Gender & Histoty ISSN 0953-5233

Vo1.3 No.3 Autumn 1991

Feminist Debates about Women and National
Socialism
ATINA GROSSMANN
In 1989, Gisela Bock, one of the most prominent womens historians in
Germany, published a review of Claudia Koonzs book, Mothers in the
Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics in Geschichte and
GesellschaA, the major German language social history journal of which
Bock is the sole female editor. She lashed out at her American colleague for
having written an historically useless and tendentious, even anti-feminist
book.2 Besides taking Koonz to task for a range of putative factual error^,^
Bock excoriated her for imposing collective guilt on all German women
and positing love as a source of hatred, motherhood as a source of death,
female difference and separate sphere as a source of massacres . . ..4
Why such a vituperative response which even by the rather sharper
standards of German feminist and scholarly discourse, truly deserves the
highly charged German description, exterminatory (vernichtend)? Why did
Koonzs passionate and heavily researched (if indeed at points moralizing,
overgeneralized and ambitious) book not only enrage Bock but touch a
sore nerve among many German feminist historians?5 Koonzs direct
confrontation with issues of female agency and complicity in Nazism and the
Holocaust poked right into an ongoing and painful German feminist debate
about the degree to which women who lived in/under/through the Third
Reich should be judged victims or perpetrators (Opfer or Tater).
Accusatory, and in its polarized either/or quality stereotypically German,
this debate is also important and challenging. Issues of womens guilt or
responsibility are particularly salient for analyses of National Socialism. With
the liquidation of conventional public sites of the political (parliament,
political parties, trade unions, voluntary associations), much Nazi policy was
directed at the appropriation and mobilization of the ostensibly private or
reproductive arena where women had traditionally been situated and were
perceived to have influence or even power. Arguments about womens role
therefore cannot be separated from other questions that preoccupy historians
of modern Germany, such as the reactionary or radically modern nature of
the regime, and the degree of continuity or rupture with the era before 1933
Women and National Socialism 351
and after 1945. Moreover, questions of gender are critical to an evaluation
of the still unclear relationship between state social welfare and racial
hygiene measures directed predominantly toward Aryans (such as marriage
loans, sterilization and euthanasia) and the extermination of inferior
aliens, particularly European J ewry.
Gisela Bocks own densely detailed and pathbreaking study of coercive
steri I i zati on, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur
Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (1 986)6 argued compellingly that far from
having oppressed and bribed women by a cult of motherhood and
exhortations to improve the master race by raising the birth rate, the true
novum of Nazi population policy was a profound anti-natalism which
potentially victimized all women by threatening their (biological and social)
maternal identity. She maintained that forced sterilization was not only
chronologically prior but also conceptually necessary to mass murder and
genocide. Working with a very different set of sources about Nazi and other
middle-class and religious womens organizations, Koonz on the other hand
insisted that far from having been only victims of a brutally misogynist
regime, most German women (like most German men), in a myriad of
complex and ambivalent ways, collaborated with the regime. Not only had
there been an active minority of militant female Nazis, but even those who
werent, helped to stabilize a murderous regime precisely by their adherence
to domestic and maternal values associated with a politically indifferent
female separate sphere.
A new book interestingly entitled Daughters Ask (or Daughters Questions;
the German TochterFragen implies both): National Socialist Womens
History documents a 1990 conference about Participation and Resistance:
The Problematization of National Socialism in recent Womens Studies
and confirms that German feminists are waging their own version of a
historians debate (Historikerstreit) about what constitutes a usable past.
While the (male) historians debate about the nature and specificity of
German National Socialism8 seems to have calmed down, German women
scholars continue to struggle with the still restless issue of how to come to
terms with their mothers and grandmothers place in the Nazi past. IsBritish
historian J ill Stephenson correct, as Bock insists she is, in concluding that on
the whole, German women were, contrary to the popular view, peculiarly
resistant to National Socialism . . .?g Or must German women own their
negative legacy as T&hterFragen editor Lerke Gravenhorst puts it?lo What
does one do with the legacy described by one woman whose father was in
the SS and did his duty in Dachau and the Warsaw Ghetto while:
My mother did not resist, she also did nothing which would suggest a conscious
opposition to the National Socialist system. She also did not murder anybody. She
only remained silent and determined certain parts of NS practical politics to be
good and useful. The rest did not interest her, and she didnt want to be involved
. . . Those are our mothers!
352 Gender and History
These differing perspectives have implications not only for German
historians but for feminist theory and practice. The controversies about
the pro- or anti-natalism of Nazi programs, and the ways in which ideals of
maternalism and female difference facilitated or resisted Nazi ascendancy
and consolidation (Gleichschaltung), contain finally an intense and intimate
argument about motherhood and its role in womens lives. Claudia Koonz
indicts womens defense of and retreat into the separate space (Lebensraurn)
of womens organizations and the churches as contributing to the
maintenance of a murderous state in the name of concerns they defined as
motherly.12 Bock suggests just the opposite. National Socialism was
particularly pernicious for women precisely because it invaded that maternal
sphere which she persists in romanticizing as having been womens own.
Provocatively she says that the National Socialist state by no means broke
with birth control (Malthusianism) but institutionalized it.I3
Despite the fact that one half of the approximately 400,000 involuntarily
sterilized people were men, Bock sees women as the primary victims not
only because 90% of the fatalities resulted from the more complicated
female procedure, but because childlessness is more painful and severe for
women than for men.14 In making this argument Bock structurally locates
all women as victims because they were all disciplined and oppressed by the
threat of forced abortion and sterilization if they did not live up to proper
standards of social and physical fitness.I5 For Bock the crime of the Nazis
was to deny women motherhood and to attack their motherly values; for
Koonz it was to instrumentalize motherhood as a mobilizing tool.
Bock posits a straight line continuity from sterilization to euthanasia to
genocide. As Dagmar Reese and Carola Sachse carefully point out in
TochterFragen however, while it may be true as Bock says, that for the
victims the difference between being killed and being allowed to continue
living as a stigmatized sterilized person was only relative,I6 it was also
total, a difference about everything.
There remains much disagreement and contradictory evidence about the
actual impact of National Socialist policies on reproduction and the degree
to which women were its beneficiaries.18 According to Bock, even fit
Aryan women did not benefit from pro-natalist programs, such as marriage
loans, which were enacted in their name because the economic bonuses
were delivered to their husbands and not directly to them. German historian
Ute Frevert however, even more than Koonz, stresses the pro-natalist welfare
state aspects of Nazi population policy. Citing a rising birth and marriage
rate, a toughening of penalties on abortion, and the five million women who
attended courses in household rnanagement,l9 she concludes that The
Nazis spared no expense in encouraging citizens to excel themselves at
The question of benefits is important because it connects to the issue of
womens support for the system and the particular role of mothers. Bock
insists that even within the National Socialist womens organizations the
Women and National Socialism 353
majority of women, especially pregnant women, mothers and housewives,
were more resistant than men to propaganda, including its racism.2 Ute
Frevert remarks that by 1939, over one million of the approximately
3,300,000 women in the Frauenschaft and Frauenwerk . . . held some
official position22 and thereby presumably identified at least to some
degree with the regimes social and population policy goals. Multiple
memoirs and oral recollections of ostracism from former friends and
acquaintances by German-J ewish women (included in Koonzs study but not
discussed by either Bock or Frevert) also testify to, Aryan womens
willingness to accept racial dogma and measures.23 And deviating both
from Koonzs emphasis on separate spheres and Bocks focus on
victimization, Dagmar Reese proposes that the League of German Girls
(BDM) was appealing precisely because it did not preach domestic and
feminine virtues, but rather offered a sense of generational and Volk identity
and opportunities for leadership. Girls and young women therefore were
freed from familial restrictions at the same time that they were made more
available for state and party influence.24
In a thoughtful contribution to the TochterFragen volume Reese and
Sachse attempt to draw a kind of balance sheet on these argument^.^^
They point out that womens historians have been grappling with issues of
participation and resistance at least since 1 976 when Annemarie Troger
published a broadside accusing the (male) left of joining right-wing historians
in formulating a stab in the back legend which blamed womens votes and
masochistic hysteria for having brought Hitler to power.26 On the other
hand, it was also in Trogers pioneering 1970s oral history project at the
Institute for Comparative Research in Fascism of the Free University of
Berlin, that young feminist researchers were fitst confronted by the depth of
womens happy memories of the Third Reich. They were taken aback by
interviewees bursting into old League of German Girls songs, while remem-
bering their youth movement days as a time of solidarity, adventure and
empowerment. By now, a long list of publications dealing with women and
National Socialism has been produced by scholars who were associated with
the Berlin in~titute.~
At the same time, numerous (mostly male) historians of everyday life
have blurred the lines between opposition and conformity in Nazi Germany.
They have shown that most Germans were quite able to combine skepticism
toward propaganda and grumbling about individual policies with basic
support for the regime, admiration for the Fuhrer, and at best indifference to
the fate of J ews and other persecuted groups such as Communists or foreign
laborers.28 In their review of feminist controversies, Sachse and Reese plead
for deconstructing as well the binary opposition of victim/perpetrator in
womens history to which they feel that both Koonz and Bock subscribe.
Koonzs narrative is dramatically framed by that paradigm, starting with
her encounter with a still spry and unapologetic Gertrud Scholtz-Klink,
354 Gender and History
the former Reich womens leader (Fuhrerin) and mother of eleven, and
concluding with a poignant conversation with an elderly Holocaust survivor.
Bock too follows the dyad in a very different way when she maintains that
the tiny minority of women, including concentration camp guards, who
could truly be charged as villains were mostly childless women workers
and professionals. They were implicated not as mothers or housewives but
by their work. Their complicity in racial politics was a result of careerist
conformity which led them to aspire to upward mobility and a kind of
equality with male killers.Z9 This notion that the evil women do derives
from adaptation to male models is inspired by psychoanalyst Margarete
Mitscherlichs musings about Anti-Semitism - A Male Disease?.3o The
same thesis is accommodated in Christina Thurmer Rohrs concept of
women as lesser co-conspirators (Mittaferschaff), whose crime lay not so
much in what they actually did but in allowing themselves to be corrupted
by the false rewards blandished by men and patriarchy. Here too, women
are structurally situated as victims even as they are acting badly; the
inescapable implication is that if women were not so dependent on men,
they would not have supported such an awful ~ystem.~ The political lesson
of course i s that the only proper thing for subsequent generations of German
women to do i s to dedicate themselves to the radically separatist (uncon-
taminated) feminism that Bock sees Koonz as maligning.
Personal positionality is crucial to these disputes. Who i s doing the writing
matters enormously. Koonz, the Midwestern American, was constantly
confronted by the anxious burden of memory shared by J ewish colleagues
and the elderly German-J ewish refugees and Holocaust survivors she
befriended-and felt responsible to-in her then base of Worcester,
Massachusetts. For all of Bocks emphasis on race she never addresses the
relationship between Anti-Semitism, racial hygiene and genocide. Women
historians in Germany carry another audience in their heads and hearts. Even
as they wrestle with anger and pity for Nazi and/or soldier fathers, they stress
their mothers and grandmothers fortitude under bombing raids and in flight
with their young children from the advancing Red Army, and the energy of
the sturdy Trummerfrauen tidying up the ruins of the bombed out cities. In
many accounts, these women became a kind of female equivalent to the
valiant soldiers on the Eastern front invoked in the Hisforikersfreif, suffering
and brave but loyal and without connection to or responsibility for the
atrocities committed on their behalf. Whereas Gravenhorsts more judge-
mental claim to a negative legacy is explicitly linked to her fate as the
daughter of active Nazis, Reese and Sachses desire to posit a more
ambivalent legacy is connected to their resentment at being subsumed in
an undifferentiated German collective agency (Handlungskollekfiv Deufsch-
land). They strenuously resist a geneology which mandates Nazi forebears
for all German daughters.
At every point in these debates, the personally toxic issue of motherhood
i s a powerful but undertheorized and suppressed presence. When Bock
Women and National Socialism 355
asserts that losing the capacity to have children is uniquely painful for
women and that the women most compromised by Nazi horrors were
childless and male identified, she comes curiously close to implying that
non-mothers are not really women. For Koonz, women social workers,
nurses and midwives espousing family protection and motherliness in the
caring professions were necessarily instrumental in identifying targets for
both sterilization and euthana~ia.~~ Yet she also valorizes the family as a
haven and source of strength for resisters and the persecuted. Challenging
the male imitation thesis, Karin Windaus-Walzer, another contributor to
TochterFragen, finds authentic female guilt for anti-Semitism and Nazism in
the fact that in the Third Reich . . . the power of mothers also showed its
ugly face.33
Remarkably, the German feminist scholars represented in TochterFragen,
most of them now in their forties and even fifties, still identify themselves
exclusively as questioning daughters and never as responding mothers or
possible mothers. In a long and tortured confessional about her struggle to
come to terms with the Nazi enthusiasms of her parents, sociologist Lerke
Gravenhorst whose professional specialty i s the study of the family, plumbs
her development in social-psychoanalytical terms but never once alludes to
any conflict about having or not having children of her own. Having finally
broken through layers of repression to confront what she calls her NS
Problem, the possibility of raising her own children remains a last
unarticulated taboo.34 One cannot help wondering whether the obsessive
back and forth between romanticization and demonization of motherhood,
and the ambivalence towards forming families of their own, among many
German feminists has something to do with an unworked through problem
about the meaning of motherhood in the shadow of a horrific regime that
so massively intervened in reproduction.
Somewhat ironically, the debate about how to interpret Nazi population
politics and whether women should be classified primarily as culprits or
victims has now spawned a new and related argument among feminist
historians about the primacy of race or gender in Nazi policies. Indeed, both
Bock and Koonz now apparently agree that the primary intention and goal
of the Nazis was not to control or oppress women; they aimed above all to
establish a new European order based on a hierarchy of racial fitness. Race
rather than gender, racism rather than sexism, i s now deemed dominant.
Aside from the continuing problem that the general category race tends to
obscure the vast differences among groups labelled racially unfit by the
Nazis, as well as the specificity of anti-Semitism, the fact also remains that
women as reproducers and nurturers stood willy nilly at the center of these
bio-social
It would seem more useful therefore to continue to stress the selectivity of
Nazi population policy, and to ask how categories of race and gender were
intertwined in Nazi rhetoric and practice as well as in the experience of
everyday life. If certain fit women were saturated with womanness and
Gender creeps back in as a critical category.
356 Gender and History
others such as foreign workers, J ews and Gypsies were stripped of it,36 that
racial selection was nevertheless performed in a gendered fashion. Nazi
criteria for selection for death or work, concentration or extermination camp,
were highly differentiated by nationality, age and gender.37 If the road to
Auschwitz was organized according to the dictates of race and not gender
politics, the stark fact remains that on the ramp in the death camps, men and
women were separated, and women with small children or visibly pregnant
were invariably marked for immediate extinction. Even at the most extreme
point of racial policy-extermination in the gas chambers and crematoria-
gender was still relevant, and indeed could make the difference between
instant death and a chance at survival. This latest effort to privilege race as
an explanatory category is a laudable reaction to the overemphasis on
women as victims without agency but finally it seems as counterproductive
and misleading as trying to understand womens relationship to National
Socialism by rigidly (and cleanly) dividing them into victims or perpetrators.
Notes
1. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics
(St. Martins Press, New York, 1987).
2. Gisela Bock, Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus: Bemerkungen zu einem
Buch von Claudia Koonz, Geschichte und Gesellschah. Zeitschrih fur Historische
Sozialwissenschah 15 (1989), pp. 563-579. An English language version appeared in
Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London II (1 9891, pp.16-24. Al l quotes are
from the latter. On p. 21 Bock writes that Koonzs conceptual framework which remains
undefined . . . is not only historically useless, but does serious harm to the memory of the
dead and the survivors.
3. Koonzs response to these allegations is forthcoming in Geschichte und
Gesellschah.
4. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London, p. 16.
5. Koonz had trouble finding a German publisher for a German translation. A revised
German edition is forthcoming from the Kore Verlag in Freiburg.
6. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik
und Frauenpolitik (Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen, 1986).
7. Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat, eds., TijChterFragen. NS-Frauen
Geschichte (Kore, Verlag Traute Hensch, Freiburg i. Br., 1990). The conference held in
Wurzburg was entitled, Beteiligung und Widerstand. Thematisierungen des
Nationalsozialismus in der neueren Frauenforschung.
8. For a fine English langauge overview of the Historikerstreit see Peter Baldwin, ed.,
Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians Debate (Beacon Press,
Boston, 1990).
9. J ill Stephenson, The Nazi Organization of Women (Barnes and Noble, New York,
London, 1981 1, p. 18.
10. Lerke Gravenhorst, Nehmen wir Nationalsozialismus und Auschwitz ausreichend
als unser negatives Eigentum in anspruch? Zu Problemen im feministisch-
sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskurs in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in TochterFragen
NS-Frauen Geschichte, pp. 17-38.
Women and National Socialism 357
1 1. Elly Geiger, Die Geschichte Deutschlands ist meine Geschichte. Personliche
12. Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, p. 5.
1 3. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 10.
14. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 1 2.
15. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, esp. p. 457.
16. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 381.
17. Reese and Sachse in TiichterFragen, pp. 90-93, esp. p. 93. For a detailed
discussion of the many twists and turns in Nazi race hygiene policy see Paul Weindling,
Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism 1870- 1945,
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989).
18. Gisela Bock herself offered quite different evidence about the persecution of
abortion and attempts to increase the fit population in her now classic article, Racism
and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,
in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, eds. Renate
Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (Monthly Review, New York, 1984),
19. Ute Frevert, Women in German History; From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual
Liberation (Berg, Providence, 1989) pp. 233-4, citing Stephenson, Nazi Organization of
Women, p. 165-6.
Anmerkungen, in TbchterFragen, p. 347-8.
pp. 271 -296.
20. Frevert, Women in German History, p. 232.
2 1. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 139.
22. Frevert, Women in German History, p. 242.
23. See Marion Kaplan, J ewish Women in Nazi Germany: Daily Life, Daily Struggles,
1933-1939, Feminist Studies 16, no. 3 (Fall 19901, pp. 579-606 and Koonzs chapter
on J ewish women in Mothers in the Fatherland.
24. Dagmar Reese, Emanzipation oder Vergesellxhaftung: Madchen im Bund Deutscher
Madel , in Politische Formierung und soziale Erziehung im Nationalsozialismus, ed.
Hans-Uwe Otto and Heinz Sunker (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 19911, pp. 203-225.
25. keese and Sachse, Frauenforschung und Nationalsozialismus. Eine Bilanz, in
TijchterFragen, pp. 73- 106.
26. Annemarie Troger, Die Dolchstosslegende der Linken: Frauen haben Hitler an
die Macht gebracht , in Gruppe Berliner Dozentinnen, eds., Frau und Wissenschafi.
Beitrage zur Berliner Sommeruniversitat fur Frauen )uli 1976 (Courage Verlag, Berlin,
27. Besides Gisela Bocks own work, see also, Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung,
ed., Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der Weimarer Republik
und im Nationalsozialismus (Fischer, Frankfurt, 1981); Gabriele Czarnowski, Das
Kontrollierte Paar Ehe- und Sexualpolitik im Nationalsozialismus (Deutscher Studien
Verlag, Weinheim, 1991); Susanna Dammer, Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik und
soziale Arbeit, in Soziale Arbeit und Faschismus: Volkspflege und Padagogik im
Nationalsozialismus, 4 s . Hans-Uwe Otto and Heinz Sunker (Bielefeld, KT Verlag, 19861,
pp. 269-287; Dagmar Reese, Straff aber nicht stramm - Herb, aber nicht derb. Zur
Vergesellschaftung von Madchen durch den Bund Deutscher Madel im sozialkulturellen
Vergleich zweier Milieus (Weinheim, Basel, 1989); and Carola Sachse, Siemens, der
Nationalsozialismus und die moderne Familie. Eine Untersuchung zur Sozialen
Rationalisierung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert (Rasch und Rohring, Hamburg, 1990).
28. For an excellent discussion of these debates, see Mary Nolan, The Historikerstreit
and Social History, New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 19881, pp. 51 -80.
1976), pp. 324-355.
358 Gender and History
29. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 139. For a more nuanced discussion of womens path
up the career ladder during the Third Reich see Ursula Nienhaus fascinating article on
women postal workers, Von der (0hn)Macht der Frauen. Postbeamtinnen 1933-1 945
in ThchterFragen, pp. 193-21 0.
30. Margarete Mitscherlich, Antisemitismus - eine Mannerkrankheit?, in Di e
friedfertige Frau (Fischer, Frankfurt, 19851, pp. 148-60.
31. See Christina Thurmer-Rohr, Aus der Tauschung in die Ent-Tauschung - Zur
Mittaterschaft von Frauen, Beitrage zur feministischen theorie und praxis, 8 ( 1 9831,
32. See also Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer and Taterinnen. Frauenbiographien des
Nationalsozialismus (Delphi Politik, Franz Greno Verlag, Nordlingen, 1987).
33. Karin Windaus-Walzer, Gnade der weiblichen Geburt? Zum Umgang der
Frauenforschung mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus, Feministische Studien,
6 (1988), p. 114. See also her article Frauen im Nationalsozialismus. Eine Herausfor-
derung fur feministische Theoriebildung, in TiichterFragen, pp. 59-72.
34. Lerke Gravenhorst, Die Wunde Nationalsozialismus und die Sozialwissenschaften
als therapeutisches Milieu oder: Der lange Weg zu einem losenden Sprechen, in
TijchterFragen, pp. 371 -393.
35. Claudia Koonz uses this term, borrowed from Michel Foucault, in her new research
work on the National Socialist Racial Political Office (Rassenpolitisches A m) . See also her
response to Bocks review in a forthcoming issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Gisela
Bock presented her thinking on the primacy of race at a conference on women and
National Socialism at the Technical University Berlin, J uly 1990.
36. Denise Rileys analysis in Am I That Name? Feminism and the Cat egov of
Women in History (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1988) i s extremely helpful
in thinking through these questions.
37. Gudrun Schwarz, Di e nationalsozialistischen Lager (Campus, Frankfurt, 1990).
pp. 1 1 -26.