1943 German wartime stamp that displays the ideal number of children per family. [2]Women’s role in Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft was a place of mother and wife. The world of women in the Volksgemeinschaft was made up of only looking after “her husband, her family, her children, and her house”. [1] Women were expected to raise children to protect the racial purity of Germany and be supportive of their husbands. This to me seems like a move by Hitler to keep women stuck in their ‘place’. He uses some flattering words and phrases to win his audience over by saying things like “the larger world is built on this small world”. [1] With larger world being a reference for the role of men and the small world being the shut-in and sheltered life of women. I believe he also buttered up the crowd emotionally by comparing child-rearing with battles. Hitler says “every child she brings into the world is a battle, a battle she wages for the existence of her people”. [1] I’m not saying child-rearing is a piece of cake but I just think he uses that phrase to play up women’s role in the Volksgemeinschaft so they won’t feel a need to question authority or try to overstep their bounds. Women might feel that being that stay-at-home mom is their only purpose in Germany even though the modern trend at the time saw women increasingly brought out of the home and entering the work force and public life in general. [1] I think Hitler’s speech had an ulterior motive to keep women in their homes and focus on preserving the racial purity of Germany.
Sax, Benjamin C., and Dieter Kuntz. Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1992.
Accessed October 17, 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kaiser_(Nazi_leader).
I like that you stated that the Hitler compared the raising of child with a battle. I believe this is a reference to Nazi ideology of struggle. everything in life is a struggle, so why should the home be any different, some people want to do other things than to raise children, so the concept of fighting for the home is compelling to those people
Reading this made me think of a particular person that I’ve heard about in one of my German classes. Her name was Mildred Harnack. She was an American (from Wisconsin actually) who moved to Germany with her husband in 1929 to work on her doctorate in Giessen. In 1930, she moved to Berlin. How she becomes important, however, it what happens later in her life. A few years later, she became very politically active, specifically in the Communist Party. She saw them as a solution to poverty. Anyway, a whole bunch of stuff happens and by 1942, because she was a politically active, educated female, and for the fact that she was part of a group that opposed Hitler’s regime, she was tried and executed by the Nazis. Hitler had a huge thing against women and education. To him, the only education that a woman needed to know what how to care for the family. Obviously there was some opposition, and Mildred unfortunately paid the ultimate price.
![1943 German wartime stamp that displays the ideal number of children per family. [2]](https://i1.wp.com/www.uwgbcommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/His.-423-Blog-6.jpg)
I like that you stated that the Hitler compared the raising of child with a battle. I believe this is a reference to Nazi ideology of struggle. everything in life is a struggle, so why should the home be any different, some people want to do other things than to raise children, so the concept of fighting for the home is compelling to those people
Reading this made me think of a particular person that I’ve heard about in one of my German classes. Her name was Mildred Harnack. She was an American (from Wisconsin actually) who moved to Germany with her husband in 1929 to work on her doctorate in Giessen. In 1930, she moved to Berlin. How she becomes important, however, it what happens later in her life. A few years later, she became very politically active, specifically in the Communist Party. She saw them as a solution to poverty. Anyway, a whole bunch of stuff happens and by 1942, because she was a politically active, educated female, and for the fact that she was part of a group that opposed Hitler’s regime, she was tried and executed by the Nazis. Hitler had a huge thing against women and education. To him, the only education that a woman needed to know what how to care for the family. Obviously there was some opposition, and Mildred unfortunately paid the ultimate price.