life in nazi germany 1933-39

• Many of the events described so far have been national events, which happened to Germany - the German revolution, the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic and the start of the Nazi Third Reich
• Many of the people described so far have been national figures, from the centre of political events - people like the Kaiser, Stresemann, Brüning and Hitler
• The final section is about the lives of ordinary Germans
• This section will show what life was like in Nazi Germany for minority groups such as 'gypsies', Jews, Slavs, homosexuals and people with disabilities
• Chapter 1 showed what life was like for women in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s
• Nazi views on women and the family

  Women should adopt the traditional role of mother and housewife, while the man provided for the family
• Hitler, addressing a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934: 'The world of a woman is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children and her house. But where would the greater world be with no one to care for the small world? Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle waged for the existence of her people.'
• Joseph Goebbels, a leading Nazi, describing the role of women in 1929: 'The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world. The female bird... hatches eggs for him. In exchange, the male takes care of gathering the food and stands guard and wards off the enemy.'
• Nazi views on women and the family

  • Appearance: women should adopt a 'natural' look, with simple plaited or tied-back hair and long skirts
  • Employment: The Nazis wanted women to stay at home rather than go to work, so they could raise a family
  • Marriage and family: birth rates should increase to make Germany bigger and stronger. The Nazis wanted women to marry and have as many children as possible
• After the Nazis came into power in 1933, the Nazis could turn their ideas about women into policies which affected the lives of all women in Germany
• Reich Women's Leader

  Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, appointed in 1934 to oversee all policies relating to women
• A speech by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Reich Women's Leader, in 1936: 'Not only will women with children become mothers of the nation but every German woman and girl will become one of the Führer's little helpers, wherever she is.'
• Scholtz-Klink insisted that all women's organisations would be forced to merge with a new Nazi organisation for women, called the German Women's Enterprise (Deutsches Frauenwerk, or DFW)
• By 1939, 1.7 million women had attended Nazi courses on subjects such as childcare, cooking and sewing through DFW activities
• The Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, 1933


  Loans, worth up to 1,000 marks, were provided to encourage young couples to marry. This law also encouraged wives to stay at home and bring up children, as the loans were only available if the wife stopped work. It also encouraged childbirth - for each child born into a family, a quarter of the loan was written off.
• Divorce laws


  In 1938, the Nazis changed the divorce laws to encourage childbirth. If a wife would not (or could not) have children, or had an abortion, this could be used as grounds for divorce by the husband.
• The Mother's Cross


  An award given to women for the number of children they had: bronze for four or five children, silver for six or seven and gold for eight. The Hitler Youth were ordered to salute wearers of gold medals.
• Wilhelmine Haferkamp, a mother from the industrial city of Oberhausen, interviewed in the 1980s: 'I got 30 marks per child from the Hitler government and 20 marks from the city. That was a lot of money. I sometimes got more 'child money' than my husband earned... I was proud. When I got the gold [Mother's Cross medal], there was a big celebration in a school, where the mothers were all invited for coffee and cake.'
• Lebensborn


  A programme started in 1935 by the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, to encourage single women to breed with SS men to create 'genetically pure' children for worthy German families.
• Once in power, the Nazis worked to reduce the number of women in work, as they believed a woman's place was in the home, raising a family
• From 1933, women were banned from professional posts as teachers, doctors and civil servants. By the end of 1934, about 360,000 women had given up work
• From 1936, no women could become a judge or a lawyer, or even do jury service
• In 1937, grammar schools for girls, which prepared girls for university, were banned. The number of female students starting higher education fell from just over 17,000 in 1932 to 6,000 in 1939
• The Nazis never forced women to look a certain way through legislation. However, Nazi propaganda did encourage women to wear modest clothes, with their hair tied back, in plaits or in a bun; they were discouraged from dyeing their hair or wearing make-up
• Nazi policies towards women had only mixed success. Some German women were persuaded by Nazi views and were content to accept Nazi policies towards women
• Traudl Junge was a young woman in Nazi Germany. Here she is remembering her youth in Nazi Germany: 'Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was the type (of woman) we did not like at all. She was so ugly and wasn't fashionable. We didn't bother about joining her organisation. It didn't attract me or my friends. We were interested in dancing and ballet and didn't care much for political ideas.'
• Extract from a letter to a Leipzig newspaper in 1934: 'A son, even the youngest, laughs in his mother's face. He regards her as his servant and women in general are merely willing tools of his aims.'
• By the end of the 1930s, German industry was expanding so fast that the Nazis needed women to return to work. Some Nazi policies were reversed. In 1937, women with marriage loans were allowed to work. Because of this, compared with the five million women in work in 1933, there were actually seven million in work by 1939
• Rational


  (in classical economic theory) economic agents are able to consider the outcome of their choices and recognise the net benefits of each one
• Rational agents will select the choice which presents the highest benefits
• Producers act rationally by


  Selling goods/services in a way that maximises their profits
• Workers act rationally by


  Balancing welfare at work with consideration of both pay and benefits
• Governments act rationally by


  Placing the interests of the people they serve first in order to maximise their welfare
• Rationality in classical economic theory is a flawed assumption as people usually don't act rationally
• Marginal utility


  The additional utility (satisfaction) gained from the consumption of an additional product
• If you add up marginal utility for each unit you get total utility
• In 1933, all children in Germany went to school until the age of 14; after that, attendance at school was voluntary. Boys and girls went to separate schools. Most schools were controlled by local councils, though some were run by the Church.
• All this changed after Hitler came to power. He wanted the young to be the long-term security of his Third Reich (see Source H). Hitler believed that even if some adults did not believe in Nazi ideas, if children were taught from a young age to believe, they would follow Hitler, no matter what.
• In 1934, a leading Nazi, Bernhard Rust, was made Education Minister. Rust saw schools as a way of controlling the views of young Germans and once said that 'the whole purpose of education is to create Nazis'. During the 1930s, he made a series of changes to bring all schools under the control of the Nazis.
• As early as April 1933, the Nazis passed a law giving them the power to sack teachers and headteachers they didn't approve of. In just one German state, Prussia, Rust sacked over 180 secondary headteachers.