“Women in the Nazi Project”, on Histoire TV, for better and especially for worse

TV STORY – TUESDAY, MAY 25 AT 8.50 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

“It is something very disturbing to see that the III^e Reich was not only repression and coercion, but that it was also something desirable and attractive for young members of the so-called community of the people, including girls ”, explains Johann Chapoutot. The historian has done a remarkable job with his colleague Christian Delage for this two-part documentary devoted to the place of women in National Socialist Germany.

Thanks to filmed archives, sometimes unpublished, but also to the enlightening analyzes of historians, such as the British Elizabeth Harvey (author of « Women and the Nazi East. Agents and witnesses of Germanization ”, in 2003, not translated), the American Wendy Lower (associate research director at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich) or the Austrian Elissa Mailänder (researcher at the Center for History of Sciences Po), this field of study with complex proves to be fascinating.

Under the Nazi regime, were women glorified only for their ability to give birth to future soldiers? Obviously not. How could a dictatorial regime with a total absence of women in the upper echelons of power, through laws, films and a clear desire to put an end to bourgeois norms, encourage the emancipation of young people? women? One of the most interesting paradoxes of this documentary.

Many responsibilities

Inheriting a democratic society in which German women had acquired many rights, including that of voting, the Nazis will practice a social policy favoring the family, the youth (social benefits, educational and recreational structures), but also, more surprisingly , help young women who have given birth out of wedlock to bring up their children. Needless to say that the young woman in question must be “Of good Germanic race”, and the father, even flown into nature, a pure Aryan…

Young Germans have, in the world of work, acquired a freedom they could not have dreamed of in peacetime under such a regime.

Bring city-dwellers to work in the countryside, encourage teachers to settle in the conquered territories in the East and then, over the course of the war, give women responsibilities in the factories, offices, public transport deserted by the men at the front, all of this is mentioned, with archival footage.

Beyond propaganda, young German women have, in the world of work, acquired a freedom they could not have dreamed of in peacetime under such a regime. Emancipation made even faster in some places: “By going east to work, the Germans suddenly gained power over Polish men, and therefore over men, underlines Wendy Lower, author of Hitler’s Furies. How German women participated in the Holocaust (Tallandier, 2014). They felt radically superior to those populations considered inferior. “

An unprecedented situation in German society – except at the beginning of the 20th century^e century in Namibia, in what was then the German colonial empire. Photos dating from 1904 recall that, at that time already, Germany sent young women to its conquered territories on “mission”.

Ultimate Evil Figure

At the end of the Second World War, from teachers to nurses, from factory workers to secretaries, nearly 16.5 million German women worked for the Reich. But many wives and companions of soldiers avoid offices and factories, being satisfied with the generous salary of their companion, which greatly displeases the authorities. Despite an official directive dating from January 1943 asking inactive young women to register on the labor registers, the process did not meet with great success.

The end of this fascinating documentary addresses two specific cases. One, massive, concerns the rape of hundreds of thousands of women (estimated at around two million) of all ages by Red Army soldiers. A national trauma coupled with a taboo that will weigh heavily on post-war German society for a long time.

The other, which concerned around four thousand German women, deals with the case of female guards stationed in concentration camps. Through the journeys of appalling torturers like Irma Grese, a beautiful woman of legendary cruelty that rages in Bergen-Belsen, Maria Mandl, terror of Birkenau, or Doctor Herta Oberhausen, capable of atrocious experiences in Ravensbrück, the woman Nazi suddenly emerges as the ultimate figure of evil.

Filmed archives, rarely seen, show extracts from the trials of these female torturers. That of Lüneburg in 1945, at the end of which Irma Grese was condemned to death. That of Nuremberg in 1946 which condemned Herta Oberhausen to twenty years in prison. And that of Krakow in 1947, after which Maria Mandl was executed. In addition to these three cases, the British justice organized seven trials in Hamburg, between 1946 and 1948, to try twenty-one guards of Ravensbrück. Eight were sentenced to death.

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