Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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358 thomas j. saunders
Emotion and Celebrity in the Russian Popular Song, 1900–1955 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2002).
17 See James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds,
Mass Culture in Soviet Russia (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 234–5, from March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys
(1934).
18 See the essays in James Riordan and Pierre Arnaud, eds,
Sport and International Politics
(London: Routledge, 1998).
19 Stites,
Russian Popular Culture, p. 67.
20 Cf. Robert Edelmann,
Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993); Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema
and its Afterlife (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
21 See Mary L. Roberts,
Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France,
1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Richard W. McCormick,
Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Eugenia Paulicelli,
Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (New York: Berg, 2004).
22 See Victoria de Grazia,
How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), pp. 201–33; Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination
in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Wolf von Eckardt and Sander Gilman, Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin: A Scrapbook of the Twenties
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). A photographic record of the culture of the
metropolis, both high and low.
Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto:
Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989). Provocative and impressive in breadth and in suggesting
connections between artistic sensibilities and popular passions.
Chris Goddard, Jazz Away from Home (New York: Paddington Press, 1979). Well-informed
and rewarding study of European attempts to assimilate jazz, especially in the Parisian
context.
Hans Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997). International, idiosyncratic, and intriguing: from boxing and bullfighting to
movie palaces and revues, it evokes and decodes the age.
Richard Maltby, ed., Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the 20th Century (London: Harrap,
1989). Well illustrated overview which situates the jazz age internationally.
Princesse Tam Tam (1934) (New York: Kino on Video, 1989). Josephine Baker in a semi-
autobiographical Pygmalion tale of the clash between European civilization and African
primitiveness. Features a magnificent revue and Baker in a trademark “native” dance.
Charles Rearick, The French in Love and War: Popular Culture in the Era of the World Wars
(New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1997). A national survey of broad scope which
inquires into the “Frenchness” of the subject.
Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, eds, Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943
(Blooomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). A dozen essays illustrating the richness of
current approaches in film and cultural studies.
Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992). Comprehensive in its coverage of the range of popular
culture and perceptive in suggesting overarching national themes.
Denise, J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). An important study of film as popular
culture, attentive to its foreign and domestic elements as well as social context.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Nazi New Society
Dick Geary
It is difficult to derive any single Nazi vision of a new society from the statements of
its leaders before 1933. The initial program of the National Socialist German Workers
Party (NSDAP) contained a mixture of nationalist, racist, and socially radical demands
(nationalization of industrial trusts, communalization of department stores, and
confiscation of war profits), but it was far from clear that Hitler ever believed in these
last elements of the program. By 1928 the Nazi leader was reassuring rural and
middle-class voters that it was “only Jewish capital” which would be expropriated.
In the elections which preceded Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in late January
1933, the NSDAP made a wide variety of promises about the future under Nazism.
The unemployed were promised jobs. Agriculture was promised protection and lower
taxation, and was lauded as the healthy backbone of the German nation. Small shop-
keepers were promised protection against large department stores and small busi-
nesses protection against banks and corporate giants. Yet at the same time the leaders
of German industry were promised the restoration of management’s right to manage,
the destruction of trade-union power, and fewer taxes. Differences and contradictions
in the area of economic policy were bridged over by the more general aims of restor-
ing national greatness, reviving traditional family values, and destroying socialism/
communism, as well as by the most fundamental of Nazi goals: the creation of a
“People’s Community” (Volksgemeinschaft), in which divisions of region, religious
denomination, social class, and political affiliation would be overcome in a single
German identity.
1
Economic Reality: Productivity, Income Distribution,
and Property Ownership
Economic change under Nazism was limited in scope. Although several historians
have credited the regime with a Keynesian approach to economic problems and noted
that Germany pulled out of the Depression with relative speed after 1933, the growth
of the German economy in the mid-1930s was not that spectacular: over the whole
period from 1913 to 1938 many of Germany’s competitors enjoyed greater growth
360 dick geary
rates and the economic spurt of the 1930s simply saw the Reich catching up with
the growth that had been achieved earlier elsewhere. Certainly, Hitler’s coming to
power set the scene for economic recovery. This was not so much the result of a
specific Nazi economic policy, however, but rather because of the resolution of politi-
cal conflicts, the destruction of trade unions, the prohibition of strikes, wage controls,
and the default on international debts. Significantly, the fall in world prices, especially
food prices, in the 1930s were not passed on to German consumers. Here the contrast
with British and US economic growth is instructive; for this was driven by cheap
imports, rising real incomes (of those in jobs) and a subsequent increase in consumer
demand for manufactured goods, which led in turn to greater investment in new
technology and a reorganization of industry. In Germany, on the other hand, the
state-led stimulus to increased consumer demand in the first two years of the Third
Reich was quickly replaced by increased demand for capital goods and industrial raw
materials in the armaments boom of 1936 to 1938. Moreover, despite full employ-
ment in Germany between 1936 and 1939, private consumption and the output of
consumer goods responded slowly to the economic upturn. It was only in 1941 that
real earnings reached the level of 1929. The product of German economic growth
in these years was increasingly redistributed to profits, which rose significantly faster
than wages, and to the German state, rather than to German consumers. Moreover,
high rates of investment in the mid-1930s did not lead to commensurate increases
in the productivity of German industry. Indeed, despite the recent claims that the
Nazis were a force for modernization, increases in industrial productivity in Germany
in the 1930s only look good in comparison with the disastrous years of the Depression
and compare unfavorably with those of many other countries. The “Americanization”
of German industry took place after, rather than before, 1945 and the continued
production of consumer goods during the armaments boom was largely a conse-
quence of lowering quality rather than technological innovation. Furthermore, the
economic boom of 1936–8 was generated by expenditure on armaments or
arms-related activities. Mass consumption and a new consumerism, which, according
to Rainer Zitelmann and Michael Prinz, were central to the aims of Hitler and
the German Labor Front, remained figments of the imagination. It should also
be noted that the realization of Nazi economic aims was predicated on the exploita-
tion of non-Aryan labor and plundered resources from beyond the boundaries
of the Reich.
Thus Nazi economic policy was in no sense “Keynesian.” For Keynes had argued
that state expenditure was to serve the role of job creation primarily in order to
increase pay packets and thus give rise to a self-sustaining recovery, led by consumer
demand. But the reverse of this happened in Nazi Germany. The Nazi government
used public spending to gain greater control of the German economy, not to relin-
quish that role to consumer spending power. It did not encourage private consump-
tion, but, as we have seen, restricted it. It did not lower interest rates á la Keynes or
reestablish links with the world economy, but embarked upon policies of autarky and
investment in producer goods industries. Moreover, it sought to replace dependence
on international trade with national self-sufficiency and a series of bilateral trade
agreements with countries in eastern Europe. From Anschluss with Austria in 1938
the Nazi economy was also increasingly dependent upon plunder from occupied
territories and dispossessed foreigners and Jews. It was not only for its raw materials
the nazi new society 361
and industrial capacity that Nazi-occupied eastern Europe was exploited after 1939,
however, but also and above all for its manpower. This included not only the forced
labor of the Jews and other prisoners in the ghettoes, concentration camps, and death
camps, but also of up to 8 million foreign workers imported into the Reich, mainly,
though not always, forcibly. By 1944, 7–8 million foreign workers were domiciled
in the Reich. This system of servile labor was a distinguishing feature of the Nazi
economy and casts no little doubt on its supposed “modernity.”
The Nazi economic system remained capitalist. Except for non-Aryan or foreign
capital, the ownership of private property was not disputed, though the long-term
trend of capital concentration, so often denounced by the Nazis in their appeals to
small businessmen and shopkeepers, not only continued but accelerated. At the same
time the profits of large industrial concerns rose significantly and the share of
Germany’s national product consumed by profits increased, while that of wages
declined. This was no accident: Hitler had promised that he would restore profit-
ability to German industry and management’s right to manage. Furthermore, many
of the “Nazi radicals” had left the NSDAP by 1933, while the murder of the SA
leadership in the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934 further reduced the prospects
of a fundamental challenge to the prevailing economic and social order. Subsequently,
the plans of the German Labor Front (DAF) to expand its role, plans likened by
Michael Prinz to the welfare program of Beveridge in the UK (a flawed comparison,
given the complete absence of racism in the latter and its centrality to the former),
never came to fruition. Industrialists benefited from the destruction of socialist and
union influence in government and the prohibition of strikes. Moreover, the larger
firms, which were most successful in the intense competition for labor and raw mate-
rials after 1936, were the major beneficiaries of forced labor. The power of corporate
capitalism was reflected in the continuing process of industrial concentration: the
number of independent artisans declined from 1.65 million in 1936 to 1.5 million
three years later.
The Third Reich did take some steps to protect artisans and small retailers. Special
taxes were introduced on large stores, the creation of new department stores was
prohibited, some consumer cooperatives were closed, and restrictions were placed on
itinerant salesmen. To establish a business, independent craftsmen now had to belong
to a guild and possess certificates of qualification. Yet the major beneficiaries of eco-
nomic growth and government contracts were the large firms: to build the industrial
infrastructure of German national greatness, the Nazi regime required efficient, large-
scale production.
Similar points can be made about the relationship between the regime and agricul-
ture. Nazi ideology proclaimed the significance of “Blood and Soil” for the Aryan race
and portrayed the peasantry as the healthy core of the German Volk. However, schemes
to re-ruralize German society soon proved illusory. The regime began by addressing
some grievances of peasants and farmers: introducing strict import controls on agri-
cultural produce; pegging food prices at levels higher than those of the Depression;
subsidizing agriculture; introducing the Farm Inheritance Law to make it illegal for
agricultural land to be alienated from its owners. However, until 1935 agricultural
subsidies were more likely to be distributed to large or medium size estates than to the
smallholdings of peasants. Moreover, the Farm Inheritance Law proved to be a very
mixed blessing; for, by preventing the alienation of farmland, it also prevented peasants
362 dick geary
from using their farms as collateral to raise loans from financial institutions. As a result
of these developments and above all of the fact that the gap between rural and urban
incomes continued to grow to the detriment of agriculture, Germans continued to
leave the countryside for the towns in large numbers. By 1939 more Germans lived in
cities than ever before. At the same time the number of agricultural workers declined
by half a million and attempts to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency failed. Thus indus-
trial and urban growth was not halted by the Nazis.
So far we have seen that industry in the Third Reich was not subjected to major
state interventions in property relations, that large concerns continued to thrive under
private ownership, and that the role of agriculture in the total German economy
continued to decline. However, this did not mean that big business was free to do
whatever it wanted. In return for lucrative armaments contracts, the suppression of
strikes and unions, and access to cheap servile labor, business leaders either complied
or were forced to comply with the wishes of their political masters. Wage and price
levels were now dictated by the regime, as was the distribution of raw materials and
manpower, capital flows and foreign exchange. Moreover, private entrepreneurs
found themselves in competition with a new and privileged economic player in the
shape of Göring’s personal industrial empire. Thus capitalists in the Third Reich
competed less for markets and more for their share of contracts in the arms economy
and for labor and raw materials. State, rather than private, demand became the driving
force of economic life; and representatives of industry were largely excluded from
the most important decisions. Yet most industrialists were not expropriated; and sig-
nificantly they were absent from the activities of elite resistance groups in the final
years of the Reich. Earlier, in the first six years of the Nazi regime, the profits of
German industry rose by over 36 percent. At the same time the share of profits in
gross national income rose from 43 percent to just under 48 percent, while that of
wages fell proportionally.
2
If capitalists remained capitalists, what of German labor in this period? Most obvi-
ously millions of Germans welcomed the return of full employment and the rise
in real wages, although most of that rise can be explained by longer working hours
and it was not until 1941 that real wage levels reached those of 1929. Significantly,
the distribution of wage increases in Germany after 1933 became increasingly
uneven, as collective wage agreements were abandoned for the Leistungsprinzip, the
“performance principle,” which meant an individualization of pay packets. The
Refa-Verfahren of wage calculation, which was partly modeled on Fordist/Taylorist
concepts of scientific management, together with greater supervision of labor, served
to fragment the solidarity formerly generated by collective wage agreements and
trade-union membership and to some extent cut across older hierarchies of skill and
gender. Moreover, medical and welfare support was increasingly delivered by indi-
vidual factories, which further served to tie the worker to his or her place of employ-
ment, while dissent within the “work community” could lead to the withdrawal of
benefits and other forms of punishment. Whatever workers may have thought of
these changes, they certainly made collective opposition increasingly difficult.
However, that some workers drew advantage from increases in the number of jobs
available and greater purchasing power is indisputable.
Although the changes described above did significantly reshape the experience of
German labor, it is far from clear that a completely new labor force, untouched by
the nazi new society 363
older solidarities, was created in these years. In the first place, it is questionable that
class identities and solidarities are forged by experiences on the shop floor alone, for
there have always been divisions of skill and gender here. Secondly, the extent to
which the new systems of payment created hierarchies genuinely different to older
shop floor hierarchies needs to be investigated in relationship to different kinds of
concerns and not only in the large and newest plants, which have formed the focal
point of recent research. Thirdly, there is considerable evidence that processes of
rationalization in German industry between 1933 and 1945 were extremely uneven.
If anything, modernization in some sectors increased the difference between the new
enterprises, for example in the aircraft and automobile industries, with their serial
techniques of production, conveyor belts, and new buildings, and older concerns,
which were much more difficult to reorganize according to Taylorist precepts.
3
Together with full employment and rising real wages, the Nazi regime instituted
a number of measures to increase worker loyalty to the regime. The “dignity of labor”
and “German craftsmanship” were praised, and a national skills competition for
younger workers proved very popular. Attempts were made to make factories lighter
and less congested by the “Beauty of Work” organization; and May Day was declared
a public holiday as the “Day of National Labor.” Workers now received a second paid
day of leave at Easter, longer vacations, and various benefits from the “Strength
through Joy” leisure organization. This provided many German workers with decent
leisure facilities and their first experience of holidays away from home. Just how
successful these attempts were to seduce workers into the arms of Nazism is far from
clear, however, and will be discussed later. What is undeniable is that this worker-
friendly strategy was accompanied by a range of coercive measures.
4
The leverage of the regime over workers, generated by new systems of payment,
rationalization, and factory-based welfare, was further enhanced not only by the
generally repressive nature of Nazi rule, but also by legislation relating specifically to
labor. In June 1938 labor mobility was restricted and infringements of industrial
discipline were criminalized. As a result, absenteeism or shirking at work could result
in fines or imprisonment. A proliferation of labor camps emerged to discipline the
“work-shy” and in 1939 one worker was actually hanged for persistent absenteeism.
With the onset of World War II labor was subject to ever more restrictions.
5
Simultaneously, the German working class was restructured, partly because of the
geographical uprooting of millions of Germans and partly because of a new racial
division of labor. The development of new centers of industrial production, such as
the aircraft industry in Bremen and the Reichswerke Hermann Göring in Salzgitter,
saw the recruitment of workers from all over Europe, as well as from different parts
of the Reich. This brought into existence a new labor force without traditions of
solidarity and segmented by new methods of payment. Migration, enforced by the
Allied bombing of industrial centers, disrupted established residential and work com-
munities, which had sometimes formed the basis of class solidarity. Moreover, workers
could now be intimidated by the threats of employers to call in the Gestapo and were
cut off from traditional forms of working-class socialization (labor clubs and unions),
which the Nazis had destroyed. In consequence many workers concentrated on
maximizing their earnings and thought in terms of individual strategies of advance-
ment, especially as the prospect of both increased wages and upward mobility were
increased by shortages of labor and the emergence of a racial underclass of foreign
364 dick geary
workers. By 1944 there were 7–8 million such Fremdarbeiter in the Reich. Italian,
French, Dutch, and Scandinavian workers in German concerns were rewarded at rates
roughly equivalent to those of German employees, but the bulk of the foreign work
force (Russians and Poles) was treated most brutally. This racial restructuring of the
labor force created significant opportunities of upward mobility for German workers,
who might now find themselves in supervisory positions. Racial difference thus
constituted one more factor which cut across class identity in the Third Reich and
increased the mobility prospects of significant numbers of German workers.
6
The issue of labor in the Third Reich was inextricably bound up with that of
gender. That the Nazis had “traditional” attitudes towards female employment is well
known. When they first came to power, they thought that women belonged in the
home and adopted pronatalist policies for “healthy” Aryan women, who were encour-
aged to leave their places of paid employment, marry, and procreate through the
provision of loans and subsidies. However, such policies were not as extensive as they
might have been. For example, there were no mass firings of female employees, nor
any laws passed against the hiring of women in or after 1933. Moreover, the National
Socialist Women’s Organization sought to prepare German women for paid employ-
ment, as well as for motherhood; and both the total number of women and the
number of married women in paid employment in Germany continued to increase
from 1933 to 1939, became significantly larger with the onset of war, and grew even
larger from 1942–3, with a move towards total mobilization. In 1933 almost 5
million women worked outside the home. Six years later rising real wages and increas-
ing labor shortage drew 7.14 million women into paid employment. This was another
example of the partial conquest of ideological imperatives by economic logic. However,
the industrial mobilization of women in the Third Reich continued to lag behind
that in other industrial nations, even in the early years of the war, and the rise in the
number of women in paid employment scarcely outstripped the overall growth of
the arms economy. Significantly, the increased industrial employment of females
between 1933 and 1939 was almost matched by an increase in the number of women
taking up jobs in that most traditional of female economic roles, domestic service.
Pressure from the DAF to pay women workers the same rates as their male colleagues
and to move to the total mobilization of female labor in the war were repeatedly
rebuffed by Hitler, even as late as 1942. Only in 1943 was the Führer forced to
change his position. Even thereafter the largest increase in the number of female
laborers in the Reich was provided by foreign females. Many German women seem
to have tried to avoid conscription into the factories.
7
Class, Mobility, Gender, and Race
From the above it is clear that the Nazis brought about no fundamental changes in
property relations, except where Jews and foreign nationals were concerned. The
profits of large corporations continued to grow and inequality was further com-
pounded by both an increased gap between agrarian and industrial incomes and the
new system of wage calculation, which increased inequalities of income within the
German working class. The economic foundations of capitalist class relations (private
ownership of the means of production, production for profit, and the commodifica-
tion of labor) remained intact in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Workers remained
the nazi new society 365
workers and their bosses remained bosses. Moreover, the control of capital over labor
was reinforced by the destruction of unions, the prohibition of strikes, and the disap-
pearance of the traditional working-class parties (SPD and KPD), as well as by the
changes on the factory floor described above. Yet, if Nazi Germany remained a capi-
talist society, it was one, nonetheless, in which various important aspects of social
relations were transformed. This was the case, for example, as far as patterns of social
mobility were concerned. It was true above all, however, in terms of race, which
became the defining criterion of life chances in Nazi Germany and in the territories
it occupied and plundered after 1939.
The Third Reich made deep inroads into the power and influence of the traditional
German social elite. In the realm of politics, membership of the Nazi Party and not
aristocratic birthright or worldly riches conferred advancement. The dismissals in the
army, the foreign office, and the finance and economics administration in 1937–8
saw members of the German elite lose their positions to Nazis of lower social status.
The army also witnessed a significant reduction of aristocratic influence in its ranks,
though this process had already begun in the Weimar republic. The massive expan-
sion of the German military and the events of war accelerated this change even
further: of 166 infantry generals during the conflict, 140 came from middle-class
families. Nazi vengeance after the abortive “Bomb Plot” of July 1944 hammered a
further nail into the coffin of Junker power, for many of the 5,000 “conspirators”
then executed came from the most famous families of the German aristocracy. The
expansion of the German army and the experience of war did far more than rid the
military of Junker dominance, however. For vast numbers of Germans from all walks
of life, including many former “workers,” military service now constituted the crucial
life experience, in which traditional social divisions paled into insignificance beside
the imperative of survival. World War II became the crucible of change, as the
possibilities of plunder in eastern Europe opened up for many “ordinary Germans”
apparently endless opportunities for advancement and enrichment. It remained true
in Nazi Germany that most academics, university students, diplomats, senior civil
servants, and leading businessmen were recruited from a very restricted elite. Only
1 percent of university students in 1939, for example, came from working-class
homes. Yet new avenues of social mobility did arise; and not only in the army. The
massive proliferation of Nazi Party agencies created a huge number of jobs, access
to which was determined by political or racial and not social criteria. As early as 1935
some 25,000 Germans received salaries from the NSDAP. Subsequently the expan-
sion of the DAF, the NSF, the Hitler Youth, and the League of German Maidens
provided more employment opportunities, through which politically reliable Germans
could escape from their humble origins. Göring’s Office of the Four Year Plan gave
jobs to over 10,000 people, while Himmler’s SS grew to monstrous proportions. By
1944 there were 40,000 concentration camp guards (though many of these were
non-Germans), 45,000 officers of the Gestapo, 100,000 police informers, and 2.8
million policemen. Death and destruction, brutality and plunder thus created a space
for individual Germans to improve their life chances at the expense of the defeated,
the occupied, and the exploited; and it is this that makes various forms of complicity
with the regime comprehensible. Traditional social cleavages were also dissolved by
the evacuations and bombings of wartime, which threw Germans from different
regions and backgrounds together, and by the racial reordering of society. As already
366 dick geary
indicated, “racially superior” German workers now found themselves in supervisory
positions over millions of foreigners. It has also been argued that class identity became
less significant in determining the fate of Germans than other factors. These included
whether or not one was sent to the front, whether one was on the western or the
eastern front, and whether or not one lived in an area subject to Allied bombing.
For some commentators, such developments eroded earlier traditions of working-
class solidarity.
The opening up of mobility chances and the reduction of the power of the tradi-
tional elites has been seen as a fundamental moment in the history of German society.
For the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, this denoted the modernization of German
social relations, though in his view this was an unintended by-product of Nazi rule,
a consequence of economic imperatives, labor shortage, and above all World War II,
which frustrated the anti-modern (anti-industrial, anti-urban, anti-feminist) senti-
ments of the leading National Socialists. For Rainer Zitelmann and Michael Prinz,
on the other hand, the modernization of Germany was the intended consequence of
the modernizing vision of Hitler and the German Labor Front. According to
Zitelmann, Hitler was an advocate of “equal opportunity,” with a strong desire to
exalt the manual worker and increase his social standing at the expense of the mate-
rialistic bourgeois. In his view the Führer was a Keynesian modernizer, an advocate
of an industrial and consumerist society, and a prototypical social engineer. Hence
his enthusiasm for the People’s Radio and the People’s Car. Prinz paints a similar
picture of the DAF, stressing its enthusiasm for modern technology, industrial ratio-
nalization, the emergence of functional rather than status elites, and a sweeping
program of public welfare. Now it is true that one can find various remarks in the
totality of Hitler’s writings and speeches that are amenable to Zitelmann’s interpreta-
tion. However, compared to the centrality of race in those writings and speeches,
such remarks are few and far between. In fact Zitelmann confuses ends and means
in Hitler’s Weltanschauung. War and racial hygiene were the goals, which in passing
brought about significant social change, rather than the other way round. In any
case, even if Hitler did make complimentary remarks about manual labor, he also
sent reassuring noises to big business, which reaped far more benefits from Nazi rule
than did the German working class. Much as Hitler may have been keen on
Autobahnen, cars, and airplanes, no “modern consumerist society” came into exis-
tence in the Third Reich. Economic policy favored armaments, not consumers. The
great majority of German workers remained workers, even if limited mobility chances
offered themselves, and even though they were better off than the slave laborers they
often supervised. In any case this supposedly “modern society” rested upon the bar-
barous exploitation and plunder of non-Aryan capital and labor. It was only “open”
for “healthy Aryans.” The increase in mobility chances was not universal and social
position was not determined by function alone. For economic inequality, racial dis-
crimination, and political correctness directly affected the life chances of millions of
German citizens. Nazi Party members and sympathizers might do well and experience
rising living standards, but social democrats and communists suffered persecution
and a reduction in their job prospects, unless they converted to the gospel of Nazism.
Jews, Gypsies, “asocials,” the incurably ill, alcoholics, mental patients, Freemasons,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, and gays were also excluded from the benefits of this “moder-
nity.” All of which suggests that modernity was not what the Third Reich was about.
the nazi new society 367
Racial and political imperatives subverted the emergence of a society genuinely open
to talent. Similar points can be made about the plans of the German Labor Front,
which were continuously thwarted by opposition from Hitler, as in the case of pleas
for the total mobilization of women.
8
The extent to which Nazi rule transformed the role of women is hotly contested.
The Third Reich did remove women from significant posts in the German govern-
ment and administration. Where women were active in public life, they were expected
to be so in specifically female agencies. Early initiatives of the regime to persuade
married women to abandon employment outside the home, as well as the provision
of marriage loans to encourage single women to remain at home and procreate,
seemed to reinforce the traditional segregation of male and female roles. They cer-
tainly fitted ill with images of modernity. The closure of birth control clinics, attempts
to restrict access to contraceptives, and the prohibition of abortion pointed in the
same direction. However, the “pronatalist” policies of National Socialist Germany
did see significant extensions of pre- and postnatal care, as well as other forms of
mothers’ welfare and family allowances. These have been seen as a more “modern”
aspect of gender relations in Nazi Germany. So have the increased employment of
women outside the home, the fact that the NSF sought to prepare German women
for work as well as motherhood, and the rise in the percentage of university students
who were female: from 17 percent of the student body in 1933 to 40 percent in
1940. There was also an increase in the percentage of female German doctors: from
6 percent in 1930 to 8 percent in 1939.
Nevertheless, the Third Reich did not deliberately modernize gender relations. In
the first place Hitler resisted the total mobilization of female labor until economic
imperatives forced him to recant in 1942–3. He also opposed the equalization of
male and female wages. On the shop floor of the factories they entered, women still
did not fill skilled, supervisory, or managerial posts. Increases in the numbers of
female doctors and students were chiefly a consequence of the drafting of males into
the Labor Service and the armed forces. Secondly, the “pronatalist” and welfare poli-
cies of the regime were dominated by considerations of racial hygiene. Female Jews,
Gypsies, asocials, the incurably ill, and chronic alcoholics were excluded from the
welfare system and from entitlement to marriage loans, making it clear that the logic
of Nazi welfare was not care but racial selection. Women (and some men) in the
categories listed above were subject to a program of compulsory sterilization, which
involved some 400,000 victims. According to Gisela Bock, Nazi racial policy actually
turned women into the “prime victims” of the Nazi era. If women were “healthy”
and Aryan, the Nazi regime deprived them of control over their own bodies by
making abortion and contraception illegal. If they were “unhealthy” or “non-Aryan,”
they were forcibly sterilized or shipped to concentration and extermination camps.
Needless to say, Bock’s view that women were invariably “victims” of the Third
Reich has not gone uncontested. Aryan women were clearly superior to non-Aryan
men in both Nazi ideology and reality. Women denounced their fellow Germans to
the Gestapo, just like their male counterparts. Moreover, as Claudia Koonz points
out, significant numbers of German women were complicit in the sustenance of the
regime’s objectives. They did breed for the Fatherland, rear Germany’s soldiers, and
care for their Nazi menfolk. Nazi women’s organizations were hugely popular,
though rarely for ideological reasons; and many young German girls even experienced