Nazi Women of the Third Reich

The Nazis had no doubts about a woman's place in the Third Reich. Hermann Goering urged every woman to 'take a pot, a dustpan and brush, and marry a man.'

Many women welcomed the arrival of Hitler's regime with childlike enthusiasm believing that the dictatorship would make Germany master of Europe, but as the war dragged on, their blind faith in Hitler was betrayed…

Power is said to be the ultimate aphrodisiac. When Hitler came to power in Germany he had no shortage of female admirers. Women sent him socks, silk handkerchiefs, home-made cakes, and proposals of marriage daily in the post.

In December 1930, Elsa Walter, an unmarried woman from Karlsruhe, sent Hitler an 80-page clothbound handwritten book entitled The German Woman, in which she described her reasons for joining the Party the previous month, reasons she believed were shared by many of her sex.

This book is a fascinating account of what happened to women during the time of the Third Reich, from the Nazi women’s organizations that campaigned for their own exclusion from public life to the individuals who risked their lives to oppose fascism.