Women's Complicity in the Third Reich

would bring Nazi doctrine “home” to every family in the Reich.” (Koonz 1987, 6). Although that may be the case, Koonz also argued that within this shell of domesticity, women, in fact, active in the nature of the politics of the Third Reich. She states that Aryan women were accomplices and therefore also responsible for the genocide of the millions of Jews that were deemed sub-human. Koonz states, ―Far from being helpless or even innocent, women made possible a murderous state in the name of concerns they defined as motherly. The fact that women bore no responsibility for issuing the orders from Berlin does not obviate their complicity in carrying them out.” (Koonz 1987, 5).
It can be acknowledged that the majority of the German women stood

Women kept folk traditions alive, gave charity to poor Nazi families, cared for SA men, sewed brown shirts, and prepared food for rallies. While Nazi men preached race hate and virulent nationalism that threatened to destroy the morality upon which civilization rested, women‘s participation in the movement created an ersatz gloss of idealism”. (Koonz, 1987, 5).
Women helped the men cultivate an ambiance that created a feel of normality and serenity. Women focused their attention on being the role of the homemaker. Spending the majority of their time on raising the kids, cooking, cleaning and making the home perfect. Women effectively provided a stable family experience that helped disillusioned the men to maintain a level of self-esteem that encouraged them to work, believing that they were hardworking patriots of the nation. They ultimately gave men a place to divert their attention away from their heinous acts of

In Nazi thinking, spending several hours to round up to Jews to be shot was considered to be laborious farm work. In these situations, it became common practice for women to follow German soldiers to set up refreshment tables with food and beverage near mass execution and deportation sites to proliferate the process. In some cases, the relationship between men and women went beyond the confines of political order, as Lower illustrates, “I read about a German commissioner and his lover-secretary in Belarus who organized a wintertime hunt. They failed to find animals, so they shot at Jewish targets.” (Lower 2013,