HITLER’S WOMEN
A dolf Hitler always spoke about his mother, Klara, who died in 1907 when she was only 47, as a saintly figure. Her major accomplishment, as he saw it, was to give birth to him. “Compared to all those educated, intellectual women, my mother was certainly only a little woman…but she has given the German people a great son,” he declared. Her birthday, August 12, was designated as a “day of honor for the German mother.”
Hitler’s broader message for German women flowed from his view of his idealized mother. According to Nazi doctrine, their role was to serve their husbands and raise children, leaving nearly everything else to men. Specifically, they were to raise the boys who would become warriors and the girls who would become the mothers of future warriors. Speaking to the National Socialist Women’s League in 1934, Hitler insisted that “every child [a woman] bears is a battle she endures for the life and death of her people.” As a reward for having many children, the Nazis handed out the Cross of Honor of the German Mother—a bronze one for four or five children, silver for six or seven, and gold for eight or more.
Yet there is much more to the story of the role that women played in the Third Reich than the official Nazi Party rhetoric suggests. As Hitler admitted, women “played a not insignificant part in my political career.” If anything, that is an understatement.
The women he was referencing were not the rank-and-file female concentration camp guards and others who directly implemented Nazi racial doctrine. Instead, these were the women who, because of their early proximity to Hitler or his top officials, facilitated the Nazis’ rise to power and were complicit in the consequences right up until the end of the war.
“These women were the best propagandists the Party had; they devoted themselves utterly and selflessly to the cause.”
FROM HIS EARLIEST DAYS as a rabble-rouser in Munich, Hitler recognized the importance of appealing to women. As Dietrich Eckart, a founder of the tiny German Workers’ Party that soon transformed itself into the Nazi Party, explained in 1919, Germany needed a savior who would be a bachelor. “Then we shall bring in the women,” he maintained. It was a concept that Hitler adopted as his own, regularly explaining: “My bride is Germany.”
As difficult as it may be to imagine today, this contributed to the sexually charged magnetism
