Transcript How successfully did the Nazis impose their ideology on German

"The mission of women is to be beautiful and to
bring children into the world. This is not at all
as.........unmodern as it sounds. The female bird
pretties herself for her mate and hatches eggs
for him. In exchange, the male takes care of
gathering food, and stands guard and wards off
the enemy."
Joseph Goebbels, writing in 1929.
How successfully did the Nazis
impose their ideology on
German women?
“ Take hold of kettle, broom and pan,
Then you’ll surely get your man!
Shop and office leave alone,
Your true life’s work lies at home”
Women in Nazi Germany
• Kinder, Kuche, Kirche : children,
kitchen, church
• Contrast to women’s
emancipation in Weimar
Germany
What the Nazis did to influence
women...
• National Socialist Womanhood and German
Women’s Enterprise, these groups ad a
membership of several million
• The NS-Frauenschaft (NSF: National Socialist
Women's League) was the women's organization of
the Nazi party.
• Government laws: restrict number of hours women
could work in factories and stop them from
undertaking heavy work in certain industries
• Propaganda campaign aimed at
raising the status of mothers and
housewives within the Peoples
Community
• Award women with the Mother
Cross. Eight or more children got
gold award, six got silver and four
got bronze
• Government laws: restrict number of hours
women could work in factories and stop them
from undertaking heavy work in certain industries
• Women in higher ranks of the civil service and in
medicine were dismissed, senior positions in the
legal profession were barred to women
• Excluded from politics
• Discouraged from going to university
• 1937 banned grammar education for girls and
banned them from learning Latin, which was
compulsory for university
Why did the Nazis have these policies?
• Ideological: Hitler’s belief in a
peasant based volksgemeinschaft
that rejected the modern and
Bolshevik ideas of female
emancipation
• Pragmatic: Germany had a
declining birth rate post WWI, an
increased birth rate was required
to conqueror Eastern Europe
1938: divorce is made easier, grounds for a
divorce are adultery, refusal to have children,
venereal disease, a three year separation,
mental illness, racial incompatability and
eugenic weakness
Why?
Removing Women from the workplace
• Removed from higher ranks of the civil service
and in medicine
• senior positions in the legal profession were
barred to women
• Excluded from politics
• 1937 banned grammar education for girls and
banned them from learning Latin, which was
compulsory for university
To improve the ‘quality of births’
• The priority of the Nazis was not so much the
family as the birth of healthy ‘Aryan’ children.
• Abortion banned
• Aryans offered interest free marriage loan,
amount reduced by each child born. But could
only get the loan if women stayed out of work
• Birth Control for Aryans restricted
• Lebensborn (well of life) homes set up for
unmarried mothers whose partners were ‘racially
valuable’. Good facilities at cheap rates
To improve the ‘quality of births’
• 1936 SS men required to have at least 4
children in or out of wedlock
• SS men ordered to fertilise young single
women so that they could ‘donate a baby to
the Fuhrer’
• 1933 Sterilisation Law passed against those
with a hereditary disease/mental illness
• 350,000 people sterilised 1933-1945
How successful were Nazi polices?
• 1937 labour shortages meant that more
women joined the work force.
• By 1939 12.7 million women in employment,
37 % of the workforce.
• Increasing numbers of doctors and teachers
• Outbreak of WWII changed policy
• WWII increased women in the workforce to
52% in 1942.