HISTORY IGCSE CONTENT - 20TH CENTURY OPTION - DEPTH STUDY GERMANY: THE NAZI REGIME - WOMEN IN NAZI REGIME

1. DEPTH STUDY
GERMANY
THE NAZI REGIME
NAZI POLICIES TOWARDS
WOMEN AND THE FAMILY
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2. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
THE GERMAN WOMEN
German women played a vital role in the Nazi movement, one which
far exceeded the Nazi Party’s propaganda that a woman’s place was
strictly in the home as mothers and child-bearers.
Of the estimated forty million German women in the Reich, some
thirteen million were active in Nazi Party organizations that furthered
the regime’s goals of racial purity, imperial conquest, and global war.

3. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
NAZI POLICIES TOWARDS WOMEN
The Nazis had clear ideas
of what they wanted
from women.
They were expected to
stay at home, look after
the family and produce
children in order to
secure the future of the
Aryan race.

4. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. Dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC05SbnDRSc

5. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
NAZI POLICIES TOWARDS WOMEN
Hitler believed women’s lives should
revolve round the three 'Ks’:
Kinder (Children)
Kuche (Kitchen)
Kirche (Church)
Goebbels said:
The mission of women is to be
beautiful and to bring children into the
world.
Women were important to the
Nazis, however, the Nazis believed
that the role of the woman was in
the home and with her family, not
in the world of work.

6. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
Hitler wanted a high birth rate so that the Aryan
population would grow. He tried to achieve this
• introducing the Law for the Encouragement
Marriage which gave newlywed couples a
of 1,000 marks, and allowed them to keep
marks for each child they had
• giving an award called the Mother’s Cross to
women who had large numbers of children
• allowing women to volunteer to have a baby
for an Aryan member of the SS
Nazi propaganda ideal of motherhood
The cover of a Nazi publication on race, Neues Volk (New People), portrays motherhood with this ideal image of an
"Aryan" mother and child. Germany, April 1936. Library of Congress.

7. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT
Women were central to Adolf Hitler’s plan to create an ideal “Aryan”
Community (Volksgemeinschaft).
Praising German women as “our most loyal, fanatical fellow-
combatants,” Hitler valued women for both their activism in the
Nazi movement and their biological power as generators of the race.
In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would enhance
Germany’s military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered
territory in eastern Europe.
The Third Reich’s aggressive population policy encouraged “racially
pure” women to bear as many children as possible.

8. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
LEBENSBORN
In an extension of the SS Marriage Order of 1932, the 1936 Lebensborn
ordinance prescribed that every SS member should father four children,
in or out of wedlock. Lebensborn homes sheltered single mothers with
their children, provided birth documents and financial support, and
recruited adoptive parents for the children.
Lebensborn program was never promoted aggressively. Nazi
population policy concentrated on the family and marriage.
The state encouraged matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed
family income supplements for each new child, publicly honoured
"child-rich" families, bestowed the Cross of Honour of the German
Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased
punishments for abortion.

9. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
EMPLOYMENT
Measures were introduced which strongly discouraged women from
working, including:
• the introduction of the Law for the Reduction of Unemployment,
which gave women financial incentives to stay at home
• not conscripting women to help in the war effort until 1943
However, female labour was cheap and between 1933 and 1939 the
number of women in employment actually rose by 2.4 million.
As the German economy grew, women were needed in the workplace.

10. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
APPEARENCE
Women were expected to emulate traditional German peasant
fashions - plain peasant costumes, hair in plaits or buns and flat shoes.
They were not expected to wear make-up or trousers, dye their hair
smoke in public.
They were discouraged from staying slim, because it was thought that
thin women had trouble giving birth.

11. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
WIVES, MOTHERS AND WORKERS
The National Socialist Women's Union and German Women's Agency
used Nazi propaganda to encourage women to focus on their roles as
wives and mothers.
Besides increasing the population, the regime also sought to enhance
its "racial purity" through "species upgrading," notably by promulgating
laws prohibiting marriage between "Aryans" and "non-Aryans" while
preventing those with handicaps and certain diseases from marrying at
all.

12. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
GERMAN PROPAGANDA ABOUT
THE ROLE OF WOMEN
German propaganda photograph
of a kindergarten for German
infants promotes the nurturing
role of women on the home
front. Germany, 1941.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum

13. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
WOMEN INTO WORKFORCE
Girls were taught to embrace the role of mother and obedient wife in
school and through compulsory membership in the Nazi League of
German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel; BDM), which started at the age of
ten years old.
However, rearmament followed by total war obliged the Nazis to
abandon the domestic ideal for women.
The need for labour prompted the state to prod women into the
workforce (for example, through the Duty Year, the compulsory-service
plan for all women) and even into the military itself (the number of
female auxiliaries in the German armed forces approached 500,000 by
1945).

14. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
MEMBERS OF THE LEAGU OF
GERMAN GIRLS
A parade of young Austrian
women, members of the Nazi
youth organization the League of
German Girls (Bund Deutscher
Maedel). Graz, Austria, February
20, 1938.The Hitler Youth and the
League of German Girls were the
primary tools that the Nazis used
to shape the beliefs, thinking and
actions of German youth.
Oesterreichische Nationale
Bibliothek, Bildarchiv.

15. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
WOMEN IN THE WAR
Gearing up for the war and waging it obliged Nazi leaders to mobilize
female workers.
Young women provided free labour in annual summer camps, and in
1939 all single women had to report for compulsory labour service in
war-related industries.
By war’s end, the number of female auxiliaries in the German armed
forces approached 500,000, including some 3,700 women who served
as guards in the Nazi camp system.
Equally numerous to the female auxiliaries were the many women who
were secretaries in the Nazi machinery of destruction, supportive wives
of SS officers, and nurses in the Euthanasia Program.

16. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
CHIEF NURSE
Portrait of Irmgard Huber, chief
nurse at Hadamar Euthanasia
killing center. The photograph
was taken by an American
military photographer on April 7,
1945.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Courtesy of Rosanne Bass Fulton.

17. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D
WOMEN IN THE WAR
Gearing up for the war and waging it obliged Nazi leaders to mobilize
female workers.
Young women provided free labour in annual summer camps, and in
1939 all single women had to report for compulsory labour service in
war-related industries.
By war’s end, the number of female auxiliaries in the German armed
forces approached 500,000, including some 3,700 women who served
as guards in the Nazi camp system.
Equally numerous to the female auxiliaries were the many women who
were secretaries in the Nazi machinery of destruction, supportive wives
of SS officers, and nurses in the Euthanasia Program.

18. CAMBRIDGE IGCSE – DEPTH STUDY: GERMANY – MR. D