No no no, before the Hand Mirror accuses me of doing a feminazi post, which would be too too kind to them, it is a post about some research coming out about womens roles in the Nazi party.
A book called "Perpetrators: Women Under National Socialism" is going to ruffle a few feathers about womens roles during WW2.
It seemed that after the war many women were able to excape the war crimes courts simply by being women. A flattering of innocent eye lashes and a few excuses about being stuck in the kitchen was enough to prevent some nasty war criminals from facing justice.
Written by a female historian, Kathrin Kompisch has some rather shocking revelations, which I'll put in bold.
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The fairer sex venerated by the propaganda machine of Josef Goebbels was, according to Kompisch,
every bit as eager to turn the thumbscrews on the victims held in Gestapo cellars across Europe; every bit as fanatical as the male when it came to crushing resistance to the state. They became assistants to the doctors who first sterilised, and later murdered, the ‘useless’ handicapped.
They became head guards in the gulag of concentration camps — like Herta Bothe, known as the Sadist of Stutthof for her merciless beatings.
And they were handmaidens to the SS as they staffed the ‘baby farms’ where ‘supermen’ children were born. In these ghoulish clinics, women were the managers and nurses.
And, Kompisch points out: ‘One should never forget the legions of women who stood by their menfolk as they killed people by the tens of thousands in Russia, in Poland, in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka.’
This was the supreme corruption of the old maxim about a woman standing behind every successful man. In the Third Reich, it often meant a massmurderer being silently supported by a woman who would not dream of raising a hand to her child or kicking the family dog.
‘The history of National Socialism has long been reduced to one that blamed men for everything,’ says Kompisch. ‘The fact is
women were involved at all levels of the Third Reich’s most infamous and brutal crimes . . . There were always choices, even within the Third Reich, and women often made their own choices as much as men.
‘They typed the statistics of the murdered victims of the SS Action Squads in the east, operated the radios which called up for more bullets, were invariably the secretaries — and sometimes much more — in all the Gestapo posts.
After all, it was largely women who queued up at government warehouses to buy the furniture, jewels, household appliances and clothes of their Jewish neighbours who had disappeared in the night without a word.
The high-testosterone, all-male hierarchy of the Nazi state blocked out women from leadership positions from the very start — but the regime actively encouraged female participation in enforcing the Nazi terror at grassroots levels.
Most Blockwaerts — apartment house snoops who reported on un-Nazi activities to the party — were female.
Women also made unofficial denunciations to the Gestapo of suspicious neighbours, Jews and other enemies of the state at a rate of three-to-one compared to men. (Three to one??? That's the power of gossip to you) :)Women also undermined the sacredmarriage illusion which Nazism tried to promote, for they were avid denunciators of their spouses. The surviving files of the Gestapo in the city of Dusseldorf noted
they ‘try to change the power balance of the household by denouncing their husbands as spies or Communists or anti-Nazis’.Kompisch agrees: ‘The cliche of Gold Mother Cross-wearing women having 10 babies and baking bread was a myth. Women could and did advance themselves massively through the Third Reich.’
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Interesting! Hitler assisted feminism in Germany without even knowing it!
I know my impression of innocent and powerless women is shattered. What makes me interested is that back then women were able to do anything and yet now they need positive discrimination to get ahead. Seems to me feminism has gone backwards rather than forwards.
Story hereLabels: women
