Role Of Women In The Third Reich

[Kyt]

The rhetoric:

The Role Of Women In The Third Reich

the reality:

http://members.aol.com/DAnn01/combat.html

Hitler had always insisted that women remain home and be full-time wives and mothers; Nazi women were to guarantee the survival of the Aryan race in the labor room, not on the battlefield.40 Even single women were not recruited for jobs in industry in the beginning of the war. By 1941 women were holding jobs in industry and serving in Female Auxiliary Units doing administrative work for the military. After the invasion of Russia, German women in Female Auxiliary Units increasingly began replacing men who were sent to the Eastern front. Berlin did monitor its Finnish ally, which successfully used "Lottas" as auxiliaries to the Army. But it was not until January, 1943, when the war had clearly begun to turn sour and Albert Speer became the economic czar, that Germany began full mobilization of its human resources. Even so, measures to conscript women into industry were introduced "only with extreme reluctance, and were never efficiently implemented." Not surprisingly, then, measures to draft women into the military-- including Goebbels' 1944 Second Order for the Implementation of Total War-- were even less well-enforced....

German women, however, did serve in the military: in all, 450,000 joined the women's auxiliaries, in addition to the units of nurses. By 1945 women were holding approximately 85% of the once all-male billets as clericals, accountants, interpreters, laboratory workers, and administrative workers, together with half of the clerical and junior administrative posts in high-level field headquarters. These German women, in uniform and under military discipline, were not officially referred to as female soldiers. They were unofficially nicknamed "Blitzmaedchen." While it may seem surprisingly that the Nazis ever allowed women to serve in the military in any capacity, to test our hypothesis we must examine the German model to see if women held more than combat support or combat service support positions....

Antiaircraft units became increasingly central to Germany's war effort, so on July 17, 1943, Hitler decided to train women for searchlight and AA positions. Basic training was to take 4 weeks. These AA auxiliaries were placed as follows: 3 to operate the instrument to measure distances, 7 to operate the radio measuring instrument, 3 to operate the command instrument and occasionally 1 to serve as a telephone platoon leader. By the end of the war between 65,000 and 100,000 women served in AA units with the Luftwaffe. Some searchlight units were eventually 90 percent female. Similar to the British experience, German women who joined AA units were soon "proud to be serving as AA-Auxiliaries," and were, "Burning soon to be trained well enough to be able to lawlessly stand our ground at the equipment." In these units women developed the unit cohesion which had been evident in the British AA units. As one veteran recalled, "We have been raised with the same kind of spirit, we had the same ideals, and the most important was the good comradeship, the 'one for all'". Here again these AA-Auxiliaries emphasized their continued femininity. As Lotte Vogt explained:

"In spite of all the soldier's duties we had to do, we did not forget that we are girls. We did not want to adapt uncouth manners. We certainly were no rough warriors--always simply women"...