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the bearer of "truth, purity, and love" which alone could triumph
over the postwar "anarchy of values." But why, asks Koonz in the
chapter on Nazi women, "did some previously emancipated German
women follow a leader who told them bluntly to leave politics to
men?" Why, for instance, did they put up with the routine insults in
Der Sturmer,
which featured stories of Jewish men raping blonde
women, and derided these women as stupid, lustful, and deceitful?
Having been raised on the Bible, Koonz noted, women Nazis had
learned to "screen out misogyny from the doctrine they respected,"
and although most of them started out as ardent nationalists rather
than as anti-Semites, they too converted after anti-Semitism became
the national religion - along with anticommunism and anticap-
italism
.
Koonz has demonstrated most excellently how the Nazi women
she interviewed, and those whose diaries she found, managed to fit
so many opposing ideals into their ideology: they adored Hitler
though he disenfranchised them; they espoused women's roles as
procreators and homemakers while spending much time at rallies
and in fundraising; and they oozed humanity for their
Volk
while
helping to enforce racial laws against Jews and "racially unfit
Aryans." Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, whose Women's Front governed
some thirty million German women by 1941, told them what to wear,
how many children to have, and how to talk to their husbands and
sons. She also saw to it that social workers, teachers, and nurses
turned over mentally retarded, schizophrenic, and alcoholic
"Aryans" for sterilization. Mesmerized by their ideology, German
women complied, denounced and delivered their victims, because
they believed that a "sick
Volk
could be healed by excising the
Uewish] parasite or poison." This seems to be confirmed by the
memoirs Koonz dug up, in which "women Nazis attest[ed] to their
joy at feeling that even the most trivial work served a mighty cause."
In the beginning, women Nazis had been disoriented by the
Depression and expected the state to defend their private sphere.
They never thought it would invade their
Lebensraum.
Scholtz-Klink
indoctrinated them in courses on race, National Socialism, and
home economics, and she "facilitated the world's most ambitious fer–
tility drive, even after the shift to a wartime economy conflicted with
the commitment to 'strong' families and the revival of motherhood."
Thus few German women realized that after 1939, "behind the ac–
claim for military triumph, the fabric of domestic life [would] begin
to unravel." The unrepentant Scholtz-Klink herself still maintained
