Page 211 [211]
Male War, Female War: The Image of Russians and the Soviet Union in Nazi Propaganda 1941-1945
should not arbitrarily or continuously be inflicted,” as Tim Mason states (1995:
149).
Aiming to “liberate” women from the ideas of emancipation, the Nazis limited
women’s education opportunities, lessened professional options, and excluded all
but a few women from the political arena. Generally, women’s intellectualism was
rejected as unhealthy (Mouton 2010: 945—949).'°
In the Third Reich, like in almost all other countries in the world, public and
family life was described as sets of contradictions. The public sphere was regarded
as “cold, impersonal, competitive, insecure and often arbitrary or opaque, usually
enormous in scale, demanding, geared to efficiency and, perhaps above all, tending
to reduce the person through the progressive division of labour to a function, so
that work becomes instrumental” (Mason 1995: 205). Family, on the contrary, was
supposed to be “the compensation and the justification for this anxious and alienated
toil, both the refuge from the compulsions of work and the unquestionable good for
the sake of which the public sphere is endured: the family is warm and supportive,
individual, intimate and secure” (Ibid.: 205-206). In that sense, “Nazi propaganda
magnified the fundamental reconciliatory function of family life, which turned out
to be the more important the more intense the economic and political pressures
became” (Ibid.: 205-206). As Adolf Hitler said: “The world of the man is the state
(...) his struggle on behalf of the community, [...while] the world of the woman
is a smaller world. For her the world is her husband, her family, her children and
her home.”
It is true that under a totalitarian regime such as the Third Reich, all spheres,
including family and intimate life, were regulated by the state. Nazi propaganda
was everywhere, spread through the education system, ideological trainings and the
mass media. Consequently, racial and anti-Communist propaganda was also visible
in the magazines dealing with childcare and cooking recipes.
The ideal German citizen, from the point of view of the Nazis, was healthy and
fertile, physically trained, tidy, hostile towards the representatives of other races”,
but first of all disciplined and obedient to the authorities. The same ‘virtues’ were
appreciated during the war. The role of men was to fight on the battlefield, that of
women was to serve on the “domestic front” (Mainwald & Mischler 2003: 104).
I agree with Gisela Bock’s statement that the “Nazi regime attributed greater im¬
5 In 1934, a Numerus Clausus was introduced to limit the number of women in incoming university
classes to ten percent, reversing the trend in effect since 1918. The number of female university students
fell drastically from 18 315 in 1932 to 5 447 in 1939. From 1936 women were prohibited from working
as lawyers or judges (Mouton 2010: 948-949).
“Adolf Hitler, speech to the National Socialist Women’s organisation, Nuremberg Party Rally,
September 8, 1934 (Mason 1995: 131).
5 "This rule especially applied to women, as it was believed that after having sexual relations with a repre¬
sentative of an “inferior race”, an Aryan woman was forever deprived of the possibility of giving birth to
a “racially valuable” child (Gruber 1939: 48).
209