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portance to pursuing racist policies than to keeping women in their traditional
sphere”! It was not only German men who were exposed to the brutality of war.
German women were also involved in its machinery: they worked in factories and
some of them even served in concentration camps.
On the other hand, it is also true that German men and women in general did
not get information, including information about the war, from the same sources.
In my opinion, women, who had been socialised to the roles of mother and house¬
wife, were firstly much more attracted by the ‘real-life problems’ then by ‘dirty and
sophisticated political issues. Secondly, some messages from the magazines for the
general public were considered to be inappropriate for women’s eyes. It can be said
that such satirical magazines as Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus, as well as tabloid
magazines such as Der Stürmer, used to function in the Third Reich as a substitute
of erotic magazines.
However, does this mean that German men’s and women’s worldviews differed
profoundly one from each other during WWII? No. All German society was more
or less involved in the ‘total war’ and its consequences. Moreover, it can be stated
that all Germans shared another significant feature. They were in general spared of
an important hardship: critical reflection and the feeling of guilt for the sins com¬
mitted in the name of the state. The totalitarian regime succeeded in persuading the
German people that it were the enemies of the Third Reich who were responsible
for the atrocities of war, and Nazi propaganda essentially influenced that process.
References
Arnold K. 1941. Die Ratten verlassen den Dreck (“The Rats Are Leaving the Dirt’). Simplicissimus, no. 45,
November 5, p. 705.
Baur N. & Hofmeister H. 2008. Some Like Them Hot: How Germans Construct Male Attractiveness.
The Journal of Men’ Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 280-300.
Benjamin A. 2008. Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals. South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 107,
pp. 71-87.
Bock G. 1998. Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders.
In: Ofer D. & Weitzman L.J. (eds) Women in the Holocaust. New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, pp. 85-100.
Bryant M. 2008. Streicher, Fips & Der Stürmer. History Today, August, pp. 60-61.
‘© For instance, “women were not fired en masse from employment and driven back to home and hearth.
Actually the number and proportion of women in the labor force increased, and so did the proportion
of married women and mothers. Nazi propaganda and ideology did not include ‘Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche’
or the biblical exhortation ‘Be fruitful and multiply’. Actually, Nazi race hygienists often and deliberately
polemicised against these slogans. The number of convictions for abortion declined during most of the
Nazi period in comparison with the years of the Weimar Republic...Under the Nazi regime, abortion
was no longer simply prohibited but was practiced widely on ‘racially inferior’ and hereditarily diseased
women” (Bock 1998: 94-95).