MOTHERS IN THE FATHERLAND
Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics
Claudia Koonz
New York: St. Martin's Press
556 pp., $25.00
"After the publication of fifty thousand books and monographs about Hitler's Germany, it seems scarcely conceivable that any facet of those nightmare years remains unexplored, much less undiscovered. But in fact, half of the Germans who made dictatorship, war and genocide possible have largely escaped observation. The women among Hitler's supporters have fallen through the historian's sieve, unclaimed by feminists and unnoticed by men." Thus begins the introduction to the long-missing half of Nazi social history.
It is not difficult to understand how the women of the Third Reich escaped historians' scrutiny. The Nazi state was the dream-come-true of one man, the fuehrer, a bizarre modern caricature of the patriarch, and the hallmarks of his regime - brown-shirted violence, Gestapo terror, and SS-organized genocide - were the exclusive province of males. Wholly excluded from political posts and decision-making, German women of the period are commonly portrayed as the passive, often helpless, spectators and victims of their marching, warring men. Yet millions of women not only cheered Hitler's rise to power, but actively worked for the success of his party and its political, social, and racial programs, enthusiastically administering educational and indoctrination programs, Nazi welfare services, leisure activities, and consumer organizations. Most importantly, they brought Nazism home to the grassroots of everyday family life. By their support, outward compliance, or tacit acquiescence, women created the social side of Nazism, thus giving tyranny a sheen of respectability.
It was Claudia Koonz's purpose to somehow gauge the contribution to evil made by both Nazi women leaders and the average German housewife and mother. To this end she spent eight years in archival research. In the virtual absence of rival works, Mothers in the Fatherland can make the uncommon claim to being the first to map the uncharted waters of women's history in the Third Reich. It does so with depth and scholarship.
That history involves a paradox so glaring and so germane to the role of women in Nazism that it lies at the very heart of Koonz's work and can be seen as yet another factor in the general disregard of German women by modern research.
From the earliest beginnings of his party, Adolph Hitler, who vacillated on nearly every other crucial political issue, never equivocated about two axioms: elimination of Jews and women from the Aryan man's world. Hitler wanted to deprive women of their voting right, and of all political office and influence. Nazi doctrine defined women in the narrowest biological terms - as breeders of the future "racially pure" Aryan generation. In their speeches and periodicals, Nazi males were not averse to contemptuous, often vulgar, demeaning of women. Yet voting statistics are available that show that "women nearly as strongly as men supported the Nazis during the years of their spectacular rise to power between 1930 and 1932." In our own age, sensitized by feminism to the equal educational, political, and social opportunities and rights of women, the gravitation of women to so blatantly
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