Broken Lives
Page 18
The testimonies of ordinary women demonstrate how collaboration with the Nazi dictatorship eventually turned them into its victims. During the prewar years, women struggled with the contradiction between the regime’s restrictive misogynism and the chances for career advancement by joining the cause. Somewhat shielded by Hitler’s effort to maintain domestic morale, in the first part of the war when the Wehrmacht victories opened up grand vistas of domination, German women overwhelmingly supported the struggle. But during the second phase of approaching defeat, they were caught up in the suffering through the horror of bombing raids, flight and expulsion from the East, and mass rape by Red Army soldiers. Not only the objects of sterilization, members of the resistance, Jewish women, and Slavic slave laborers, but also ordinary German women suffered the dreadful consequences of NS bellicosity and racism.7 Their later recollections therefore show a distinctive experience that parallels the disillusionment of men.
A MISOGYNIST SYSTEM
During peacetime, Nazi attitudes toward women were an odd blend of racist phobias and volkish ideals. Due to the Social Darwinist view that national strength rested on a growing population, a concerned Hitler sought to reverse the decline of the German birthrate by encouraging women to bear more children. At the same time, the NSDAP’s virulent racism suggested that “asocial” and “genetically defective females” should be sterilized and members of “inferior races” be kept from polluting the Aryan stock.8 In cultural terms, the NS leadership loathed the decadent urban lifestyle of the “new women” during the Weimar Republic as a betrayal of their biological duties. Instead, they preferred elements of the turn-of-the-century life reform movement, which promoted a “natural” and “healthy” look without the use of cosmetics.9 As mothers of the next generation, women were also supposed to be the guardians of the vaunted Volksgemeinschaft who would produce a genuine national community.
A campaign of fulsome praise that enlisted popular poetry sought to reshape the image of German womanhood in a maternalist direction. In his ode to an unborn child, Theo Scheller celebrated the “eternal mother, called Germany” as the future destination of a growing life. A presumably female poet who used the Nordic pseudonym Frigga praised the miracle of birth in a nationalist fashion: “We need mothers who carry in their womb / a hard race as if forged by iron ore / without servility and fearful doubt / that boldly scales new heights not reached before.” Such kitschy rhymes used religious language to celebrate Hitler as deliverer from material want and foreign servitude. Similarly, a child’s verse claimed, “Hail to you Hitler / You are and will be my best friend.” Anne Marie Koeppen celebrated women even more pompously, writing, “You carry honor, purity and light. / Your virtue has made Germany great. / You are the face of the people. / The future sleeps in your womb.” Many young women therefore wished “fulfillment [in] the life of a wife and mother.”10
In actual practice, the new Nazi regime promoted the redomestication of women in order to reduce the unemployment of male heads of households during the Great Depression. Concretely that meant reversing some of the occupational gains of the Weimar Republic, when young women embarked upon white-collar careers as salesgirls or secretaries. During decisions about secondary schooling, girls such as Renate Finckh were shunted into non-academic tracks to prepare them for their role as homemakers. In the universities, a new regulation supposedly to reduce academic overcrowding reserved space for young men who aspired to become professionals and set a quota of 10 percent female students. In public service, a law already prepared before 1933 prohibited the employment of a married woman if her husband already held a government job, even a high-school teaching position.11 While these restrictions were gradually abandoned when full employment was reached in the later thirties, initially they had a deterrent effect on women’s ability to work.
The same contradiction between subordination and assertiveness animated the NS Frauenschaft, the women’s auxiliary of the Nazi Party. As “Adolf Hitler’s guard,” the NSF’s “chief charge is and remains the National Socialist indoctrination of the German women.” While rejecting the “erroneous paths of the democratic-liberalist-international women’s movement,” the principles of the Frauenschaft praised “the physical and spiritual task of mothering the entire people” on the one hand and endorsed “the training and occupational integration” of unmarried women on the other. Without challenging the misogynist character of the party, the NSF saw to it that “females in large numbers were to be socialized in Nazi ideology and included in public life.” The NSF therefore assumed control of a broad range of welfare services that opened up career possibilities for women considered to be Aryan.12 At the same time it policed society by making sure that “asocial” women would not reproduce and Jewish men would not sire children with gentile German women.
For adolescent girls, the Third Reich offered a surprising range of activities. The Bund deutscher Mädel was an attractive organization where they could spread their wings. “In their earlier years as Jungmädel, girls could enjoy a freer and less restricted modern life outside the boundaries of their families than had previous generations.” Ursula Mahlendorf fondly recalled that they “could travel with their groups to rallies, in their ‘separate sphere’ compete in sports and in fact relish most of the activities boys enjoyed.” Especially for lower-middle- and lower-class girls, the BdM provided chances for leadership training and advancement that gave them unprecedented responsibilities. The somewhat older adolescents were trained “in health, child care, domestic skills, and self-improvement in preparation for motherhood, domesticity, and comradeship in marriage.”13 In spite of this maternalist twist, participation in the Hitler Youth gave many girls a new sense of independence and empowerment.
The price of membership in the Nazi youth group was nationalist and racist indoctrination and preparation for war. Often feeling alone in her home and picked on at school, Renate Finckh was delighted to be able to join the Jungmädel of the BdM when she turned ten: “In the new community I felt secure.” She enjoyed the weekly meetings and activities and had a crush on her female group leader, who inspired her with principles such as “German girl, be good, loyal, and true.” The festive swearing-in ceremony at which they pledged, “we want to have clear eyes and active hands” went “straight to [her] heart.” But the ideological training discredited humane values and the wearing of uniforms, marching in ranks, listening to speeches, and waving of flags followed the militarization of male adolescents. While Renate applauded the Anschluss and “liberation” of the Sudetenland, seeing the wanton destruction of the November pogrom in 1938 made her doubt the anti-Semitic justification, especially when a girlfriend argued that, after all, “Jews are also human beings.”14
The BdM nonetheless had difficulty in dealing with the awakening sexuality of its members. Because middle-class mothers did not like to enlighten their daughters about biological changes, Ursula Mahlendorf was distressed by the onset of her period. The kitchen maid from the farm only laughed at her naiveté, warning, “when your boyfriend fucks you, you might get pregnant.” As a result, “the feeling of being dirty, of not being acceptable poisoned [her] adolescence and young adulthood.” Her BdM leader was no help when providing “factual information” on “intercourse and impregnation Nazi style.” She began by pointing out, “you will enjoy having many children for the Führer, and that is why you must keep yourself pure.” The explanation of the physical act was rather gruesome: “When your future husband makes you a mother, he will put his member into you like a sword thrusts itself into its sheath, and his seed will impregnate the ovum in your belly.” Teenage Ursula was shocked by such “a violent, obscene metaphor.”15
For many female adolescents, the “new ideal of femininity” nonetheless “appeared enormously progressive at the time.” Nazi leaders appealed to youthful idealism, the wish to overcome class barriers, and the search for authentic experience. Eva Peters “was caught up in body and soul” when using magic words as a leader such
as “honor, loyalty, bravery comradery, freedom, community, home, struggle, death, flag, heroism, blood, soil, faith, duty, people, fatherland, Führer, and follower.” As special “carriers of culture,” women were tasked with preserving folk songs and ethnic customs, traditional crafts and peasant dress, while transmitting them to their children. For older adolescents, the BdM founded an advanced group called “Faith and Beauty” that was supposed to help teenagers to mature into full womanhood through music and gymnastics. While the organization ultimately prepared girls for motherhood, these activities tried to carve out an intermediary female sphere that left “preponderantly happy feelings” in retrospect.16
Girls looking for spiritual moorings did not see religion as an alternative, for BdM propaganda disparaged traditional faiths. The most radical Nazis subscribed to a neopaganism that hearkened back to Nordic mythology and substituted secular rites of passage for the Church rituals of marriage and baptism. Brought up without contact with religion, Renate Finckh was delighted to hear about the German Christians, a Protestant group that saw it as “a sacred duty to cleanse Christian faith from Jewish influences.” To her this creed was acceptable, since it was “a Christianity without Jews.” By contrast, the party claimed that the Confessing Church of Protestants who rejected the Third Reich for reasons of faith was “a bunch of biased, arrogant, and straitlaced people.” While her friends went to confirmation, Renate participated in a Nazi “youth consecration” and vowed, “I believe in Germany and fight for it.” Among young women from religious families, those who belonged to a Protestant sect, such as Edith Schöffski, proved impervious to such irreligious appeals.17
At home and in school, girls had less freedom than boys of the same age. Their mothers watched over them more closely. In families without servants, it went without saying that they were responsible for taking care of their younger siblings, even if they were barely old enough to look after themselves. Also, in most modest households, adolescent girls had to help their mothers in preparing food, shopping, gardening, and the like. While parents were willing to invest in their sons’ educations, they considered schooling for their daughters less important. In spite of her good grades and intellectual ambition, Ursula Mahlendorf was forced to remain in primary school because “it is not right that you should be better educated than your brother,” who preferred an apprenticeship. Similarly, the parents of Ursula Baehrenburg did not keep their promise to send her to a commercial academy. Decades later she remarked wistfully about female limitations: “From early on, I learned to do without.”18
One diversion for poorer girls was the Kinderlandverschickung program that sent urban children into the countryside in order to render them healthier. Welfare organizations such as the NSV selected needy city boys and girls to be shipped either to private families or camps for four to six weeks of fresh country air, physical activity, and more copious food. Some of the girls who had never been away from home battled with homesickness, but friendly host families and new friends quickly dispelled their shyness. As a working-class girl, Erika Taubhorn was sent away twice, first to a private home and then to a camp with over a dozen other comrades. Another Berlin girl, Edith Schöffski, had the good fortune to be shipped to the Baltic coast, where she “ran around the beach and searched for amber.” The ample food and vacation atmosphere usually had their desired effect. “The recreation was good for all of us,” Taubhorn recalled, adding, “I gained ten pounds.”19
For graduates of primary schools, the BdM invented the Landjahr, a year of volunteer work helping shorthanded farmers in ethnically disputed areas. With eighty other girls, Ruth Bulwin went to a camp at the Dutch border where she did chores “for the home, garden, and stable, for laundry … kitchen and field.” She did not mind the indoctrination and enjoyed working with plants and animals, even if the “iron discipline” was a pain. Other young women, such as Lore Walb, also worked on farms, where they “got to know and appreciate the difficulty and importance of agricultural work.” In 1938 this duty became mandatory, a female form of Labor Service, in order to help rural families or urban households with many children. Gisela Grothus lived with the family of a medical officer and learned how to take care of infants. Ruth Bulwin was sent to a Bavarian farm where she had to learn how to dump manure without falling on the pile. While the work was difficult, she grew to like it because it earned her respect.20 Her private snapshots show that it was not easy for urban girls to cope with rural tasks (image 14).
These Nazi obligations complicated occupational training for those girls who had finished their education by graduating from primary school. Some parents tried to guide their daughters into white-collar jobs, but when Ursula Mahlendorf’s mother suggested she become a beautician, she balked. Ruth Bulwin had more luck: she was allowed training in a private academy in Berlin where she actually “liked learning” stenography, typing, and other commercial skills. Anneliese Huber was even better off: she started with bookkeeping in a Jewish firm that was eventually Aryanized. To have a more secure future, she then applied for a position as a “head secretary” at the public health insurance office in Pforzheim. After proving her Aryan birth, she got the job and found out that it “was interesting and many sided.” Erika Taubhorn was less fortunate; an uncooperative labor official only allowed her to train as a seamstress. Dictated by inclination and expediency, such decisions showed the limitation of female career options.21
14. Female Farm Service. Source: Ruth Bulwin, Spätes Echo.
Occupational training and first jobs allowed teenagers to leave the home, gave them independence, and gradually transformed them into young adults. Ten-hour workdays, including Saturdays, offered little leisure time, but they provided a bit of income that could be used for diversion. To escape her mother’s temper tantrums, Anneliese Huber usually went hiking with her girlfriends on Sundays, enjoying nature and “singing joyous songs.” If there was any money left after contributing to the household expenses, they would occasionally go to the movies. Their aspirations grew gradually to include opera productions or stage plays. Later on, they took their first vacations at the Bavarian Chiemsee with the Nazi “Strength through Joy” organization. This introduced Anneliese to the Alpine mountains, which “became [her] great love.” Ruth Bulwin preferred the metropolitan excitement of Berlin, sauntering every day from the zoo station to the Tauentzienstrasse, “right through the pulsating life, just what a teenager loves.”22
Inevitably, becoming more independent also led to their first romantic contacts with the other sex, most of them harmless for the time being. The HJ propagated an ideal of “clear and clean comradeship” while keeping its members busy enough to prevent emotional entanglements. As a result, Lore Walb’s stirring of interest in boys during cotillion did not lead to anything. For Renate Finckh, dancing lessons created a conflict between her dedication to BdM duty and her interest in a boy who was critical toward the Third Reich. When a young man walked Anneliese Huber home, her vigilant mother met him with a slap on the face, nipping the relationship in the bud. But Anneliese was none too upset, since “it was nothing serious on [her] part” yet. Drafted into auxiliary duty in Königsberg, Ruth Weigelt could only communicate with her Gerhard in the military by letter. When one good-looking HJ leader saw Ruth Bulwin’s picture, he insisted on a double date and started a long-term relationship that eventually turned into a wartime marriage.23
Many young women transferred their adulation to Hitler, responding to his charisma with “hysterical rapture.” The BdM leader Lore Walb gushed in her diary in October 1933, “I have seen our Führer!” During a rally “he stood in his car with his right arm raised, so serious, so strong and so great.” Swept away by happiness, the Nazified girl confided that “this was the most beautiful, moving and powerful moment of my fourteen-year-old life.” Some years later, a skeptical Anneliese Huber reported a similar response: When Hitler came down the street in a roadster, “all hands stretched out toward him.” To her surprise, the Führer suddenly
reached out to her over the heads of the others: “His eyes exerted a demonic power over me and involuntarily I gave him my hand.” When a young officer reported the same magnetism, Ursula Mahlendorf “was fascinated by the idea that Hitler’s eyes could have such a powerful effect.”24 Many girls’ diaries reveal a fervent adulation of a figure who was father, lover, and savior all at the same time.
This intoxication with National Socialism was strong enough to override any scruples about the violence against German Jews. Ursula Mahlendorf, then nine years old, was shocked by “the screaming, crashing, splintering of glass” during the anti-Semitic pogrom of the “night of crystal” in November 1938. “I saw and heard what happened in our [Silesian] town and was terrified by it, though I failed to understand its full significance.” When she inquired about the destruction of stores and the violence against neighbors, her mother replied “Don’t you ever dare to ask that again.” As she viewed the burning synagogue in her home town of Paderborn, BdM leader Eva Peters “felt no outrage at all about the desecration and destruction of a holy site.” Instead, public resentment focused more on the anarchic process than on the persecution of Jews. When questioned by his girlfriend about the pogrom, HJ leader Rolf Bulwin admitted that he had been ordered to participate in a raid on a Jewish orphanage. But he was so moved by the children’s terror that he “just decamped.”25
The eugenic program of Nazi biopolitics seemed sensible to many women as long as it did not involve their own families. One typical BdM leader liked to harp on the need for “national and racial hygiene” that sought to keep the body politic healthy through preventive measures. According to the 1933 law on hereditary disease, “if mental illness or physical deformity is frequent in their family” people “should be sterilized or not marry.” Such individuals “are a burden to themselves, to their families, and to the state.” Nazi doctors therefore argued that it would be a kindness to end their suffering. “That is what euthanasia, mercy killing is all about.” Only when the actual practice of mass sterilization and euthanasia involved someone they knew did unaffected people realize its dehumanizing implications. While Renate Finckh was shocked that her sister-in-law was confined to a wheelchair due to polio, she understood that she nonetheless radiated an inner light. Yet Eva Peters was fanatical enough to reject Bishop Clemens von Galen’s warning against murdering helpless human beings.26