Why You Wouldn’t survive Life in Nazi Germany

The Nazis were a male supremacist organization. This was part of the general racist doctrine that governed the Nazi ideology. They believed that politics was for men, so you won't find any women in any positions of power in Nazi Germany. There was a so-called Reich women's leader, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, but she had no influence on Nazi politics at all. She just spoke to organized women.



Women were there to support their men, and for breeding and having lots of children. The Nazis introduced the Mother's Cross: if you had six children, you got an award; if you had 10 children, Adolf Hitler became godfather to the tenth child, which had the unfortunate effect that you had to name the child ‘Adolf’, if it was male.


Women were organized in the Nazi Frauenfront, and in the broader based but less successful Deutsches Frauenwerk. They made clothes for the troops and organized supplies and welfare. But they were shut out of politics altogether. Women had the vote, of course, from 1918, and Hitler did not abolish that. But in Nazi elections, there was only one list of candidates. You had no choice as to whom to vote for.


In referendums, of which there were quite a few in Nazi Germany, women were a kind of lobby fodder. Basically they – just as with men – had to vote for the Nazi party and its policies.


Hitler said that the aim was to bring up children as physically fit and healthy – if they were so-called Aryans, if they were basically 'pure' Germans – not if they were of mixed origin, with Slavic blood, or least of all with Jewish. By the time of the Second World War, non-Jewish, non-Slavic, non-foreign-born German children were obliged to enrol in the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls, which was essentially aimed at preparation for war.

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