by Wendy Lower
Hitler aimed to raise ordinary Germans’ racial consciousness, but for many women the racial awakening was also a political awakening. Women began to act on the ambitious notion, at times daunting but more often energizing, that they should expect more from life. In their memoirs and interviews, each of Hitler’s Furies expressed similar experiences in their youth: as they completed their basic schooling and reached young adulthood, they realized that they wanted to become something. This aspiration is a cliché now, of course, but at the time it was revolutionary. Young women of modest backgrounds asserted themselves by leaving their villages, enrolling in training programs as typists or nurses, and joining a political movement. The daughters of those first-time Weimar voters imagined possibilities in Germany and beyond.
A Nazi Party rally in Berlin, August 1935, with banners declaring, “The Jews are our misfortune” and “Women and girls, the Jews are your ruin”
Rarely do the women featured in this book describe, or even mention, prewar Nazi policies concerning Jews. Indeed, Brigitte Erdmann, a female entertainer for the troops in Minsk, wrote to her mother in 1942 that she had her first encounter with a German Jew when she was in Belarus. Did German women realize the centrality of the “Jewish Question” in Hitler’s ideology and grasp what was happening to the Jews? German girls growing up in Germany of course saw the crude propaganda, the images of Jews as inferior, in posters and newspapers. In fiction and film representations, the Jew was depicted as something dangerous—and for girls in particular, lecherous. In this sexualized form, anti-Semitism struck at the most intimate, emotionally charged domain of intercourse between German Gentiles and German Jews. It was tailored to Germany’s “Aryan” female population, understood as vulnerable sexual objects who needed to be vigilant protectors of their own bodies vis-à-vis Jews. This form of anti-Semitism also incited German men’s machismo: protecting their women from “dangerous” Jews was a test of their honor and their manhood.
In childcare courses, women received “racial hygiene” (healthcare) instruction that identified the odious characteristics of “subhumans” in facial features and head shapes. In secondary schools, all children created elaborate genealogical charts, which served two purposes: children became aware of their German bloodline, and teachers discovered who was Aryan and who was not. In new editions of textbooks, anti-Semitic slogans and grotesque images of Jews were paired with Nazi symbols and uplifting quotations attributed to an attractive, airbrushed Führer. Public name-calling and bullying of Jews was tolerated on playgrounds, at bathhouses, and at sporting events. A Mardi Gras parade in one Catholic region included an elaborate float and a procession of Germans dressed as Orthodox Jews going to Palestine. As part of the mockery, participants donned “Jewish noses.”
During the interwar period, German girls witnessed the violence of politics, both in the streets and at school. They learned not only how to tolerate it but how to take action against select foes and vulnerable classmates. When a German girl at one school tried to beat up a former Jewish friend, the Jewish girl retaliated, to her surprise. The German declared, “You’re a Jew, you can’t fight back.”
By the time of the November 1938 pogrom, the World War I baby boomers were reaching adulthood. They saw, heard, and read about the destructive assaults on Jews across Germany. Hundreds of synagogues in cities and small towns were torched, shop windows smashed. Stormtroopers and SS men vandalized Jewish cemeteries, digging up and breaking gravestones. Thousands of Jewish men were beaten up, and thirty thousand were thrown into concentration camps. Official German sources reported the Jewish death toll as ninety-one. The historian Richard Evans, however, has estimated that there were between one and two thousand deaths, including three hundred suicides. More than three-quarters of some nine thousand Jewish businesses in Germany were looted and destroyed. Women and girls who did the shopping saw this destruction; many of them commented on the mess that needed to be cleaned up, or complained about the disorder and inconvenience. Ordinary Berliners euphemistically called the pogrom Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” expressing the destruction in material rather than human terms. One of these Berliners, upon seeing the glass shards in the morning light, thought to herself, “The Jews are the enemy of the new Germany. Last night they had a taste of what this means.”
In their roles as shoppers and salesclerks, German women had everyday encounters with Jews in the Reich’s consumer society. They chose which stores to enter and which to shun during the earlier boycotts, and saw that local businesses were changing hands. Prior to 1933, Jews owned some of the largest department stores in Germany, such as the Tietz chain, which included the KaDeWe, the Harrods of Berlin. During the boycotts, Nazi Stormtroopers defaced store windows and tried to prevent women from entering the shops. Most of these were small Jewish family businesses, but in the larger department stores such as Tietz many German women worked as salesclerks. Nazi leaders and German financiers drove the Jews out of business, forcing them to sell below true value, while Jewish managers were removed from management boards. For most German female salesclerks, this “Aryanization” of Jewish retail could mean the loss of a job or a new boss. In any case, it was an event, a visible change that marked the victimization and then departure of their Jewish neighbors and employers.
The waves of Nazi assaults in the 1930s became overwhelming for German Jews, and eventually most Jews who could leave did. By 1940, about half had left Germany, two-thirds of whom were children. From the German perspective, the Jews who remained were invisible as human beings but ever-present as a phantom or evil force that threatened Germany. Thus the Minsk entertainer, Brigitte Erdmann, and other German women who were taken aback by the presence of Jews in the East believed that they had not seen an actual Jew before, when in fact many had had daily contact with Jewish people while growing up in Germany.
The societal norm of disregarding the plight of German Jews was allied with the expectation that German girls should embody a feminine brand of toughness. Among the sporting exercises for young women in the League of German Girls were marching drills and sharpshooting. Young women, indeed girls, were trained to fire in formation with air rifles. The longstanding tradition of Prussian militarism not only cultivated a culture of total wars and “final solutions” but, in its twentieth-century fascist form, integrated women into a martial society as patriotic nurturers and combatants.
The physical activity was coupled with a dumbing-down of the population. German schoolgirls were not taught subjects such as Latin, since knowledge of this kind was not necessary for future mothers. Instead, the girls were given pamphlets with advice on how to pick a husband: the first question to ask a prospective mate was “What is your racial background?” For nubile women, such guidance and social support was considered useful. The public affirmation of motherhood also had its appeal. “In my state the mother is the most important citizen,” Hitler proclaimed. Never before had German mothers enjoyed such recognition and so many services, such as more baby-care stations, more healthcare (“racial hygiene”), and celebrity status at ceremonies where mothers were awarded the Cross of Honor for having more than four children.
Certainly one must be wary of taking Nazi propaganda and the declarations of Nazi leaders as fact. The propaganda meant to push women back into the private realms of Kinder, Küche, Kirche—children, kitchen, and church—and the financial incentives that were supposed to increase marriage and birthrates did not yield the results Nazi leaders had expected. After 1935, the birthrate declined and the divorce rate increased. Statistics show that most German women were not married, were not constantly pregnant, and were not staying at home. As the Third Reich established its proliferating agencies and offices across Germany (and later in the occupied territories), women became a more visible part of the workforce than ever before in German history. A woman of this generational cohort summed it up by saying that World War I had taught them that “everyone had to have a profession. You couldn’t at all be ce
rtain that you’d marry . . . Who knew what the future might bring?”
And yet it would be inaccurate to overstate the freedom of choice that German women had in Hitler’s Germany. They certainly could not choose to marry a Jewish man, or raise a child with a disease considered genetic. They no longer had political options, since the Nazi Party was the only legal party. And the types of careers open to them were limited. Before the war, all Germans fresh out of school or planning to attend university were expected to fulfill a labor assignment for the Reich, a six-month stint usually in agriculture. At these Reich Labor Service camps, though the sexes were separated, all socioeconomic classes were thrown together to develop a sense of national camaraderie. By early 1938, as part of Hitler’s preparations for war, every female student enrolled in an institution of higher learning or a trade school had completed basic training in three areas: air defense, first aid, and communications.
The Nazi system did not tolerate nonconformists. Once placed in military and government offices, female employees could not be dismissed except for a health reason, including pregnancy, or for misconduct, in which case they were punished. The duty to serve the Reich had been drilled into the children in school and in youth programs, and those branded “work-shy” or “shirkers” were sent to the proliferating concentration camps to be “reeducated.”
In the summer of 1941, as Hitler’s armies conquered more territory in the East, the labor drive was expanded by more women being placed in war-related industries, offices, and hospitals. Nazi leaders prepared for a total war and a total empire. Eventually all of Europe was to be an Aryan stronghold governed from Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin. Such global ambitions required the creation of a new caste, a German imperial elite, composed of young men and women.
2
The East Needs You
Teachers, Nurses, Secretaries, Wives
IN THE EARLY YEARS of the Nazi movement, Hitler and his associates developed their imperial ideology and staked out their territorial ambitions. Restoring Germany to its position as a Great Power in Europe would complete what the Kaiser had attempted. However, unlike the British approach of securing hegemony in sea power and overseas possessions, the German tactic would focus on continental Europe, and specifically on the fertile lands of eastern Europe. Hitler’s doctrine was spelled out in the bible of the movement, Mein Kampf, published in 1925:
Just as our ancestors . . . had to fight for [soil] at the risk of their lives, in the future no folkish grace will win soil for us and hence life for our people, but only the might of a victorious sword . . . For it is not in colonial acquisitions that we must see the solution of this problem, but exclusively in the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country . . . And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east.
Mein Kampf tied the aims of the movement to Hitler’s biography in an unusual blend of memoir, diatribe, and doctrine. The explicit call to colonize eastern Europe seems brazen in hindsight. We know the genocidal outcome of what Hitler summoned from his followers. In the twilight of European hegemony, though, such imperial claims by a self-perceived Great Power were considered legitimate. Hitler presumed that these territories were his people’s collective right and historically deserved. As he would later muse in his bunker in Ukraine:
The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvelous buildings, the governors in palaces . . . What India was for England the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future! Colonies are a precarious possession, but this ground is safely ours. Europe is not a geographic entity; it’s a racial entity.
Expanding the circulation of Mein Kampf in the 1930s, the state required that the book be used in the classroom to teach the “essence of blood purity.” And the Nazi ritual of marriage included a special gift from the Führer: wedding editions of Mein Kampf were given to each German couple.
Perhaps, at first, the newly married German women who received this book did not grasp—if they bothered to read it—the implications of Hitler’s call to colonize the East. But Hitler’s demand for a restoration, indeed expansion, of Germany’s 1914 borders was not unpopular. Among Germans, the experience of the Great War—in particular the humiliating loss of territory—only broadened the feeling that they were a Volk ohne Raum, a people without adequate space, which was the title of a best-selling novel in the 1920s. Nazi propagandists and intellectuals recast German history in school textbooks and popular exhibits as the story of successive waves of eastern migration. As of 1938, German girls in the Hitler Youth (BdM) learned new songs with verses such as “Into the east wind throw your banners / For the east wind makes them wide / Over yonder we shall start building / Which will defy the rules of time.” In 1942 Joseph Goebbels, the Reich propaganda minister, and his staff opened a major exhibit in Berlin, The Soviet Paradise, which had been under development since 1934 and would be seen by 1.3 million Germans. In it, Goebbels paired the horrors of Bolshevism with the German Drang nach Osten, the Drive to the East. The exhibit traced Germans in eastern Europe back to the medieval history of the crusading Teutonic Knights, industrious German merchants of the Hanseatic League, and hard-working German peasants, who in successive attempts all sought to stem the tide of Asiatic hordes driving west. Germans were civilization’s great defenders and developers. Women figured in The Soviet Paradise as well, as adoring wives and robust mothers. These images and tales were supposed to inspire ordinary Germans to go east and to accept the crusade against Bolshevism, the subjugation of Poland in 1939, and the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 as historically legitimate and necessary.
German women who went east in the Third Reich were not the first generation of German imperialists. Female missionaries populated the Kaiser’s colonial elite in sub-Saharan Africa, and in the interwar period women were mobilized closer to home in the borderlands movement to rescue Germans who resided in the territories lost under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. After Poland was defeated in September 1939, several thousand German women were pressed into labor service and strongly encouraged to vacation in Poland. The propaganda of the Nazi Party women’s movement reignited imperial fantasies, proclaiming in 1942 that “the expanses in the East which our troops have traversed, fighting and winning, become ever greater, [and] ever greater are the numbers of Germans who go out into the East (Ostraum) with the civilian administration . . . The fighting troops are always quickly followed by German women.”
Over time it was expected that any woman who desired a position in the Party’s upper management would complete some training in the eastern territories. In 1943 more than three thousand young women went to Poland to prepare for their careers. They cared for and educated ethnic German refugees who streamed from Romania and Ukraine into special villages in Poland such as Zamosz, where the occupying German force had brutally ejected Poles from their homes, stealing their property along with their livestock and personal possessions. In the history of German imperial expansion in Europe and overseas, the Nazi chapter was the most extreme in its genocidal policies, social engineering schemes, and deployment of female activists.
In the Nazi imagination, the eastern Lebensraum, an Aryan living space abroad, was a frontier where anything was possible—a place where mass-murder factories could be constructed alongside utopian, German-only colonies. “The East” evoked all the violent, but also romantic, cowboys-and-Indians stereotypes in literature and film of the time. Third Reich popular culture projected the Wild East as a fertile terrain where Teutonic bounty hunters, posses, and pioneers tamed the terrain and its savages. Ethnic Germans appeared in Nazi photographs in wagon trains while local gendarmes and SS policemen crossed the
plains straddling motorcycles like cowboys astride horses. A popular family board game of the 1930s depicted German settlers as pioneers in the East.
Hitler, among those fascinated with the American West, made the connection explicit, proclaiming the duty “to Germanize [the East] by immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.” Himmler, meanwhile, spoke of the Nazi mission in the East as Germany’s Manifest Destiny. Many Germans grew up reading the adventure novels of Karl May, or saw the 1936 film Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Kaiser of California), or saw a bigger feature in 1941, Carl Peters, about a German brute in Africa who decks himself out in a white coat and black shiny boots to whip “the blacks.” These cultural productions, like the earlier horror and gangster films of the German expressionists—Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and M—reflected, in the words of a cultural critic of the time, Siegfried Kracauer, “those deep layers of collective mentality” as well as the “psychological dispositions” of this era and generation.
The notion of Lebensraum was supposed to galvanize Germans—functioning in much the same way as the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft within the Reich—to conquer, colonize, and exploit eastern Europe. Reclaiming Germany’s border regions and heritage abroad was presented as an act of national self-determination: with the Wehrmacht’s march into Poland and the Soviet Union, millions of ordinary Germans were expected to follow as imperial rulers and settlers in the conquered territories. The reality of Lebensraum would fall far short of its democratic promise.
