp system, very few exhibited a humane attitude toward the prisoners in their purview. Female guards at Camp Neuengamme were known for their shrill screaming, slapping, and beating. To a prisoner, however, such “disciplining” would have been better described as random acts of terror—acts that were especially disturbing because it was a woman who committed them.
Outside the camps as well, women persecuted other women. Prisoner categories were left deliberately vague and elastic. Anyone could be denounced as a shirker, a saboteur, an outcast, or an “asocial.” Entering a bakery one day, a woman failed to greet her neighbors with the expected Heil Hitler; she was subsequently questioned by the Gestapo. “Asocials”—vagrants, petty thieves, prostitutes, the “riffraff” who sullied German streets and tarnished the dazzling image of Aryan beauty—were arrested, even sterilized and killed. A dictatorship does not require a massive secret police force when one’s neighbors are willing to do the surveillance work of the regime, out of fear, conformity, fanaticism, and spite. Personal and political scores can be settled. The most vulnerable members of society, those on the margins, are expendable.
Hitler proclaimed that a woman’s place was in the home as well as in the movement. At the Nuremberg Nazi rally of 1934, he employed the typical martial rhetoric. “What man offers in heroism on the field of battle, woman equals with unending perseverance and sacrifice, with unending pain and suffering,” he declared. “Every child she brings into the world is a battle, a battle she wages for the existence of her people . . . For the National Socialist Community of the Volk was established on a firm basis precisely because millions of women became our most loyal, fanatical fellow-combatants.” In 1935 and 1936 speeches to the Nazi Party Women’s Organization, Hitler proclaimed that a mother of five, six, or seven children who were all healthy and well raised accomplished more than a female lawyer. He rejected equal rights for women as a Marxist demand, “since it draws the woman into an area in which she will necessarily be inferior. It places the woman in situations that cannot strengthen her position—vis-à-vis both man and society—but only weaken it.” Women who sought degrees in higher education and political office were restricted by quotas. As Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party ideologue, summed it up: “Hence all possibilities for the development of a woman’s energies should remain open to her. But there must be clarity on one point: only man must be and remain a judge, soldier, and ruler of the state.”
In the Reich’s battle for births, Hitler’s female combatants had to fall in line, follow orders, sacrifice for the greater good, develop nerves of steel, and suffer in silence. They had to give up control over their own bodies, now placed in service to the state. Victories were measured not by births but by the number of healthy Aryan babies. The mass campaign of selective breeding mustered German women across generations and classes who ended up suffering from, as well as advancing, the Nazi racial war. Midwifery as a profession exploded. In keeping with the regime’s exaltation of purity and nature, cesareans were restricted and breastfeeding was rewarded. Not all women were considered suitable soldiers. Those with so-called genetic disorders (including alcoholics and the clinically depressed), prostitutes with venereal diseases, Roma and Sinti women, and Jewish women were subjected to forced sterilizations and abortions. Of the four hundred thousand non-Jewish Germans who underwent forced sterilization, women made up about half. According to the historian Gisela Bock, several thousand died because of botched medical procedures. Ordinary German women and girls were betrayed by midwives and nurses, who upon the arrival of a child reported alleged defects and upon routine gynecological examinations recommended abortions and sterilizations. Thus, in the civil war for perfect Aryan babies that was under way even before the outbreak of World War II, women made cruel life-and-death decisions for other women, eroding moral sensibilities and implicating women in the regime’s crimes.
Political conformity was required of Germany’s women and even girls. Indoctrination began formally at age ten. As of 1936, membership in the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel, BdM), was compulsory. Eventually the Nazis shut down most other youth programs or assimilated them into the Hitler Youth, with the exception of some Catholic youth groups protected by the Vatican. Since protective parents who attempted to shield their children from the movement lost their authority in the household and standing in the community, they usually yielded to the badgering of Nazi Party agitators, neighbors, and colleagues. In towns such as Minden, local officials supplied the Nazi Party with lists of registered female births, which were used by Party volunteers to go door-to-door conscripting German girls into the movement.
The League satisfied the desire of many girls—political or not—for community and lasting friendships. For some it was a steppingstone to full Nazi Party membership and a career in the movement, a way to acquire appropriate skills. The local League leader in Minden was “incredibly authoritarian”; she was “notorious throughout Minden” for her shouting and screaming, “almost vicious.” The most odious of local Nazi leaders could serve as role models to young girls coming of age in small towns.
The young women of the era looked forward, not backward. They were not self-proclaimed feminists; in fact, most in their generation spurned the suffragettes as passé. When the Nazis called to abolish the female vote in 1933, German women did not go on a hunger strike. Their enemy was not “the oppressive male”; for many, it became “the Jew,” “the asocial,” “the Bolshevik,” and “the feminist.” It was the Jewish intellectual who spoke of the emancipation of women, Hitler declared in 1934. The Nazi movement would “emancipate women from woman’s emancipation.” In fact, German Jewish women had played a significant role in social reform and women’s movements in the Weimar era. Thus Hitler’s pronouncements served two ends—the removal of Jews from German politics, and the crushing of an independent wome
n’s movement in Germany. The experimental laboratory of the Weimar era had to be fully discredited and dismantled while introducing another emancipatory alternative in Nazism, one that prioritized discipline and conformity. German women who felt empowered by the Nazi movement experienced a sort of liberation in camaraderie—not as feminists who wished to challenge the patriarchy, but as agents of a conservative, racist revolution. As full-fledged Aryan members of Hitler’s fascist society, they were political despite themselves. Indeed, the “Woman Question” now took the form of women and girls heading out to the streets for rallies and parades; to farms for labor assignments; to summer camps, marching exercises, domestic-science courses, medical examinations, and flag-raising ceremonies.
Members of the League of German Girls shooting rifles as part of their paramilitary training, 1936
The ideology of the Volk had its own female aesthetic. Beauty—according to this ideology—was a product of a healthy diet and athleticism, not of cosmetics. German girls and women were not supposed to paint their fingernails, pluck their eyebrows, wear lipstick, dye their hair, or be too thin. Nazi leaders condemned the entire cosmetics boom of the 1920s as Jewish commerce, as a cheapening of German femininity that turned women into prostitutes and led to racial degeneration. German men should mate with the girl next door, not the urbanite or the Hollywood-style vamp. A young woman’s natural glow should radiate from physical exertion, from being outdoors, and, in its most celebrated form, from pregnancy.