Politics of Gender: Women in Nazi Germany Charu Gupta With the rise of National Socialism, in whose ideology the degradation and depersonalization of women was implicit, the process of women's emancipation in Germany suffered a setback. In addressing the larger question of what fascism does to gender this paper deals specifically with the image of women in Nazi ideology and whether this imagery underwent a change during the course of the second world war. It examines also the controversy surrounding the role of women in Hitler's rise to power and the voices of dissent. The paper concludes by drawing some partial Indian analogues to the portrayal of women in Nazi Germany, particularly the way communal organisa- tions look at women. I Introduction WITH the coming of National Socialism, the process of female emancipation was reversed, her degradation and depersonalisa- tion became an element of German ideology' The desirability of motherhood for all German women became the central issue and family was seen as the germ cell of the nation, class or volk. The lack of a com- peting conceptual framework also con- tributed to the middle class's vulnerability to Nazi family ideology. As is stated: "The petit bourgeois is asocial: the fellow human to him is human material, usable subject matter which may be manipulated... His girl as his beloved is sexual animal, as German woman she is a mechanical womb; enthroned as heroic patriarch, the man towers over the family? 1 With communalism and fundamentalism in India acquiring almost fascistic overtones, the current relevance of this topic cannot be overlooked. What does fascism do to gender? The specific questions that have been dealt in this paper are the image of women in Nazi ideology and whether this imagery changed during the second world war? Was it the women's vote that brought Hitler to power? What were the voices of protest? Lastly, one cannot help but draw some partial analogues with the way com- munal organisations in India look at women. II Motherhood and Sterilisation as Racism and Sexism Women appeard in the Nazi world view, primarily as mothers—either as Aryan mothers, to be encouraged to have more children and to be made fit to do so by the new emphasis on physical training which the Nazis introduced in schools, workplaces and organisations such as the League of German Girls; or as 'inferior' mothers, as Jewish, gypsy, handicapped or other 'degenerate' mothers and potential mothers, to be discouraged or prevented from having children and to be rigidly separated from the favoured majority of the population. 2 Thus reproduction, or as Gisela Bock prefers to call it, 'the reproductive aspect of women's unwaged housework', was directly effected by state policy. 3 Thus in the context of Nazis, race and gender, racism and sexism are closely connected with each other. The issue of motherhood went hand in hand with compulsory sterilisation and had a close bearing to a sort of 'race hygiene' culture It becomes important to study this aspect not only due to the emphasis on the sup- posedly 'natural' or 'biological' domains of women but also because here specifically traditionalism and anti-feminism combined effectively with racism. The obsession with motherhood comes out clearly in Nazi writings. Just as men served the state by fighting, so women served by bearing children. The theme of childbirth as an analogue to battle was a popular one in Nazi ideology—'Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her peopled But Nazi leaders were aware that the exclusive function of childbearing demeaned women in the eyes of some critics. Thus Hitler felt compelled to proclaim in his 1935 Party Day speech to the Frauenschaft, "When our op- ponents say: You degrade women by assign- ing them no other task than that of childbearing, then I answer that it is not degrading to a woman to be a mother. On the contrary, it is her greatest honour. There is nothing nobler for a woman than to be the mother of the sons and daughters of the people.'' 5 Gregor Strasser wrote that National Socialism intended to restore the natural order, to accord women the respect they deserved as mothers and housewives. 6 Of course, this went hand in hand with an extreme separation of spheres for men and women. There was a distancing of the household from the 'productive' sphere, a point that 1 will discuss later The notion of 'private woman' and 'public man'; mascu- line/feminine; strong/weak dichotomy; was a part of this concept of sexual polarity. The married pair came to be viewed as com- plementary: husband representing strength, domination, the world; the wife weakness, sexuality, subordination, the home, i e, her supposedly 'natural' or 'biological' domains. This stereotypical role clearly fixed women's position in the home and in the family. Thus Adolf Hitler stated, " I f we say the world of the man is the state, the world of the man is his commitment, we could then perhaps say that the world of the women is a smaller world for her world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. But where would the big world be if no-one wanted to look after the small world? How could the big world continue to exist, if there was no-one to make the task of caring for the small world the centre of their lives? No, the big world rests upon this small world! The big world cannot survive if the small world is not secure,'' 7 Alfred Rosenberg, the self-proclaimed Nazi philosopher, represented the female sex as the 'lyrical' pole, the male as the 'architectural! Oppression of women in Nazi Germany in fact furnishes the most extreme case of anti-feminism in the 20th century. There was a multiplicity of responses towards women and the family, i e, multiple exploitation and simultaneous repressive protection. A hysterical protective anxiety on behalf of guileless German women was one of the hallmarks of Hitler's fantasies on the sub- ject of 'Jewish pollution of the German racial stock', etc, in Mein Kampf and it formed one of the most persistent themes in later Nazi anti-scmitic propaganda. The purity of the blood, the numerical power, the rigour of the race were ideological goals of such high priority that all women's acti- vities other than breeding were relegated in party rhetoric to secondary significance.' There was in fact a close connection bet- ween Nazi pro-natal ism for 'desirable' births and its anti-natalism for 'undesirable' ones. Women were thus hailed as 'mothers of the race', or, in stark contrast, vilified, as the ones guilty of 'racial degeneration'. There was a complex relationship between racism and sexism and they were not just two forms of exploitation. Before going into the specificities of this, one or two points must be made clear. When the Nazis came to power, they were confronted by a declining birth rate. 9 They stated that the problem stemmed from the women's movement. Such women's organi- sations based on bourgeois liberalism were abhorrent to the Nazis. It was believed that the women's movement was part of an inter- national Jewish conspiracy to subvert the German family and thus destroy the German race. 10 The movement, it claimed was en- couraging women to assert their economic independence and to neglect their proper task of producing children. It was spreading the feminine doctrines of pacifism, democracy and 'materialism'. By encourag- WS-40 Economic and Political Weekly April 27, 1991