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in 1981 that "women belong in the public sphere only as wives and
mothers ... [within] a vast network of welfare, cultural, educa–
tional, and health-care institutions." And she claimed not to have
known about what happened to the Jews who had disappeared.
Other prominent Nazi women, such as Gertrud Baumer, who had
been the highest nonelected official in the Weimar government,
adapted by altering their curricula vitae and advocating expanded
career opportunities for women while avoiding criticism of Nazi
policies.
In the last third of the book, Koonz writes of those women who
resisted whose records she could not find, and who when interviewed
often could supply only the pseudonyms of their comrades. Official
resistance, even from Catholic and Protestant leaders, had fizzled
early. Its later development was based on disillusionment with
Hitler rather than on opposition to his goals - after it became clear
that the war was being lost. Koonz concludes that Hitler's propa–
ganda machine fooled both men and women . By adapting to the ter–
ror, of course, they allowed it to spread, while remaining unaware of
its extent. Still, there also were hundreds of thousands of would-be
resisters who met under the guises of various social gatherings and
hiking expeditions to share their discontent, although they neither
openly protested nor expected to overthrow the state. Those who did
resist always lived under the threat of being denounced, and their
survival and the continuation of their activities required that they re–
main fragmented and sequestered.
In the last section of her book Koonz writes about these cour–
ageous women, about the torture some of them had to suffer for
minor infractions, and about some of the many instances in which
resisters endangered their own lives . But information about them
and about Jewish women, she explains, is fragmentary, because it is
based only on the memories of survivors . For unlike the Nazis who
kept extensive records of everything, their victims had to erase all
evidence.
Engelmann, a former editor of
Der Spiegel
and a freelance
writer, has documented such memories. He has recalled his own ex–
periences during the Nazi years, and has supplemented them with
those of repentant and unrepentant German housewives and bus–
inessmen, and with those of friends and family. Like Koonz, he pre–
sents the views of Hitler's loyal supporters, of opportunistic fellow
travellers, of docile, dutiful, apolitical citizens who obeyed, of inno–
cent victims, and of active and passive resisters. His focus, however,
