German Wife And Mother: The Role Of Women In The Third Reich
From Functionaries Of Totalitarian Rule— Part 3 of 'The Face Of The Third Reich' (1999)
Never become ladies, remain German girls and women! — Julius Streicher
Who will ever ask in three or five hundred years' time whether a Fräulein Müller or Schulze was unhappy? — Heinrich Himmler
The National Socialist movement, from the beginning a militant community of like-minded men, had almost no place in its ranks for women. The very first general meeting of members early in 1921 passed a unanimous resolution that 'a woman can never be accepted into the leadership of the party and into the governing committee'.
The Fuhrerlexikon, or index of leaders, among countless names, often of third-rate people, does not list one woman; and during the subsequent years of the Third Reich, in spite of all the organisations of millions of both sexes, there was no true political representation of women. The misogyny of the initial phase, despite all mitigating assurances by the top leadership, remained a basic factor and emphatically differentiated the NSDAP from all other political groups and parties. The type of homeless man, profoundly incapable of bourgeois stability, who gave the movement its shape during the early phase, generally despised attachment to a wife and family along with all other ties. The decisive influences in his life, experience at the front, the years of the Freikorps, the militant alliances in the big cities, had always had the character of a men's society, and the feelings of Comradeship from those years further reinforced this masculine exclusiveness. In the idea of a carefully fostered elite and hierarchy, particularly in the SA and later in the SS, in the ecstatic admiration for the Indomitable leader', the 'heroic friend' and the self-sacrificing comrade' we see a repeated tendency to homosexuality also revealed in the soft, vaguely sentimental tone used to embellish acts of brutality.
It is no coincidence that for years no one found his way into the movement's top leadership who had a family or whose family life matched the image of National Socialist ideology. In countless and tirelessly presented metaphors, pictures, monuments, as well as in the amateurish but officially fostered 'genuinely national poetry', (2) the type is pictured as a heroic figure, preferably on his own land, gazing boldly into the rising sun or standing with legs apart as he offers his strong bare chest to the turbulent waves of life, and leaning against him is his tall, full-bosomed wife; she too is doughty and valiant, but at the same time fervent, profound and gay amid the children to whom she has tirelessly given birth. This erect blond idyll with the unmistakable aura of male sweat and nobility of soul was peculiar to all stylizations of National Socialist ideology, in whatever sphere. Behind the stilted heroism of these pictures there always lurked the sober considerations of power politics, which saw marriage as a 'productive relationship' and graded women according to their 'child-bearing achievements'.(3) Naturally, the prevalent military vocabulary spoke of 'throwing woman into the struggle', of battles fought 'not in the social but in the erotic sphere. The fulfilment of love, happiness in love, conception, and birth are the heroic high-points of female life.'
The woman who 'voluntarily renounced motherhood' was a 'deserter', and Hitler even proclaimed:
'Every child which she brings into the world is a battle which she wins for the existence or non-existence of her nation.'
For the origin and content of National Socialist ideology in respect of women, however, we must look beyond simple considerations of power to Hitler's own problematic attitude to the opposite sex. We can be fairly certain that his personal deviation from the ideal which he set up, like all his decisions and even his private behaviour, was determined in the first place by considerations relating to the psychology of power. As early as 1919 his late mentor, Dietrich Eckart, giving his idea of the future saviour of Germany at the table of a Schwabing tavern, demanded,
'He must be a bachelor! Then we shall bring in the women.'
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