in the future of Nazi Germany, so, too, were the progenitors of future generations: women. In this area, Nazi ideology was clear in principle but less than consistent in practice. As is well-known, the Nazis promoted the view of women’s role being confined to ‘children, kitchen, church’ (Kinder, Küche, Kirche). The birth rate had been declining in early twentieth-century Germany, and the Nazis wanted to reverse this trend and replenish the ‘racial stock’. A variety of means were attempted, many of which were not specifically Nazi but represented more widespread attitudes at the time. In the depression of the late Weimar years there had been much criticism of ‘double earners’, and the effective expulsion of women from sections of the labour force was underway before the Nazis came to power. After 1933 the pattern of female participation in the labour force was a partially contradictory one. While Nazi prejudices had a deep impact in some areas – the exclusion of women from practising law or becoming judges is an example – in other areas, such as the caring professions and primary school teaching, female participation increased slightly. By the later 1930s the pressures of rearmament and labour shortage encouraged a higher female employment rate. There is some dispute among historians as to whether, during the war years, ideology or economic necessity took precedence in policies on female employment.
At the same time, birth control techniques were discouraged, and the benefits and virtues of having a large family were promoted. Attempts were made to propagate a view of marriage as being for the purpose of producing healthy, racially pure stock, with the state having a clear interest in the reproduction of a ‘superior’ species. As in other areas, Nazi views were dressed up to appear scientifically respectable: the expert – the doctor – had a role to play in giving a medical blessing to what might otherwise have been seen as purely the intimate, private affair of an individual couple. The decision to reproduce was not a matter solely for individuals, but an affair of the state, responsible for ensuring healthy future stock – and for sterilizing those people deemed unfit to pass on their genes into the genetic pool of the next generation. Such views were insidiously put across in such seemingly non-propagandistic publications as popular dictionaries of health and medicine, such as Knaurs Gesundheitslexikon.7 Financial incentives were given to those having numerous children, and symbolic rewards in the form of a ‘mother’s cross’ (Mutterkreuz) were awarded to those having eight, six or four children (gold, silver and bronze crosses, respectively). Courses in motherhood and domestic science were run by the Nazi women’s organization, the Deutsches Frauenwerk (DFW), which had been established in September 1933 to coordinate the various women’s organizations of pre-Nazi Germany. Along with the original NSDAP organization, the National Socialist Frauenwerk (NSF), the DFW attempted to organize and mobilize women. Like Nazi youth organizations, Nazi women’s organizations had a limited impact: working-class and rural women proved relatively impervious to their supposed attractions. Moreover, Nazi women’s policy was in any case subject to intrinsic contradictions: while attempting to emphasize the woman’s role as wife and mother, it simultaneously tended to take her away from the family through time-consuming organizational activities. As it turned out, the essentially private sphere of family life proved relatively resistant to Nazi infiltration and ‘coordination’.8 Moreover, issues of ‘race’ and class often cross-cut questions of gender.
In the sphere of work, similar attempts were made to foster a sense of community. Programmes such as ‘Strength through Joy’ (Kraft durch Freude) and ‘The Beauty of Work’ (Schönheit der Arbeit) made a pretence at fostering the health and well-being of workers. Although a few benefited from well-publicized holidays, such as pleasure cruises, many were not taken in by the propaganda about the ‘factory community’ in which individual effort served the good of the whole community. On the other hand, with the demise of independent trade unions the experience of collective solidarity was lost, and with the introduction of individual wage negotiations for individual advancement, working-class collective identities and bonds began to be eroded. Nazi policies may not always have had the effects intended, but they were not without impact altogether.
Not all organizations and ideologies were equally susceptible to Nazi coordination, penetration or subversion. Catholics had initially proved more resistant to the attractions of pre-1933 Nazi electoral propaganda than had Protestants. The Reichskonkordat of 1933 appeared to establish a modus vivendi for Catholicism with the Nazi regime, but Catholics were concerned to preserve a strict separation between the spheres of religion – which remained their preserve – and politics, which could be left to the state. When the latter encroached on the former, Catholics were prepared to resist, as in the campaigns waged against the Nazi attacks on confessional education and attempts to remove crucifixes from schools.9 The Protestant churches, lacking the transcendent loyalty to a higher authority equivalent to the Catholic focus on Rome, initially appeared more vulnerable to Nazi incursions. But Nazi attempts to co-opt Protestantism, with the appointment of a ‘Reich bishop’ and the formation of a movement of pro-Nazi ‘German Christians’, soon led to a serious rift among Protestants. Those who recognized the essential criminality of the Nazi regime came to sympathize with the ‘Confessing Church’, associated with theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. A majority of Protestants sided with neither the German Christians nor the Confessing Church, and the latter two groups were in the event subject to internal divisions and disputes. The Nazis eventually gave up their attempt to co-opt Christianity and made little pretence at concealing their contempt for Christian beliefs, ethics and morality. Unable to comprehend that some Germans genuinely wanted to combine commitment to Christianity and Nazism, some members of the SS even came to view German Christians as almost more of a threat than the Confessing Church.10
Clearly there was a wide range of opinions among Christians of different confessions, political perspectives and social backgrounds, and different issues took precedence at various times. For many laypeople, the ‘pastors’ squabbling’ (Pfarrergezänk) must have seemed at best an irrelevance to the pressing concerns of everyday life. For some members of the laity, the singing of hymns with deeper meanings may have helped them to retain a sense of the transience of contemporary oppression, while not galvanizing them against the regime, and may hence have aided regime stability.11 On the other hand, it was also possible to hold what would otherwise have been forbidden political gatherings under the guise of church meetings or Bible study groups. But insofar as it is possible to generalize on a complex issue, it must be said that, whatever the diversity of opinion and action, the record of most Christians (Protestant and Catholic) was at best a rather patchy and uneven one. With the notable exception of those religious individuals and groups who stood out for their principled resistance to the regime – of whom more in the next chapter – it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, compliance with, or even active support for, the Nazi dictatorship.
Economy and Society
Undoubtedly of major impact on most people’s attitudes and perceptions was their economic experience. Weimar democracy had been associated, for millions of Germans, not only with national defeat and a humiliating peace treaty but also with economic disaster. Many had survived the inflation of 1923 only to be buffeted by the slump that started in 1929. Despite the increasing political repression, for a large number of Germans the Third Reich appeared to give new hope of prosperity and stability. Small retailers looked forward to the suppression of their rivals, the big department stores; peasants looked forward to a rightful place in a country proclaiming the importance and glory of ‘blood and soil’; industrialists welcomed the suppression of trade union rights in the hope of regaining power for the employers, eroded under the Weimar system. While socialists and communists, Jews and other committed opponents of the regime viewed it with foreboding, for many apolitical Germans the ‘national awakening’ appeared to offer hopes of a brighter future.
What actually happened to German economy and society in the Third Reich, and what were the relationships between economics and politics under Nazi rule? Controversies over these questions are far from settled. The Nazis themselves proclaimed that they were effecting a ‘national revolution’, although the hopes of more
