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Unlock This CourseUnder the Weimar Republic, women had the vote, and some had become doctors, lawyers, civil servants and members of the Reichstag. The Nazis wanted to turn this back. They said men and women had separate roles: a man was a worker and a soldier, and a woman's place was at home, as a wife and mother. This was often summed up in three words, Kinder, Küche, Kirche: children, kitchen, church.
There was a practical reason too. Germany's birth rate had been falling for years. Hitler wanted a bigger population to provide soldiers and settlers for the future, so he needed women to have more children.
Women were also told how to look. The ideal woman wore plain clothes and flat shoes, with her hair in plaits or a bun. Make-up, trousers, smoking and dieting were frowned on. All women's groups were merged into one Nazi organisation, the German Women's Enterprise, led by the Reich Women's Leader, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. It ran classes in childcare, cooking and sewing.
Key terms:
The Law for the Encouragement of Marriage (1933) offered newly married couples a loan of up to 1,000 marks, as long as the wife left her job. For each child born, a quarter of the loan was cancelled, so four children cleared the debt. In 1938 divorce was made easier if a husband or wife could not have children.
Large families were praised in propaganda and given extra benefits. The Mother's Cross was created in December 1938: bronze for four or five children, silver for six or seven and gold for eight or more. Birth control was discouraged and the laws against abortion were made stricter. From 1935 the Lebensborn programme, run by Himmler's SS, provided homes where unmarried women the Nazis judged 'racially pure' could have their babies.
From 1933 women were pushed out of professional jobs. Many women doctors, teachers and civil servants were dismissed, and from 1936 women could not be judges or serve on juries. Girls' places at university were cut to one in ten. Propaganda told women that taking a job meant taking it from a man.
Marriages rose from about 516,000 in 1932 to about 740,000 in 1934. The birth rate rose from about 15 births per thousand people in 1933 to about 20 per thousand in 1939. Women almost vanished from the top professions and from politics. Many women welcomed the loans and the respect given to mothers.
The rise in births may owe as much to better economic times as to Nazi policy, and most couples still chose to have small families. The policy on work also clashed with other Nazi aims. Rearmament created a shortage of workers, so in 1937 the rule that a wife with a marriage loan must give up work was dropped. By 1939 more women were in paid work than in 1933.
What happened to women once the war began is covered in The German Home Front, 1939-45.
Almost all Germans were Christians: about two thirds were Protestant and about one third Catholic. This was a problem for Hitler. Christianity teaches love, peace and care for the weak, while Nazism praised strength, war and racial hatred. Above all, Christians gave their first loyalty to God, not to the Führer. But the Churches were too popular to attack openly, so at first Hitler tried to make deals with them.
In July 1933 Hitler signed a Concordat with Pope Pius XI. Hitler promised that Catholics could worship freely and keep their own schools and youth groups. In return, the Pope agreed that priests would stay out of politics, and bishops would swear an oath of loyalty to the state.
Hitler soon broke his word. Catholic schools were put under pressure and gradually closed, Catholic youth groups were shut down, and priests who spoke out were arrested. In March 1937 the Pope answered with a letter called 'With Burning Anxiety', which accused the Nazis of breaking the Concordat. It was smuggled into Germany and read aloud in Catholic churches. The Nazis responded with more arrests.
Some Protestants, who called themselves the German Christians, admired Hitler and wanted to mix Christianity with Nazi ideas. In 1933 the Nazis joined the Protestant churches together into one Reich Church. Its leader, the Reich Bishop, was Ludwig Müller, a keen Nazi. Pastors with Jewish parents or grandparents were to be removed, and some German Christians even wanted to drop the Old Testament because it was a Jewish book.
Many pastors refused to accept this. Martin Niemöller, a Berlin pastor who had commanded a submarine in the First World War, had at first welcomed Hitler as chancellor. Now he turned against Nazi control of the Church. In September 1933 he set up the Pastors' Emergency League, and in 1934 its members founded the Confessing Church, which said the Church must obey God, not the state. Several thousand pastors supported it.
The Nazis hit back. Niemöller was arrested in July 1937. He was held in Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps until 1945. Hundreds of other pastors were arrested as well.
Hitler had some success. Open opposition from the Churches was rare. Most church leaders protested only when the Church's own rights were under threat, and stayed silent about the Nazis' other victims. But he could not make the Churches Nazi. The Reich Church never won over most Protestants, the Confessing Church survived, and millions of Germans carried on going to church every Sunday. Religion remained one part of life that the Nazis never fully controlled.
Do not mix up the two Churches. The Concordat was with the Catholic Church. The Reich Church, the Confessing Church and Niemöller were all Protestant. Also, do not write that the Nazis removed women from work altogether. They drove women out of the professions, but the number of women in paid work had risen by 1939.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
Nazi policy towards women never matched the boasts. For all the loans, medals and endless speeches about motherhood, most couples stubbornly went on having small families. The promise to send women back to the home collapsed even faster. By 1937 the regime, desperate for workers in its arms factories, quietly dropped its own rule that brides with loans must give up their jobs. The Nazis had preached a great deal and changed remarkably little.
(a) What impression does the author give about Nazi policies towards women? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that Nazi policies towards women were a failure. This is shown by the language used. The policies 'never matched the boasts', which suggests the Nazis claimed far more than they achieved, and the promise to send women home 'collapsed', a word that makes the policy sound like a total breakdown. The phrase 'quietly dropped' suggests the Nazis were embarrassed and hoped nobody would notice. The author's tone is mocking: the Nazis 'preached a great deal and changed remarkably little'. The author has also chosen to stress the things that went wrong, such as small families and the change to the loan rule in 1937, and has left out evidence of success, such as the rise in marriages and births after 1933. This selection makes the policies seem to have achieved almost nothing.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations and explains what each suggests, and then comments on what the author chose to stress and to leave out.
You do not have to decide whether the author is right about Nazi policies towards women. Start with 'The author gives the impression that...', then pick out two or three loaded words, such as 'collapsed' and 'quietly dropped', and say what each one suggests. Finish with a sentence on what the author stressed and what was left out.