The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  “My program for educating youth is hard,” Hitler declared in 1933. “Weakness must be hammered away. I want a youth before which the world will tremble . . . a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. . . . The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes. . . . That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication. . . . That is how I will create the New Order.” Boys marched from the Young Volk (JV), ages ten to fourteen, to the Hitler Youth or HJ, ages fourteen to eighteen, where they received training with weapons, orienteering, and camping, all with a strong military flavor. Militarism, nationalism, racism, and Führer worship, along with the martial virtues of duty, obedience, honor, courage, physical strength, and ruthlessness, were the virtues they wished to inculcate in the young. “I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler” read the pledge of ten-year-old boys entering the Jungvolk. “I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God. . . . We are born to die for Germany.”

  Speaking to the Reichstag in November 1938, Hitler proudly described the trajectory of Nazi indoctrination:

  This youth does not learn anything else other than to think German, to act German and when those boys at the age of ten come into our organization and there for the first time begin to breathe fresh air, four years later they move from the JV to the HJ, and there we keep them for another four years and then we do not return them into the hands of our old originators of classes and estates but take them immediately into the party, into the Labor Front, into the SA or the SS . . . and so forth. And if they have been there for two years or a year and a half and they still have not become thorough National Socialists, then we put them in the labor service and for six or seven months they work at square bashing, all with one symbol, the German spade. And any class-consciousness and pride in one’s social position still remaining after six or seven months will be taken over for further treatment by the army for two years, and when they come back after two, three, or four years then we take them immediately back into the SA, SS, and so on to prevent relapse and they will never be free for the rest of their lives.

  Membership in the Hitler Youth was not compulsory until 1936, but it was wise to join. Wearing their brown shirts, black shorts, and white knee socks, they organized camping trips, hiked in the mountains, sang folk songs around the campfire, embracing many of the traditions of the German youth movement from the early twentieth century. This mobilization of school-age boys produced a series of unintended consequences. School discipline deteriorated as uniformed HJ bullied other students and disobeyed their teachers. Teachers—and parents—found maintaining order increasingly difficult, and academic performance declined as HJ and Labor Front activities cut into study time.

  The HJ was also inculcating a new set of values, and young Germans increasingly looked to the HJ leaders instead of the teacher or the church or parents as role models. “We are the happy Hitler Youth,” one typical HJ song of 1935 declared. “We need no Christian virtues for our Führer Adolf Hitler is always our guide. . . . We do not follow Christ but Horst Wessel. . . . I can do without the church, the Swastika is redemption on earth.” Another went: “Pope and rabbi shall yield, we want to be pagans again. . . . Out with the Jews, and with the pope from the German home.” Given this powerful propaganda message, it is hardly surprising that young Germans were encouraged to inform on any teacher or parent or clergy who displayed “unsocial” attitudes. By 1935 the party had managed to insert itself into the family, driving a wedge between parent and child, teacher and student, priest and young parishioner. “The totalitarian demands of the Hitler Youth, the sense of authority and self-confidence, rebellious spirit, and fanaticism of these youths, have added so much to this problem that it approaches an unbearable intensity,” a report from the Social Democratic underground stated. (The Socialist underground organization smuggled reports on life inside Nazi Germany to the SPD’s exiled leadership in Prague and later Paris.) The Nazis tried to reassure parents, but “all these reassurances have not changed the fact that parental influence over youth continues to diminish, and that relationships within families grow more and more tense and hostile. . . . Children denounce their parents—whereupon they lose jobs, positions, and are threatened with the loss of parental rights and personal freedom.” It was probably too much to say that “those with children began to envy the childless,” but there was no small amount of truth in it.

  Girls, too, were mobilized, entering the Jungmädel (Young Girls, ages ten to fourteen), then the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel or BdM, ages fourteen to eighteen), where they received training in physical fitness, first aid, and domestic skills. At eighteen, they, too, began six months’ service in the Labor Front, where most were sent to work on farms. The goal was to prepare young women for their ultimate role in the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community): to become wives, homemakers, and healthy mothers. Despite the party’s official prudishness, its insistence on modest dress and decorous behavior for young women, its equally relentless emphasis on the body and procreation tended to sexualize the message. Given the regime’s unrelenting grooming of young women for racial breeding and the organization’s many unchaperoned activities, BdM soon acquired a reputation for looseness. In 1935 a Labor Front camp for girls in Breslau was rumored to have closed because so many of the young women became pregnant. That reputation, whether deserved or not, seemed sealed when in 1936 approximately 100,000 members of the HJ and BdM attended the annual party rally at Nuremberg, and nine hundred girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen returned home pregnant. Such stories gave rise to numerous jokes—the Bund deutscher Mädel being referred to as Bald deutscher Mütter (Soon German Mothers) or Bund deutscher Matrozen (League of German Mattresses), or “Baldur, drück mich” (“Baldur, squeeze me”).

  The Nazis also made a serious effort to mobilize adult women. It was only in the last years of the Weimar Republic that the Nazis had made a sustained effort to win over women, who had previously been reluctant to associate with the party. The Nazi program was essentially a promise to return women to the family and home, relieving them of the double burden of household duties and employment, allowing them to realize every woman’s most cherished wish: to marry and have a family. Well known for their swaggering machismo, violence, misogyny, and paganism, the Nazis rejected women’s participation in politics and opposed women in the workplace, holding generally retrograde positions on all gender issues. Women’s “liberation” of the Weimar era, the Nazis maintained, had been a swindle, in which women were free to work long hours for lower pay than men, and were denied the opportunity to fulfill their biological and societal destiny: to become wives and mothers. “ ‘Women’s Liberation’ is merely a phrase invented by the Jewish intellect,” Hitler declared in 1934. In the Third Reich, women did not need emancipation. National Socialism had “liberated women from liberation,” restoring respect for motherhood and honoring women and the German family. The regime offered equality of the sexes, Hitler maintained, each with its own sphere. “Man’s world is the state.” His “world is his struggle, his willingness to devote himself to the community. . . . One might perhaps say that a woman’s world is a smaller one. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home. . . . Providence assigned to woman the care of this, her own world, and it is only on this foundation that the man’s world can be formed and can grow.”

  To give symbolic weight to their celebration of German motherhood, the Nazis made Mother’s Day, which had first been observed in Germany in 1923, an official national holiday. They did, however, change the date to Hitler’s mother’s birthday. Families were given favorable loans and tax breaks for children—women with more than six children paid no income tax at all. At the same time women continued to suffer discrimination in the labor market—they were forbidden from serving as judges, public prosecutors, or lawyers, and no women were promoted to positions of high rank in the civil service. Wom
en teachers were also confronted by a glass ceiling, being excluded or removed from higher administrative posts in education.

  Mothers were not, however, simply to stay at home knitting by the fire but were to be mobilized for active public service to the Volk. They were encouraged to pursue careers in fields that were “compatible with their nature”—domestic, clerical, and agricultural work. Women were also prodded to take up social work, and the Nazis established a series of women’s organizations for that purpose—the National Socialist Women’s Association (NS-F), headed since 1934 by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the German Women’s Welfare (NS Frauenwerk), The National Socialist People’s Welfare, and the Labor Front. This was to be the extent of their political involvement, and no woman, even Scholtz-Klink, the most prominent figure in the Nazi women’s movement, was allowed to participate in decisions affecting policy toward women and the family.

  Women should be content within their domestic sphere, Hitler declared to the NS Women’s Congress in 1935, and

  the so-called granting of equal rights to women, which Marxism demands, in reality does not grant equal rights but constitutes a deprivation of rights, 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 can weaken it. . . . The woman has her own battlefield. With every child she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family.

  And “the family,” as one SA official explained, “is the most important cell of the state . . . and National Socialism has restored the family to its rightful place.” But the regime did “not want any petit bourgeois ideal in the family, with its plush sofa psychology and walking mannequins, with its contempt for and degradation of the woman.” For the Nazis, “the wife is a comrade, a fellow combatant.” To underscore the regime’s commitment to women and mothers, it provided state subsidies for mothers, offered them leisure activities, sports, courses in “feminine” subjects, degrees in home economics, and public ceremonies honoring mothers, all, of course, infused with the values of National Socialism. Scholtz-Klink and her organizations also emphasized proper hygiene and physical fitness, which were deemed essential for the health of the Volk. “Germany does not need women who can dance beautifully at five o’clock teas,” an SS official remarked at a party meeting in 1937, “but women who have given proof of their health through accomplishments in the field of sport.” The Reich Sports Medal would do. After all, “the javelin and springboard,” he informed the crowd, “are more useful than lipstick in promoting health.”

  Beginning in 1935 and accelerating in the following years, two developments began to reshape the regime’s approach to women. In 1935–36 the Nazis embarked on a major rearmament program, introducing conscription into a 500,000-man army, creating a modern air force and a new battle fleet, all blatant violations of the Versailles Treaty, and announcing an ambitious plan to make Germany economically self-sufficient within four years. With stepped-up production schedules in key war industries, more women were needed in the workplace, freeing men for service in the newly expanded armed forces. The regime began to expect women to find employment—and not only in occupations traditionally associated with women’s work. Women were now required to juggle two sets of responsibilities—in the home and in the workplace, exactly the double burden the Nazis had so vehemently condemned in the first years of the Third Reich. Despite the regime’s hortatory pledge to return women to the home and family, by the outbreak of war in 1939, two million more married women were working outside the home than in 1933.

  Women were also expected to maintain an attractive appearance and behave in a modest, traditional way. Cosmetics, provocative dress, bobbed hair, and other fashions of the Weimar era were out, especially in the workplace. As Nazi factory officials in Lower Franconia declared, it was “a privilege to hold a job and women should be proud to have the opportunity.” But it was also a woman’s “duty to conduct [herself] in a true National Socialist manner.” The Nazi Factory Organization (NSBO) would not tolerate “painted and powdered women,” and “women who smoke in public—in hotels, in cafés, on the street, and so forth” were not welcome in Nazi factory gatherings.

  After 1935 what had been at first a celebration of the mother’s special role in Nazi society shifted subtly toward a more strictly biological function. Mothers were to be honored for fulfilling their biological duty by producing progeny for the people’s community. Homage to the traditional family, so prominent in Nazi social policy before 1935, gradually receded almost imperceptibly into the background, and women were encouraged to have children, whether married or not. Unmarried pregnancy no longer constituted grounds for dismissal from the civil service, including for teachers, and Nazi propaganda began lauding the heroic “racially pure” unmarried mother’s commitment to the Führer. Birth control was outlawed, abortion banned. Whereas motherhood and the family had been honored in the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazis increasingly dealt with mothers as baby-producing instruments of racial policy, a policy vividly displayed when, beginning in 1938, mothers with four children received a Mother’s Cross of Honor third class; women with six offspring were awarded the Mother’s Cross second class; and a mother with eight or more children was given the gold first class medal, a practice that continued until the collapse of the Third Reich.

  The Nazis had proclaimed their determination to save the German family, the nucleus of the people’s community, but gradually infiltrated it so thoroughly that loyalty to the myriad National Socialist organizations sundered the family, atomizing its members, inserting the party between parents and children, between husband and wife. So thoroughly Nazified was society that it gave rise to many of the “whispered jokes” that circulated during the Third Reich. “My father is in the SA,” a girl explains to her friend in one such joke, “my oldest brother in the SS, my little brother in the Hitler Youth, my mother is part of the NS women’s organization, and I’m in the League of German Girls.” “Do you ever get to see each other?” asks the girl’s friend. “Oh, yes, we meet every year at the party rally in Nürnberg!”

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  In addition to the welter of party organizations for every segment of the population, the Nazis were determined to bring their message directly into every German home. To do this, they turned to technology. For Goebbels, radio was a revolutionary means of mass communication that had the potential to bring the regime into the home of every German Volksgenosse (people’s comrade). The radio was to so saturate the public “with the spiritual content of our time that no one can break away from it.” He was determined to ensure that all German households should have a radio, and a new cheap set, the Volksempfänger (people’s radio), began production in 1933. When Hitler came to power in 1933, only 4.3 million households possessed a radio out of a population of 66 million, far fewer than in the United States or Britain. A radio set in 1933 Germany was a rarity, a luxury item that cost approximately 100 marks, a price most German families could not afford.

  In May 1933 Goebbels pressed a group of radio manufacturers to undertake mass production of a standard radio that would be significantly cheaper than any currently on the market. At the radio exhibition in Berlin in August, Goebbels introduced the set, the People’s Receiver 301 (the numerical suffix referring to the date of Hitler’s assumption of power on January 30), and it was an immediate hit. The supply of sets available at the exhibition sold out in one day, and manufacturers received 650,000 orders for the new set over the next twelve months. The Propaganda Ministry and private companies introduced a variety of payment schemes to help make a purchase possible. By the close of 1935, the number of sets sold had soared to one and a half million. By 1937, radios in large cities had reached 70 percent of all households, though sales still lagged in the countryside. In 1939 a smaller, cheaper set was introduced, so that at the outset of the war an even gre
ater penetration of the population was achieved. In 1933 only one in four households had a radio; by 1939 it was one in two.

  During his first year in power Hitler delivered some fifty radio addresses. His speeches were often transmitted during working hours, and factories, offices, and commercial businesses were required to suspend work so that the workers could hear the Führer’s voice as it blared from a loudspeaker to the shop floor. All restaurants and cafés had to be equipped with radios for communal listening, and six thousand loudspeaker pillars were erected on street corners so that Hitler’s voice would resound through the streets. Pedestrians were expected to stop in place and listen. This communal listening, the Nazis believed, contributed to a sense of shared experience, of community essential in the realization of the people’s community.

  The radio was an important entryway into the family and workplace, but it was not enough. The regime simultaneously sought to organize leisure, leaving the individual no activity beyond the reach of the party and state. The Nazis began by virtually doubling the number of paid holidays, from three to eight days under Weimar to between six and fifteen days. By far the most popular of the Nazi programs to dominate leisure activities and, in the process, integrate working-class Germans into the people’s community, was the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude or KdF) program. Created in November 1933 as part of the German Labor Front (DAF) and funded by deductions from pay, this ambitious program was an attempt to court blue-collar Germans, linking work and leisure—and controlling both. It established sections for each area of leisure activity: vacations, instruction and education, travel and hiking, sports, and “the Beauty of Labor,” which was devoted to creating hospitable conditions at work sites. Beauty of Labor, which was directed by Albert Speer, came in for a good deal of mockery because of its name (as did Strength Through Joy), but by 1939 the Beauty of Labor section had seen to the creation of over thirteen thousand green spaces, fifteen thousand canteens and recreation rooms, more than forty thousand workrooms, washrooms, and changing rooms in factories and plants, some two thousand “comradeship houses,” and sports facilities, including swimming pools.