middle-class women and national socialist ‘service’

MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN AND NATIONAL SOCIALIST ‘SERVICE’

J I L L S T E P H E N S O N

University of Edinburgh

The basis of the NSDAPs support, it is well known, lay in the various elements of the German middle class; only a minority of proletarians-but often the poorest-supported the Nazi Party in its activities and at the polls before 1933.’ From the time of his appointment as Chancellor, Hitler was able to win the confidence of hitherto neutral middle-class Germans by his ruthless destruction of the Left. By reducing dramatically the cataclysmic level of unemployment, his regime bought the grudging acquiescence of much of the working class, and thus further secured the position of the middle class by rendering underground Marxist agitation relatively ineffec- tive.’ A middle class that was revolted by ‘Bolshevist licence’ in the Soviet Union welcomed the new regime’s emphasis on ‘healthy family life’ and- at first, at least-conventional morality.3 A middle class that had been intensely nationalistic for decades was gratified by the peacetime achieve- ments of Hitler’s foreign policy. It was true that Party notables, including Hitler himself, as well as Hess and Himmler, spoke scathingly of ‘petty bourgeois’ values and attitudes,’ but that could not disguise the reality of the ‘national revolution’ in 1933 as the second phase of the two-stage victory of bourgeois over proletarian, in the German class struggle which followed the First World War. Having eliminated the threat-real or imagined-of red revolution, Hitler, not unreasonably perhaps, expected neutral non-proletarians to join with his supporters in furthering the ideological and social objectives of the new regime, and, by example, in winning over the mass of working-class Germans. The entire ‘racially desirable’ population was to be educated to a sense of service, to accept that the fundamental duty of individual members of the nation was to work for the benefit of the Volksgerneinschuft (national community) as a whole-an idea given spurious validation by the demand of Point 24 of the Nazi Party Programme, ‘the common good before self-interest’.

In this, at least, men and women were to be treated equally, although the kind of service to be performed by them would differ, since service was not merely intended to benefit the community in practical terms but was to have a direct effect on the attitudes of those performing it. The logistics of

’ Heinrich August Winkler, ‘German Society, Hitler and the Illusion of Restoration 1930- 33’, and Thomas Childers, ‘The Social Bases of the National Socialist Vote’, Journal of Contemporary History, October 1976, pp. 2-3, 12-13, 17-31, 40-42; Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich (Opladen, 1977), pp. 44-76.

Hans-Joachim Reichhardt, ‘Resistance in the Labour Movement’, W. Schmitthenner and Hans Buchheim, eds., The German Resistance to Hitler (London, 1970), pp. 189-92.

Jill Stephenson, Women in Nuti Society (London, 1975), pp. 57-70. ‘ Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), pp. 8 6 8 7 . Bundesarchiv (hereafter BA), R4311/1286, letter from Hess to the fiancee of a dead soldier, n.d. (covering letter dated 24 December 1939); Josef Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe (Gattingen, 1970), pp. 127-37.

32

JILL STEPHENSON 33 organizing the two sexes into service was very different; men were much easier to control and dispose than women, and particularly middle-class women who were arguably the chief beneficiaries of the new regime. Be- nefiting from the general advantages to the middle class , they were ini- tially further flattered and reassured by the regime’s attitudes to the female sex. The exaltation of full-time motherhood approved the status quo as far as most middle-class wives were concerned, but for working-class women motherhood had often to be combined with work in industry or a family concern. The image projected of the ideal mother departed from reality by surrounding her with several children, which conflicted with the wide- spread practice of contraception by the middle class, especially,’ but in other respects paid court to middle-class attitudes. The regime’s steadfast insistence on providing low-cost domestic servants perhaps made sense in 1933 as one of many tactics for reducing unemployment figures,‘ but with labour in increasingly short supply in the late 1930s and into the war it clearly demonstrated official concern with retaining at least the benevolent neutrality of those women who could afford to employ a domestic servant. Even the small minority of middle-class women working in the professions found, after initial anxiety and problems, that their services were required and even welcomed,? while those in the ‘caring professions’, nursing and social work, were in constant demand. There were, of course, those who lost their job or faced some other kind of discrimination because they were non-‘ Aryan’ or had a history of anti-Nazi or merely non-Nazi political activity.’ But individual cases of hardship contrast with the great weight of middle-class relief-perhaps the overriding sentimentg-at what a Nazi regime brought.

Upon this response the Nazi leadership constructed a false equation: the recipients of benefits, both negative and positive, palpable and intangible, would not only accept an obligation to serve the regime, but would volunteer to do so. The collective entity of the Volksgemeinschufr-whose sum was allegedly greater than its parts-had needs, defined by the Nazi leadership, to be met unquestioningly by its members. In this new era, with the old days of ‘liberal individualism’ gone for ever, service was to be performed not merely automatically and obediently, but with a will; indoctri- nation was to produce not merely compliance but, necessarily, enthusiasm. This was the task to which the Nazi Party was relegated after the Mucht- iibernahme (takeover of power). The discrediting of Gregor Strasser’s work for the Party’s organization, in December 1932, had left the NSDAP in disarray in the critical year 1933, making it an easy prey to Hitler’s decision not to allow it to take over the state; the willing collaboration of existing

‘Jill Stephenson, ‘ “Reichsbund der Kinderreichen”: the League of Large Families in the

‘Gesetz zur Verminderung der Arbeitslosigkeit’, Reichsgesetzblan (hereafter RGB), 1933 Population Policy of Nazi Germany’, European Studies Review, July 1979, pp. 3 5 s 6 0 .

I, 1 June 1933, pp. 323-27. ’ Stephenson, Women. . . , pp. 152-77. ‘ibid. , pp. 29, 155-56.

J. R. C. Wright, ‘Above Parties’ (Oxford, 1974), p. 110, describes this as being the reac- tion of the Protestant Church leadership. See also Dora Hasselblatt, ed., Wir Frauen und die Nationale Bewegung (Hamburg, 1933), and BA, R43IU427, letter from the Ring Nationaler Frauenbiinde to Hitler, April 1933.

34 MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN AND NATIONAL SOCIALIST ‘SERVICE

state functionaries rendered such a move not only unnecessary but actually undesirable.” The Party, then, was left to win over Germans to the National Socialist ‘idea’, by propaganda and persuasion, and instil a desire to contribute to ‘the Fuhrer’s great work of construction’,” whatever that might be. Each citizen would willingly become the instrument of policies which were nominally framed by the NSDAP, but which in fact depended on the arbitrary will of one man, as transmitted by a few trusted hench- men.’* Although there were undoubtedly successes, on the whole this ‘educational task’-admittedly given only twelve years’ operation-failed to win the hearts and minds of Germans, and failed conspicuously among middle-class German women. Considered objectively, this should have been obvious, but party activists’ idealism, genuine if misplaced, blinded them to the limitations of National Socialism as an all-conquering creed and, equally, to the extent to which people with minds of their own could resist even the most insistent propaganda. And with middle-class women, particularly, propaganda was the only available weapon; violence against the German housewife and mother, as long as she remained negatively ‘politically reliable’, was unthinkable, while threats without substance were a risky bluff, which might alienate those predisposed to favour the regime. Middle-class women accepted as their due the benefits which National Socialism conferred on them, without imagining that a quid pro quo was required.

The problem for the activists partly lay in traditional middle-class attitudes-ironically, perhaps-and partly in the ambiguous use of the term ‘service’. A sense of service had, in the nineteenth century, become part of the Prussian middle-class ethic; Junker values and attitudes were widely accepted, including the bargain whereby subjects rendered service-in the army or the bureaucracy-in return for a position of exclu- sive status and privilege in Prussian ~0c ie ty . l~ But in a society where women were subordinate to men and expected to be ‘concerned with docil- ity and domesticity’ and little else,14 ‘service’, like privilege, was the pre- rogative of men. Certainly, after 1871, there were proposals for a year of service to be performed by men and women alike, to instil civic responsibil- i v , or, more honestly, loyalty to the Reich, the Kaiser and, implicitly, the political and social system, but they came to nothing.” In 1914, however, the leaders of the middle-class women’s movement inaugurated their own National Women’s Service; while gaining official praise for its efforts during the war,I6 it remained purely voluntary, and women were excluded

Areyh L. Unger, ‘Totalitarian Party and State’, Political Quarterly, 1965, pp. 441-59. BA, Sammlung Schumacher 230, ‘Satzung des Deutschen Frauenwerks’, Der Fiihreror-

Berlin Document Center, Akten des Obersren Parteigerichts, no. 2684/34, deposition by

Walter Struve, Elites against Democracy (Princeton, 1973). pp. 62-66.

den, 11 April 1936, p. 10.

Bormann, 30 May 1934.

l4 Eda Sagarra,A Social History of Germany 1648-1914 (London, 1977), p. 415. Is Hans Freising, Entstehung und Aufbau des Arbeitsdienstes im Deutschen Reich (Rostock,

1937), pp. 1-5; P. W. van den Nieuwenhuysen, De Nationaalsocialistische Arbeidsdienst, (Louvain, 1939), pp. 15-20; Elisabeth Heimpel-Michel, Ida von Kortzfiisch: Frauen- bewegung und Frauendienstpflrcht (Gotha, 1931), pp. 4447.

Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894-1933 (London, 1976), pp. 207-09; Ursula von Gersdorff, Frauen im Kriegsdienst 1914-1945 (Stuttgart, 1969). pp. 15-20.

JILL STEPHENSON 35 from the Hindenburg Programme of December 1916.17 With military service banned by the Versailles Treaty, the ‘year of service’ idea was revived during the 1920s, and adopted formally by the Stahlhelm in 1925 and by the NSDAP in 1928.18 Here, then, the NSDAP aligned itself with the views of traditionalist, backward-looking, right-wing groups, and gained support from such ~ o t e r s . ’ ~

Although various service schemes were established by a number of competing agencies under the Nazi regime from 1933, they remained piecemeal, providing reserves of labour in deprived areas or, at first, providing occupation for some of the young unemployed. The numbers involved were small, in spite of the disproportionate publicity given to ventures such as the Land Year and the Homecraft Year. In April 1934, over 20,000 young people-about one-third of them girls-were sent from their homes in industrial areas to work on the land, living together in purpose-built camps for a year.” At the same time, an appeal went out to housewives to take on a school-leaver as a domestic help ‘so that in no case does a girl begin her life in the working community without a job’.*’ With the economic upturn, the increasing shortage of labour on the land led the Reich Food Estate to begin a Girls’ Land Service scheme in 1936, which by 1938 had attracted 6,500 girls and in 1939 14,200.22 More for indoctrina- tion than for any economic purpose, female students were obliged to participate in the Women’s Service run by the Association of Nazi Girl Stu- dents, and were under pressure to volunteer for stints of factory work to afford working women extra paid holiday; rather small numbers re~ponded.’~ Then, in February 1938, Goring, as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, introduced the Pfirchtjahr (Compulsory Year), which required large categories of young women under 25 to work for a year in domestic service or agriculture before entering first empl~yment.’~ And the most vaunted scheme of all was the Labour Service, which increasingly was used to provide cheap labour on the land, but which its leader, Hierl, steadfastly maintained had primarily an ‘educational’ purpose.25 But while the men’s Labour Service was built up to a strength of 230,000 in the year ending October 1937, with plans to raise this figure to 300,000 by autumn 1 939,26 the Reichsarbeitsdienst der weiblichen Jugend (Reich Labour Ser- vice for Young Women) remained very limited in size, at 25,000 by March

” Ibid., p. 21. 18 Nieuwenhuysen, op. cit., p. 26. ” H. A. Winkler, up. cit., pp. 9-10, 12-13. ” ‘Landjahr der Jugend’, Das Archiv, 1934/35, p. 64. “ ‘Hauswirtschaftliches Jahr fur Madchen’, Das Archiv, 1934/35, p. 259. ’‘ ‘Landdienst fur Madel’, Verfugungen, Anordnungen, Eekunnrgaben, vol. 1, order of

23 Stephenson, Women. . . , pp. 141-42. ‘* Ibid., pp. 103-05. ” Konstantin Hierl, Im Dienst fur Deutschlund 1918-1945 (Heidelberg, 1954), pp. 75,

95-97. ’‘ ‘Erlass des Fuhrers und Reichskanzlers uber die Dauer der Dienstzeit des Reichsarbeits-

dienstes und die Starke des Reichsarbeitsdienstes und des Arbeitsdienstes fur die weibliche Jugend’, RGE, 1936 I, 26 September 1936, p. 747.

28.2.42.

3 6 MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN AND NATIONAL SOCIALIST ‘SERVICE’

1938 and 30,000 a year later.” Once compulsion was introduced for women and girls, with the Pflichtjahr in 1938 and then in the Labour Service in September 1939, the veneer of enthusiasm that had been propa- gated by a minority of genuine enthusiasts for Nazi service schemes” wore thin as middle-class families, particularly, tried a variety of tactics to have a daughter exempted or at least to have the rigours of these service obliga- tions mitigated. One father in Coburg, in November 1939, threatened to marry off his daughter if she was conscripted into the Labour Service, since married women, however young, were automatically exempt .” Mothers were said to have advertised for suitable homes for their daughter’s Pjiicht- jahr to ensure that the standard of comfort to which a middle-class girl was accustomed was maintained.30 And parents, employers and the girls themselves produced an infinite variety of excuses to try to obtain exemption or ‘deferral’ .31 Hardly surprisingly, barely 190,000 girls were enrolled in the Pflichtjahr scheme in 193!+40, although the number rose to over 330,000 in the following year.32 The compulsory Labour Service’s numbers never rose above 150,000, even with labour acutely short in ~ a r t i m e . ~ ‘

Yet, for the regime, ‘service’ was not intended to be a single experience which brought subsequent lifelong exemption. All ‘Aryan’, politically reliable, healthy Germans were to accept the perpetual duty to serve as a privilege conferred by membership of the ‘master race’. Behind the patent speciousness of this idea-articulated in the major Labour Service legisla- tion of 1935 as ‘Arbeitsdienst ist Ehrendienst am Deutschen Volke’ (‘Labour Service is service of honour to the German pe~ple’)~~-lay an echo of the old Prussian ethic, but it convinced only a minority of Germans. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the official women’s organizations of the Third Reich, which supervised what was only too appropriately termed ‘the women’s work of the nation’. The character and membership of the elite Party women’s organization, the NS- Frauenschafi (Nazi Women’s Group) (NSF), and its ‘Gefolgschaft’ (‘followers’), in the Deutsches Frauenwerk (German Women’s Enterprise) (DFW), were in large measure epitomized by the woman who was leader of both from February 1934 until the end, in 1945, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. As an ordinary German house- ife and mother-with a suitably large family-and a member of the depressed lower middle class, with limited intellect and education, she personified the defensive, unsophisticated, anti-proletarian women who gravitated towards National Socialism before 1933.35 She

*’ Zbid., ‘Erlass des Fuhrers und Reichskanzfers Uber die Sommer- und Winterstirke des Reichsarbeitsdienstes und Uber die Starke des Arbeitsdienstes fur die weibliche Jugend’, R G B , 1937 I, 24 November 1937, p. 1298.

Hanna Vogt, The Burden of Guilt (London, 1965), p. 149; Melita Maschmann, Fail . Keine Rechtfertigungsversuch (Stuttgart, 1963), pp. 37-41.

*’ BA, R77/158, letter from the Coburg Landrat to the RAD recruitment office, Coburg, 25 November 1939.

’” Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War (Princeton, 1978), p. 110.

:I2 Statistisches Jahrbuch fiir das Deuuche Reich, 1941142, p. 420. ”” Gersdorff, op. cii,, p. 425. ’” ‘Reichsarbeitsdienstgesetz’, RGB, 1935 I, 26 June 1935, p. 769. :I5 Berlin Document Center, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink’s file. Clifford Kirkpatrick, Woniun in

28

BA, op. cit., contains numerous examples. :I1

Nazi Germany (London, 19391, pp. 63-65.

JILL STEPHENSON 37 perhaps had less in common with those seeking either security or opportun- ity, often from the professional or more prosperous middle class, who flocked to join the Party or the NSF in the early months of 1933,% but it was her tastes, congenial to the Party’s leadership, which influenced the nature and activities of ‘the women’s work’ in the NSF and the DFW. In these circumstances, the women’s organizations remained a minority interest. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink’s attachment to the National Socialist ideas of service helped to ensure that her organizations were thoroughly unattrac- tive to working-class and middle-class women alike. Above all, comfort- able middle-class housewives did not hire a domestic servant in order to release themselves for service with a Party organization. The cafk and the tennis club had far greater attraction for the leisured middle-class woman than the DFWs sewing circles or ‘political education’ cla~ses.~’

Although the NSF and the DFW worked separately at first, from 1934, they were, for all practical purposes, merged in 1942,= because of the DFW’s failure to become the genuinely mass organization of German women, cutting across regional, confessional and, above all, class barriers, which would have provided the NSF, as the leadership group, with prestige and influence. The NSF itself sprang from various Nazi women’s groups, often purely local in character, which had been welded together as a monopoly Party women’s organization by Strasser in 1931.39 Although its membership was, like the Party’s, largely middle-class, it had acquired some working-class support, not least through the efforts of the largest of the groups to be subsumed into the NSF, Elsbeth Zander’s Deutscher Fruuenorden (German Women’s Order).40 In the rush to join the NSF in 1933-especially once admission to the Party itself was closed in May41-membership rose from almost 110,000 at the end of 1932 to almost 850,000 a year later.42 Its essentially middle-class character was confirmed, with some countemeight to the strong lower middle-class element provided by the influx of women from the conservative ‘patriotic’ groups and from the professions, some of whom felt the need, under apparent threat from the new regime, to use NSF membership as an insurance policy. But these women tended, with exceptions, to regard NSF membership as an unwelcome accessory and played little part in the organization’s activit ie~,~~ leaving a hard core of overwhelmingly lower middle-class activists to maintain the NSFs organization at regional and local level. Attempts to persuade the wives of senior civil servants to show an example, by joining the NSF and participating in its work, were strongly

:I6 Reichsorganisdtionsleiter, ed., NSDAP Parrei-Statisrik, vol. 1, pp. 30-31; F. J. Heyen, Nationalsoziulismus im Alltag (Boppard, 1967), pp. 256-51.

:I7 Institut fur Zeitgeschichte Archive (hereafter IfZ), MA 341, frames 2-667393-94, letter from Berger to Himmler, 2 April 1942; Ibid., MA 138, frames 300885-86, ‘Arbeitsbericht der Gaufrauenschaftsleiterin, Monat October 1941’, Gau Schleswig-Holstein, 29 November 1941.

:IH BA, Sammlung Schumacher 230, letter from Schwarz to Ley, 2 April 1942. :’’ lbid., ‘Ausfuhrungsbestimmungen . . . ‘, Die Organisation der nationalsozialistischen

Frauen in der Nationalsozialisfischen Frauenschaj?, 1 November 193 1. 4” NSDAP Hauptarchiv, Gau History Siid Hannover-Braunschweig, pp. 8-9. *’ Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers (Munich, 1969), pp. 252-53.

‘Mitgliederbewegung der NS-Frauenschaft’, Deutsches Fruuenschuffn, 1939, p. 12. I am grateful to Dr. Marta Baerlecken-Hechtle, Dlisseldorf, for information about this.

38 MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN AND NATIONAL SOCIALIST SERVICE‘

resisted in government ministries and local authority offices,” and regret was expressed that women from the ‘educated classes’ refused to be drawn into NSF

The NSF remained an organization of clerical workers, wives of middle and lower civil servants, and, to some extent, school teacher^,^' which was expected to give a ‘spiritual’ lead to the mass of German women. But anxiety about entrusting the ‘political education’ of Germany’s wives and mothers to women whose ability to expound the Weltanschauung coher- ently and convincingly was in doubt“ was justified b the scepticism and increasing irritation with which their efforts were met4{ although the NSFs wartime task of defusing domestic discontent was unenviable. But while far from all DFW members showed the willingness to serve (Einsutzbereif- schfi) that was expected of them, the chief problem for the NSF was that so few German women were prepared to become accessible to its influence by joining the DFW and participating in its activities. Once again, there was marked resistance among some of those who were expected to volunteer; some political leaders of the NSDAP not only did not encourage their wives to join the DFW, but even forbade them to do But the main reason for the DFWs failure to achieve a mass membership lay in its origins in the remnants of existing women’s organizations which had not been objectionable enough to be dissolved during the early Gleichschal- tung (co-ordination) period in 1933-34. Axiomatically, working-class women’s organizations disappeared, perishing with the political parties, the SPD and the KPD, with which they had been associated. A number of the women’s professional organizations were forced to dissolve, partly because of their association with the middle-class feminist movement,w The strongest of the ‘patriotic’ organizations, the Bund Konigin Luke (Queen Luke League), with 150,000 members in 1933,” succumbed in April 1934 after being subjected to intense pressure to dissolve itself.s2 There remained a motley collection of inoffensive social, sporting, cultural, charitable and ‘patriotic’ organizations whose constituency was overwhelmingly middle class. As early as September 1933 there had been an attempt, under Paula Siber, to gather these together in a loose federation in the new Deutsches Fruuenwerk.= But after Gertrud Scholtz-Klink‘s

“ BA, R22/24, memorandum from Hakcher, President of the Supreme Court, to the Minister of Justice, 20 February 1939.

I s IfZ, op. cir., frames 301117-18, NSDAP Kreisleitung LUbeck, ‘Bericht 10.41: NS- Frauenschaft‘ .

Is Ibid., MA 609, frame 56478, ‘Bericht fiber die bisherige Ttitigkeit des Seminars filr die NS Frauenschaft an der Hochschule filr Politik‘, autumn 1939, gives a useful sample. “ Ibid., MA 138, op. cir. BA, NS15/15, frame 56526, Else Petri, ‘Ziel und Aufgabe des

Seminars’. “ Mrte Winkler, Frauenarbeir im ‘Drirren Reich’ (Hamburg, 1977). pp. 143-44. IfZ, MA

341, op. cir. ”Ibid., MA 130, frame 86370, ‘Bericht Uber die Mitarbeit der Frauen v. pol. Leitern auf

Grund des Rundschreibens v. 25.6.42, Kreisfrauenschaftsleitung Strassburg, 10 April 1943. Stephenson, Women . . . . pp 27-30. Berlin Document Center, Akren d e s Obersten Pnrteigerichts, 2684/34, letter from Walter

Buch to Dr. Krummacher, 20 September 1933.

Jo

51

‘* Reports in the Vdkkcher Beobachter, 11/12 and 24 February, and 3 and 7 March 1934. ‘Zusammenfassung der Deutschen Frauenverblnde’, Das Archiv, 28 September 1933.

JILL STEPHENSON 39 appointment as leader of the NSF and the DFW in February 193454 the trend was increasingly towards sinking the identity of the DFWs compo- nent groups in a uniform, centralized organization controlled from her Berlin office. In some respects, however, the form of the organization was almost irrelevant: the D F W s disappointing development derived from its basis in surviving middle-class groups which had virtually no appeal to working-class women. It also failed to attract those middle-class women who had lost an organization through Gleichschaltung, who had never been drawn to the surviving groups while a completely free choice remained, or who had no desire to join an organization of any kind.

At first sight, the corporate membership of the DFW looked respectable, at 2.7 million in 1935 (out of a total of 24 million German women over twenty)" and 'around 4 million' in the Greater German Reich of 1938, out of a total of some 30 million women.56 But the women who counted as DFW members in this sense had not explicitly chosen to engage in Nazi-led activity; they became DFW members involuntarily through choosing to join a sports club or a basket-weaving circle, or through choosing to have any organized social life at all. More revealing are the figures for those who positively chose to join the DFW as an organization; this became possible from February 1936 when a moratorium was placed on admission to the NSF, to maintain it, at around two million members, as a relatively tight- knit elite group." After two years, fewer than one million women from the Altreich (Old Reich) had taken out individual membership of the DFW,58 in spite of an intense recruiting drive in 1937,'' and at New Year 1939 it was noted that only 6 per cent of women over 20 had While it may be assumed that they had more enthusiasm for the new order than most of those who found themselves as indirect, corporate members, the fact remains that the individual membership of the 'mass' organization of Ger- man women stood at half of that of the 'leadership' organization after five years of Nazi rule. Had the proportions been reversed, it would have been humiliating enough, given the propaganda, the recruiting drives, and the DFWs monopoly status. The adherence of some three-quarters of a million new members from the Austrian and Sudeten Gaus by the end of 1938'' helped to disguise the paltry response to the DFW in the Altreich, but the sum total of the DFWs Greater German membership in 1939 could not be stretched beyond six million, including the corporate members, which still provided a relatively limited 'Gefolgschuj? for the two million women in the NSF. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink tried, completely spuri- ously, to claim that 'twelve million women' were under the direct influence

Report in the Volkischer Beobachter, 2 March 1934. " Partei-Statirtik, vol. 111, p. 58; Statistisches Iahrbuch, 1936, p. 11. '' BA, Sammlung Schumacher 230, 'Reichsfrauenfihrung Jahresbencht 1938', p. I. "Ibid., letter from Friedrichs to Ley, 17 January 1936. 58 Deulsches Frauenschaffen, op. cit., p. 13. " I am grateful to Dr. Gisela Miller, Hamburg, for information about this.

'' Zbid., p. 15. BA, op. cit., 'Jahresbericht . . . ', pp. 15, 19. 60


of her leadership; she misleadingly included four million from the Labour Front by virtue of her largely formal position as leader of its Women’s Section.62

The limited membership of the DFW was no doubt to be expected at the start, in 1934, given the way in which it had been created. But the failure to attract a mass membership indicates the narrow horizons of the NSF and the DFW leadership under Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, and also the extent to which the DFW s activities were geared not to any popular demand but to the needs of the regime. Whether enough working-class women would have become sufficiently reconciled to National Socialism through the pro- vision of attractive leisure activities to provide the DFW with anything approaching a mass membership is open to doubt. After all, working-class women in the Labour Front probably availed themselves little of the facilities of the ‘Strength through Joy’ scheme.63 And the minimal response of working-class women to DFW recruiting drives did not necessarily indi- cate antagonism towards the regime; large numbers of urban and rural proletarian women had no tradition of joining organizations, and, on the land particularly, it seems unlikely that the hard-pressed farmer’s wife had much time for leisure activities, organized or not. The great weight of apathy towards organization contributed considerably to the DFWs recruiting problems. More positively, there was the influence of the churches which, at the local level only, often provided determined resistance to Nazi women’s organizational activity, not least to maintain their own.*

If attracting working-class women was bound to be a long-term, uphill struggle, it was particularly disappointing that comparatively few middle- class women showed much interest in the DFW, beyond those brought in, from the start, through corporate membership. Part of the problem undoubtedly lay in the contradictory nature of the NSFs propaganda. Women were to be, above all, wives, mothers and homemakers, taking a pride in their housework, caring for their husbands, and spending construc- tive leisure time with their children. The encouragement to women to make themselves available for the work of the organizations seemed to run counter to the family-centred ideal that was projected in Nazi propaganda generally. Particularly at odds with early Nazi propaganda about the need to safeguard women from the strain and corrupting influence of political life was the NSFs campaign to make German women more ‘politically conscious’, that is, prepared to accept and support every measure of the regime’s policy.65 A further difficulty lay in the often unsophisticated, lower middle-class leadership of the NSF and the DFW at the local level; as a matter of seniority, those who had supported the NSDAP actively before 1933 had become entrenched in official positions in the women’s organization in the localities. Women from the ‘educated classes’ resisted subordi-

IfZ, o p . c i f . , frames 86492-93, ‘Pgn. Scholtz-Klink: Die NS-Frauenschaft’, 17 April 1939.

‘:’ Dorte Winkler, op. cif . , p. 80. 64 Heyen,up. cii., pp. 179, 188-89.

Lore Bauer, ‘Die “politische Frau” ’, Volkischer Beobachter, 6 September 1935; ‘Erziehung zur politischen Verantwortung’, ibid., 27 September 1935.

JILL STEPHENSON 41 nation to those whom they regarded as their social and intellectual inferiors. Ironically, some-by no means al l -of the activists in the old middle-class feminist movement, including its most prominent character, Gertrud Baumer, took an interest in the Nazi women’s organizations, and expressed a desire to participate in-and to influence-them.66 But they were ‘politically unreliable’.

The greatest disincentive to middle-class women, however, was the nature of the D F W s activities. At first sight, this seems paradoxical, since in 1934 the DFW was little more than the sum of its parts-and these parts were the remaining middle-class women’s organizations. From 1934, however, the growing centralization of the D W s organization was coupled with the reorientation of its work to meet the needs, not of its constituent organizations and their members, but of the regime. Here was where the leadership function of the NSF was crucial: NSF leaders and members at the regional and local level, as politically reliable women who were, in theory, fully conversant with the current demands of the Weltanschauung, were to ensure, through participation and guidance, that all the work of the sections into which the DFWs activities came to be divided from 1934 served a political purpose. Women who had become corporate members of the DFW because they wanted to pursue a hobby, or some other leisure pursuit, increasingly found that their social life was to be spent in service. For example, members of the Housewives’ Organizations, which derived from the Empires7 and which had been brought into the DFW in 1934, were pressed to attend domestic science courses; increasingly in the later 1930s they were bombarded with propaganda and advice about methods of frugality with food, clothing and household goods to serve the regime’s aim of autarky .68 The Housewives’ Organizations themselves were dissolved in September 1935, but their members were expected to remain in the DFW as members of the section ‘National Economy/Domestic Ec~nomy’.~’ But in Hamburg, at least, some of the women continued to hold informal meetings of their former branch of the Housewives’ Organization until the Gestapo discovered and dispersed them. The alternative names which they had chosen-‘coffee mornings’, ‘entertainments’, ‘merry contrast markedly with the character of the activities they were supposed to be pursuing as members of the DFW. There was, in fact, not a great deal about the DFWs activities that was genuinely recreational by the late 1930s. Cultural activities were geared to the promotion of German music, literature, art and customs; sporting activities were designed to build up physical fitness for child-bearing and, it was hoped, voluntary work on the land; sewing circles mended more than they made, to promote autarky and to provide repaired and reworked clothes for needy fellow-citizens at neg- ligible cost. Mothercare courses, indeed, gave valuable advice about infant and child-care, but in addition they were used as vehicles for the regime’s

‘Ii Stephenson, Women. . . , pp. 30, 194. Evans,op. cit., pp. 212-13. Reichsfrauenfuhrung, Nationalsozia[isfirche Frauenschufi (Berlin, 1937), pp. 2k-27;

Reichsfrauenfiihrung, op. cif., p. 24.

ti7

68

Hauptarchiv, reel 13, fol. 253, miscellaneous Reichsfrauenfuhrung circulars, dated 1937. 69

”’ Report in Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 December 1936.


propaganda about ‘population policy’ with all its racialist and pro-natalist implications. There was incessant encouragement to DFW members to undertake voluntary social service work with the Nazi Welfare Organiza- tion, and, belying protestations about Germany’s peaceful intentions, there was increasing emphasis on attending courses in Red Cross work and air- raid protection. In addition to ever-available ‘political education’ courses, there was a strong emphasis on the political message in all the domestic science, child-care, cultural and other activities, since ‘ “ideological train- ing” provides the aim and basis . . . of every kind of work in the DFW, be it the humblest village meeting, a celebration, auxiliary social work or a homecraft course’ .‘l

While the DFWs practical instruction courses, particularly in cooking and child-care, did attract substantial numbers of its members, their general aversion to ‘political education’ courses is clearly reflected in relatively poor attendance figures.” The explicitly service activities, too, found little support among DFW members, something that became more, not less, obvious during the war. Perhaps because they genuinely feared having to work in a fa~tory , ‘~ middle-class women overwhelmingly refused to volunteer for essential war-work; labour conscription for women, introduced too late in the war in any case, was only half-heartedly enforced on middle- class women, to the outrage of working-class women who were less adept at avoiding it.74 Worse, from the organizations’ point of view, was the steadfast refusal of these same women to take on part-time voluntary work. Some, it is true, were willing to work with the Red Cross-as a traditional, patriotic organization-although they had refused to join the women’s organizations under any circumstance^.^^ But repeated com- plaints were made by NSF workers that leisured middle-class women, who had only one or two children and a domestic servant to help in the house, were content ‘to doll themselves up and stroll about the streets’, or else to while away their time in cafes or on the tennis courts.7s The NSFs magazine, NS- Fruuenwurte, could admonish such women, opining that ‘particularly during the war, idleness is an insult to the nation’,77 but to no avail.

It was perhaps understandable-if not forgivable-that the same women who had resisted all the propaganda and pressure to join the DFW should refuse to volunteer for part-time service under its auspices.78 Even more distressing, however, was the minimal extent to which even members were prepared to exert themselves. The repeated appeals for selfless service which fell on deaf ears when addressed to unorganized women also found

” Reichsfrauenftihrung, 92-96.

, op. cit., pp. 2&30 Deutsches Fruuenschuffen , cit., PP , 21-45,

BA, op. cit., pp. 32, 37, 111. Rupp, op. cit., p. 172. ?:I

74 Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich (Munich, 1968), pp. 148, 287, 29&95,

” I b i d . , frame 301118,op. cit.

77 ‘Der Fraueneinsatz in der Kriegswirtschaft’, NS-Fruuenwurfe, May 1940, p. 417. ’* IfZ, MA 138, op. c i f . Ibid., frame 300901, ’Wochenbericht 12.12.41’, from Gau

405; IfZ, MA 341,op. c i f . Ibid., MA 138, 29 November 1941,op. cit.

Ibid., 29 November 1941, op. cit. Ibid., MA 341, op. cit.

Schleswig-Holstein to the Pdrtei-Kanzlei.

JILL STEPHENSON 43 the mass of those in the organizations remarkably hard of hearing. In 1940, out of the eight million NSF and DFW members in the Greater German Reich less than half, three and a half million, engaged in some kind of voluntary service, on the land, in factories, in sewing circles or staffing transit camps for Volksdeufsche refugees from the east. And on average, the NSFs own figures showed, each volunteer was prepared to spend only a little over an hour a week assisting the war-effort in one way or another." This was, of course, at a time when success followed success on the battle- field, and when a German victory seemed both assured and imminent. But there was little evidence of willingness on the part of the vanguard of the female population to make a real effort to hasten that victory. This became more, not less, apparent as the war dragged on, taking a turn for the worse. Perhaps, in fact, it was only the war which showed up conclusively how skin-deep any enthusiasm for Nazi women's organized activity had always been, even among those who had joined the DFW, far less among those who remained aloof. Some women had been prepared to join the DFW as long as they could have a title or a position which exempted them from the duties of ordinary 'working' members of the DFWs sections. Where sufficient titles did not exist, the women invented them for themselves at the local level, to the extent that Gertrud Scholtz-Mink's office sent round a circular in July 1942 pointing out which grades of sectional leader and deputy leader were officially approved and which were not.*' And, for some, the humblest titles were not sufficient: a Frau Ervens in Kochem district, who refused the relatively menial post of Block NSF leader in August 1942 because she aspired to a more prestigious office, was ultimately reduced to the ranks since 'she doesn't have the right attitude for our work and we can easily let her go'

As more and more voluntary workers were required for agriculture and for the Party's indefensible work in the eastern occupied territories, the more it became clear that ordinary DFW members were refusing to pull their weight, even though the ruison d'&tre of the organization was explicitly service in the national interest. To compensate somehow, the women's organization simply became a clearing-house for directing teen- age girls, over whom some authority could be exercised, into the work that DFW members had been supposed to do, on land, in social service work and in the east." Even the DFWs youngest members, between twenty-one and thirty, on whom particular pressure was brought to bear, showed reluctance to volunteer, and were ultimately, in 1942, conscripted into compulsory tours of duty in the east and work on the land at harvest time in the major grain-producing G ~ u s . ~ ~ If already mature women were

"Ib id . , MA 253, frames 649-54, 'Der Einsatz der NSFiDFW irn Kriegsjahr 1940'. 24 April 1941.

Hauptarchiv, op. cif,, 'Rundschreiben N r . 157/42, 1 July 1942. nu

"I IfZ, MA 130, frame 86329, letter from the Kreisfrauenschaftsleiterin Kochem to the

Hauptarchiv,op. cir., contains several circulars, dating from 1941 and 1942, to this effect. 8:'Ibid.: 'Rundschreiben Nr. FW 100/41', 19 August 1941; 'Rundschreiben Nr. 83/42', 8

Ortsfrauenschaftsleiterin Treis, 17 August 1942. n2

April 1942.

44 MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN AND NATIONAL SOCIALIST 'SERVICE

resoundingly proving to be a lost cause, as far as instilling a sense of service went, 'it can be expected that in this way the shock troops of the rising generation will be moulded' .84

It is hardly surprising that the great confidence trick which Hitler, the NSDAP leadership, and Gertrud Scholtz-mink tried to play on German women was ultimately a failure. There were, of course, enthusiastic indi- viduals who were dedicated idealists, albeit to a wicked cause. This small minority of women, chiefly to be found in the NSF, were indeed 'tireless' in their efforts, efforts for which, as Gertrud Scholtz-Klink boasted, 99 per cent of them received no remuneration.'' Sometimes the idealists showed disillusionment with the lack of response to their appeals for collaboration and service from the female population at large and middle-class women in particular. One Gau NSF leader was moved to lament in this context in November 1941 that 'To-day, I'm afraid, the idealists are taken for fools',*' and a district leader elsewhere found to her anger and dismay that, in 1943, often more than half of her DFW members in local branches were classed as 'inactive', paying a subscription but doing nothing more for the organization." Middle-class women who had the means to avoid work at home by employing a domestic servant were not going to spend the leisure they had bought in what was unmistakably work, and often-given the nature of the DFWs activities-work of precisely the same kind as they were avoiding. Those who did not have paid help were hardly going to add to their chores when they could, instead, enjoy leisure pursuits. Since organized leisure activities other than those run by the DFW were banned, there was little alternative to going to a cafe to read a magazine and perhaps to encounter acquaintances. If it seemed a wasteful and stultifying way to spend leisure time, that was because the Nazi monopoly-mania which decreed that women should gather together for social and recreational purposes-but preferably for some kind of community service-under the supervision of a Nazi-led organization, or not at all, had left this last alternative alone.

a4 Ibid., 'Rundschreiben Nr. 90/42', 29 April 1942.

"Ibid., frame 30086, op. cit. "Ibid., frames 86368-71, 10 April 1943, op. cit.

If2,op. cit., 17 April 1939,op. cit.

middle-class women and national socialist ‘service’

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