13 Work, Gender and Everyday Life: Reflections On Continuity, Normality and Agency in Twentieth-Century Germany

13
Work, gender and everyday life: reflections

on continuity, normality and agency
in twentieth-century Germany
Mary Nolan
Until the mid-1970s the social history of the Third Reich was a terra
incognita. Since then it has become an extensively explored but highly
contested terrain. Everyday life in all its diversity and complexity has
been thickly described and redescribed. We have innumerable studies
of the changing nature of work and attitudes toward it, both official and
unofficial. Working-class sociability on and off the shopfloor, the leisure
activities of women and men, the changing face of village politics and
office interactions, the experiences of those who joined Nazi organisa-
tions and those who distanced themselves from them have all been
reconstructed. More recently the policies toward and experiences of
women as well as the Nazis' preoccupation with gender issues have
been investigated. While the initial body of work focused primarily on
the period from 1933-1939, more recent studies concentrate on the war
and immediate post-war era or span the years from the mid- and late
1920s to the mid-1930s.
The social history of Nazi Germany has been written primarily by
leftists, feminists, and proponents of Alltagsgeschichte or the history of
everyday life - three contentious and controversial groups. From its
inception, the social history of Nazi Germany, understood as history
from below, the history of the inarticulate and marginalised, the history
of that which was unpolitical or not traditionally considered political,
aimed to be methodologically unconventional, theoretically unortho-
dox, and politically provocative. From Tim Mason's pioneering study of
the working class in Nazi Germany, through diverse efforts to specify
the forms and meanings of opposition and collaboration, distancing and
participation by men and women, to explorations of economic and
social rationalisation, anti-feminism, and racism, from studies of the
home and the home front to examinations of the Eastern Front, the social
histories of the Third Reich have sparked vigorous debates.1
1
Specific works will be referred to below. For an overview of German social history see
311
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MARY NOLAN
What then, have been the main controversies and what balance - if
any - can we draw after two decades of research and dialogue? Let us
look first at the principle paradigms and issues which have structured
these debates and the main issues raised in them and then explore three
substantive themes in which these issues are intertwined and for which
different paradigms offer competing interpretations: work and the
working class; women and gender; and politics and everyday life.
The debates
Class, race, and gender, that trinity of analytical categories, have
structured approaches to the social history of Nazi Germany in ways
that have often been highly contentious and mutually exclusive.
Historians have argued for the primacy of class conflict or biological
politics or the oppression of women more often than they have explored
their interactions. The social history of Nazi Germany was initially
written by left scholars, who analysed Nazi Germany in terms of
fascism - and hence capitalism - and who privileged class relationships.
Mason's pioneering study of the working class and social policy in Nazi
Germany was followed by a host of studies which examined the
persistence of class and the manifestations of oppositional attitudes and
behaviours but also uncovered sources of integration, cooptation, and
collaboration with the regime and its many organisations.2 These
scholars were seeking, if not a usable past, at least one in which National
Socialism did not uniformly control all aspects of life and thought.
The primacy accorded to class was subsequently challenged from two
directions. Feminist historians in Germany and abroad not only un-
covered the history of women in Nazi Germany, but asserted the
centrality of gender concerns and of misogyny and anti-feminism in
Nazi ideology and policy.3 Scholars working first on Nazi medicine
Geoff Eley, Tabor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture and
Politics of the Everyday - a New Direction for German Social History7, Journal of Modern
History 61 (June 1989), pp. 297-343; Robert Fletcher, Journal of Modern History 60
(September 1988), pp. 557-68. For an introduction to the social history of National
socialism see Mary Nolan, The Historikerstreit and Social History", New German Critique,
44 (Spring/Summer 1988), pp. 51-80. For an introduction to studies of women and
gender in the Nazi Germany, see Eve Rosenhaft, "Women in Modern Germany', in
Modern Germany Reconsidered, 1870-1945, ed. by Gordon Martel (London, Routledge
1992), pp. 140-58.
2
The main works in English are Timothy W. Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich
(Providence/Oxford, Berg 1993). This is a translation of his Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich:
Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft (Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag 1977); Detlev
Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New
Haven, Yale University Press 1987).
3
The state of debate and research can best be gleaned from two old and one recent
collection of essays. Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der
Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Frauengruppe Faschismusfor-
312
WORK, GENDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
and Nazi doctors and then on biological politics more broadly came to
see Nazi Germany as a quintessential^ 'racial state', to borrow the title
of Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann's study of Nazi racism
and racial policies.4
Methodologically, the social histories of the Third Reich have been
eclectic. Some drew heavily on the 'new' working-class history of the
1960s and 1970s and were explicitly informed by contemporary neo-
Marxist debates about fascism. Others were concerned with the social
consequences of state policies and with the popular responses to them.
Still other works have been primarily informed by Alltagsgeschichte,
which seeks to reconstruct everyday life and uncover subjective experi-
ence. Some rely primarily on sources generated by the Nazi regime,
such as Gestapo reports, others on documents from firms and private
organisations, and still others from memoirs, letters, and oral histories.
Whatever categories, methodologies, and specific subject matter they
have chosen, the social historians of the Third Reich have grappled with
three broad problematics. The first involves issues of continuity and
discontinuity in twentieth-century German history. The second focuses
on agency and power, or, more pointedly, on the question of who was
an agent {Titter) and who a victim (Opfer) under National Socialism. The
third concerns the implications of normality, of everydayness, be it in
the factory, in the home or on the battle front, for understanding the
social history of the Third Reich, popular attitudes toward it, and its
place in German history.
German history is rife with debates about continuity from the
Kaiserreich to the Third Reich, from the Weimar Republic to National
Socialism, and from Nazi Germany to the Federal Republic and the
German Democratic Republic. Social history has intensified these
debates and injected new themes - work and social policy, economic
and social rationalisation, leisure activities and reading habits, fertility
patterns and family strategies.5 It has examined more traditional topics
- ideology, discourse, the army, and the shifting relationships between
schung (Frankfurt am M., Fischer 1981); When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar
and Nazi Germany, ed. by Renata Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan (New
York, Monthly Review 1984); Tochterfragen: NS-Frauengeschichte, ed. Lerke Grevenhorst
and Carmen Tatschmurat (Freiburg i. Br., Kore 1990).
4
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State. Germany 1933-1945
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1991); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors
(New York, Basic Books 1986); Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis
(Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1988); Paul J. Weindling, Health, Race and German
Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press 1989).
5
In addition to the section on work below, see Anson Rabinbach, The Aesthetics of
Production in the Third Reich', Journal of Contemporary History 11:4 (1974), pp. 43-74;
Carola Sachse, Tilla Siegel, Hasso Spode and Wolfgang Spohn, Angst, Belohnung, Zucht
und Ordnung (Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag 1982); Marie-Luise Recker, National-
sozialistische Sozialpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, R. Oldenbourg 1985).
313
MARY NOLAN
the public and the private - from the bottom up.6 Questions of
continuity and discontinuity have obvious implications for understand-
ing the nature of the varied regimes that have occupied the shifting
territory of twentieth-century Germany, for assessing the forces respon-
sible for their creation and perpetuation, and for evaluating the
relationships between state and society.7 Did 1933 and 1945 mark breaks
or were there significant continuities in elites and institutions, in social
policies and class structure, in cultures high and low? Do the continu-
ities discovered in the economic, social, and cultural realms imply that
Nazi Germany was in certain respects normal, unexceptional, even
uncontaminated by the regime's ideology and policies?
For social historians, issues of continuity and discontinuity have
frequently been debated in terms of modernity and tradition. To what
extent did the Third Reich initiate processes of modernisation, be they in
work organisation, wages, women's workforce participation, family
size and leisure activities? Or, to put the issue more precisely, how was
the relationship between the 'modern' and the 'traditional' in both
social life and in its conceptualisation in ideology and popular con-
sciousness renegotiated in the Nazi era? ('Modern' and 'traditional' are
admittedly elusive terms, but are preferable to 'modernisation', which
more strongly implies a coherence, a uniform rationality, and a
teleology that the combined, uneven, contradictory, and frequently
irrational developments of Nazi Germany - and not just Germany -
belie.8)
Social historians have frequently sought out manifestations of oppo-
sition or Resistenz, terms covering a range of behaviours and attitudes
lying between fundamental endorsement of the regime and wholesale
and active resistance (Widerstand) to it.9 They have listened for silenced
6
Major works include the multivolume Bayem in der NS Zeit, ed. by Martin Broszat, et al.
(Munich, R. Oldenbourg 1972-81); Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the 'Jewish
Question' (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1984); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and
Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933-1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press
1984). For an introduction to the social history of the army see Omer Bartov, 'Soldiers,
Nazis, and War in the Third Reich', Journal of Modern History, 63 (March 1991), pp. 44-60.
7
For an introduction to the voluminous debates about continuity and German peculiar-
ity, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford,
Oxford University Press 1984) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire (Leaming-
ton Spa/Dover, New Hampshire, Berg Press 1985). For an overview of recent works on
continuities and discontinuities from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, see
Harold James, 'The Prehistory of the Federal Republic', Journal of Modern History 63
(March 1991), pp. 99-115.
8
For an introduction to debates on modernity and modernisation, see Nationalsozialismus
and Modernisierung, ed. by Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (Darmstadt, Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1991). See also Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: Crisis of
Classical Modernity (New York, Hill and Wang 1992).
9
Martin Broszat offers the most useful definition of these terms in 'Resistenz und
Widerstand: Eine Zwischenbilanz des Forschungsprojekts "Widerstand und Verfol-
314
voices and suppressed alternatives, especially within the working class.

Of particular concern have been the questions of how, when, and to
what extent the traditional working-class milieus - of socialists, Com-
munists, and Catholics as well as of the unorganised and unskilled -
were destroyed or, more aptly, fundamentally restructured during the
fourteen years of Hitler's rule. To what extent were attitudes toward
work and leisure transformed and did such transformations serve Nazi
goals?
Finally, social historians have explored how subjectivity and posi-
tionality shape perceptions about periodisation. Are the continuities
and discontinuities which historians reconstruct also those which loom
large in popular memory?10 Do historians of structure and high policy
posit a fundamentally different periodisation than those writing Alltags-
geschichte and women's history?11 And whose popular memory should
be central, for on issues of continuity and periodisation the memory of
victims and perpetrators diverges as radically as their experiences did.12
According to Andreas Hillgruber, for example, German soldiers re-
member the last years of World War II on the Eastern Front as a heroic
and desperate defence of the fatherland against invading Asiatic hordes
- and historians should view them from this perspective.13 For concen-
tration-camp inmates, such a defence meant continued genocide; its
failure brought liberation.
Issues of continuity are closely related to those of normality, a
complex theme that has been pursued by social historians in two rather
different ways. Practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte and of women's history
have explored the relationships, real and perceived, between continu-
gung in Bayern 1933-1945"', in Nach Hitler. Der schwierige Umgang mit unserer
Geschichte: Beitrage von Martin Broszat, ed. by Hermann Graml and Klaus-Dietmar
Henke (Munich, R. Oldenbourg 1987).
10
According to Peukert and Reulecke, the origins of Alltagsgeschichte lay in part in an
effort to bridge the gap between critical academic history and popular memory, for
Germans did not see their experiences reflected in what historians were writing about
the Third Reich: Die Reihenfast geschlossen, ed. by Detlev Peukert and Jiirgen Reulecke
(Wuppertal, Peter Hammer 1981), p. 13.
11
Dan Diner, Terspektivenwahl und Geschichtserfahrung. Bedarf es einer besonderen
Historik des Nationalsozialismus?' in Der historische Ort des Nationalsozialismus, ed. by
Walter H. Pehle (Frankfurt am M., Fischer Taschenbuch 1988), p. 110.
12
See Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander, 'A Controversy about the Historicization of
National Socialism', New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 1988), pp. 85-126; Ulrich
Herbert, 'Die guten und die schlechten Zeiten! Ueberlegungen zur diachronen Analyse
lebensgeschichtlicher Interviews', "Die Jahre zveiss man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen
soil", ed. by Lutz Niethammer, Vol. I of Faschismus-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet.
Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930 bis 1960 (Berlin/Bonn, Dietz 1983),
pp. 67-97.
13
Andreas Hillgruber, 'Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45 als Problem der deut-
schen Nationalgeschichte und der europaischen Geschichte', Zweierlei Untergang. Die
Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europaischen Judentums (Berlin,
Siedler 1986), pp. 24-5.
315
MARY NOLAN
ities in the economic, social, and cultural realms across the period from
the 1920s to the 1950s and the 'normality', real and perceived, of many
aspects of Nazi society. They have reconstructed everyday life in all its
often mundane repetitiveness; they have uncovered long-term secular
trends that seem little influenced by Nazi policy even if they were either
masked or packaged in new Nazi ideology. It is abundantly clear from
oral testimonies that many Germans remember numerous aspects of life
in the Third Reich as normal, and they claim to have avoided participa-
tion and ideological contamination by escaping into a purportedly
unpolitical world of work or home or leisure. In both popular memory
and the conceptual vocabulary of many historians, the normal and the
unpolitical are seen as integrally related attributes. Precisely this
association is problematic, for representations in memory do not
necessarily reflect the reality of Nazi Germany. Historians must ask
whether people were unpolitical and therefore uncomplicitous or
whether all aspects of everyday life were politicised, blatantly or subtly?
Were the words and categories in which everyday life was constructed
and perceived tainted by the regime's antisemitism and racism, by its
sexism and homophobia, by its draconian work ethic and rabid
nationalism? Finally, how is one to weigh what is remembered as
normal - the 1930s and the war on the western front, as opposed to what
is repressed - the war on the eastern front and the Holocaust?
Other historians, who have sought to link the 1930s to the war years,
the occupied territories to the home front, have explored how abnormal
behaviour, i.e. racist and genocidal actions, came to be understood by
those engaged in them as normal. Historians of Nazi medicine have
traced the racialisation and radicalisation of eugenics and the reconcep-
tualisation of the task of the doctors from curing the individual to curing
the 'nation's body' (Volkskorper). These transformations were central to
the planning and execution of compulsory sterilisation, euthanasia, and
genocide, and to understanding the central role of doctors in them.14
Others, such as Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, trace the work of
economists and statisticians, population experts and urban planners,
administrators and agronomists, arguing that they conceptualised and
participated in deportations, population transfers, massive and invol-
untary labour deployments and eventually genocide, seeing it as part of
the normal practice of rational economic and social modernisation.15
Historians of the German army and of the war on the eastern front, such
as Omar Bartov and Christopher Browning, have sought to explain why
extreme brutality and racism became normal practice on the eastern
14
See Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, and Proctor, Racial Hygiene.
15
Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen
Plane fiir eine neue europaische Ordnung (Frankfurt am M., Fischer 1993).
316
front and why participation in killing Jews and Russian POWs and
civilians was considered routine.16 The normality at the heart of these
varied arguments is one of racism in high politics, intellectual and
expert thought, and everyday life.
The implications of continuity and normality have been at the heart of
bitter disagreements over whether National Socialism can be his-
toricised, a term covering three closely interconnected but nonetheless
separate issues. The first, and central, question involves the place of
Auschwitz in the historical reconstruction of the Third Reich. Should
Auschwitz be the central point to which all developments during the
Third Reich must refer or does that distort parts of the Nazi era which
can best be understood primarily with reference to non-Nazi traditions
and developments.17 A second issue involves whether the Nazi era is
capable of being understood historically, as Martin Broszat has argued,
or whether, as Dan Diner insists, Auschwitz is the central fact of Nazi
Germany and represents 'a no-man's-land of understanding, a black
box of explanation, a vacuum of extrahistorical significance, which
sucks up attempts at historiographical interpretation'.18 And if histori-
cal understanding is possible, can the historian of National Socialism
employ the same methods as the historian of any other era? Should s/he
abandon the distancing from the subject that has characterised most
work on the Third Reich?
A third dimension of the debates about historicisation involves the
place of National Socialism in twentieth-century German history. In the
Historikerstreit of the mid- and late 1980s, conservative historians, such
as Ernst Nolte, Michael Stunner, Klaus Hildebrandt, and Andreas
Hillgruber, sought to historicise and relativise National Socialism, to
acknowledge but minimise the Holocaust by comparing it to other
twentieth-century genocides. Nolte, going much further than his con-
servative colleagues, saw Auschwitz as an imitation of the Gulag and
argued that genocide was undertaken to ward off an 'asiatic deed' by
the Bolsheviks. These strategies contrast sharply with Broszat's insist-
ence that Auschwitz was unique, even if many aspects of the Third
Reich were uncontaminated by and explicable without reference to it. It
is even more distant from those who see the Holocaust as unique, even
16
Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, Oxford
University Press 1992); Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion
101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, Harper Collins 1992).
17
Broszat, 'A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism' (see note 18),
p. 103 and Broszat, Tlaydoyer fur eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus',
Merkur 39:5 (May 1986), pp. 373-85.
18
Broszat, 'A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism'; Dan Diner,
'Between Aporia and Apology: On the Limits of Historicizing National Socialism', both
in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians' Debate, ed. by Peter Baldwin
(Boston, Beacon 1990), p. 144.
317
MARY NOLAN
as they acknowledge continuities between Nazism and the preceding

and succeeding regimes.19
If debates about continuity and normality raise the question of the
place of the Third Reich in German history and its relationship to
national identity, controversies about agency raise the question of moral
and political responsibility for the multiple crimes of the regime.
Alltagsgeschichte, with its careful reconstruction of people's ambivalent
attitudes toward Nazi ideology and contradictory behaviour toward the
policies and organisations of the regime, has successfully destroyed the
neat categories of good resister (in the sense of Widerstand) and evil
Nazi. People actively opposed some policies and programmes of the
regime, distanced themselves intellectually or emotionally from others,
but enthusiastically participated in still other aspects. Criticism of
individual policies or political leaders coexisted with approval for
Hitler.20 The controversy is no longer about how people thought or
behaved, but rather about the implications of their multiple and shifting
identities. According to Dan Diner, social history explains 'how it really
was' by studying the microscopic and stressing normality and continu-
ity. But unlike the view from above, which emphasises the monstrous,
the discontinuous, it fails to explain 'how it was possible'.21 Others insist
that there is a complex relationship between the opposition and
acquiescence of workers, women or peasants on the one hand and
racism, antisemitism, terror, and genocide on the other.
Agency is particularly troubling for social historians who have sought
not merely to let the inarticulate speak but also to recover the voices of
those who spoke a different language than those supporting the regime.
Yet, the words, visions, and behaviour discovered were at best only
partially 'alternative', and, as we will see below, seemed to become ever
less so as the regime moved from full employment through Blitzkrieg to
total war. Equally troubling is the relationship between intentions and
consequences, between what people thought they were doing - retreat-
ing into the factory, seeking the comforts of domesticity, ignoring the
19
The best English collections of documents from and articles about the Historikerstreit are
Reworking the Past, ed. by Peter Baldwin (Boston, Beacon 1990) and New German Critique
special issue on the Historikerstreit, 44 (Spring/Summer 1988). The major English
analyses are Richard Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to
Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, Pantheon 1989) and Charles S. Maier, The
UnmasterablePast: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, Harvard
University Press 1988). Among the major German collections are Historikerstreit: Die
Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenver-
nichtung (Munich, Piper Verlag 1987); 1st der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu
Historisierung und Historikerstreit, ed. by Dan Diner (Frankfurt am M, Fischer 1987);
Normalitat oder Normalisierung? Geschichtswerkstatten und Faschismusanalyse, ed. by
Heidi Gerstenberger and Dorothea Schmidt (Munster, Westfalisches Dampfboot 1987).
20
For a summary of this literature see Nolan, The Historikerstreit', pp. 53-60.
21
Diner, Terspektivenwahl', pp. 102-3,110-11.
318
most offensive aspects of the regime's ideology and politics - and what
the consequences of such actions were - the stabilisation of the regime
and the persecution of its many victims. In short, social historians and
women's historians must decide whether ambivalence and indifference
are to be categorised positively as Resistenz, negatively as complicity, or
as some complex and shifting combination of the two. Did people
tolerate and actively support antisemitism, racism, terror, and murder
from fear, from a desire to survive, from pre-Nazi prejudices, or from
ideological commitment to National Socialism? And how many moved
from the former camp to the latter?
In exploring agency and responsibility, some social historians have
even challenged prevailing definitions of victims and perpetrators. To
be sure, many categories of victims remain appallingly clearly defined -
Jews and Gypsies, Russians and Poles, 'asocials' and homosexuals, and
politically active Communists and Social Democrats. But what of
working-class men, or women of all classes? Both broad categories were
in various ways relegated to subordinate social and economic, and, in
the case of women, biological positions. Political persecution, wage
discrimination, repressive pronatalism, and exclusion from high poli-
tics persisted throughout the Third Reich. Yet, both women and
workers received benefits as well. Historians disagree about whether
they benefitted from just the welfare and recreational aspects of the
regime or also from participation in its multiple opportunities to exert
power and control over others.22 And how did such involvement affect
both people's consciousness and behaviour and the survival and
cumulative radicalisation of the regime?
These overlapping controversies about continuity, normality, and
agency, and about the place of the Third Reich in twentieth-century
German history, erupted with particular intensity during the Historiker-
streit of the mid- and late 1980s and then subsided in the early 1990s for
many reasons, not least because reunification dramatically altered the
political context which spawned them. In both East and West Germany
attention focused on coming to terms with the East's past. The
experience of the GDR complicates the trajectories of class politics,
workers' cultures, gender relationships, and social and political identi-
ties in twentieth-century Germany. It complicates the ongoing German
effort to define its national identity for the twenty-first century based on
its history in the twentieth. But it does not eliminate the need to reflect
on National Socialism. However repressive, depressing, and oppressive
the German Democratic Republic was, it was not a racist and genocidal
22
For a discussion of these 'Herrschaftsbetriebe', see Michael Geyer, The State in National
Socialist Germany', in Statemaking and Social Movements, ed. by Charles Bright and
Susan Harding (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 1984), pp. 193-232.
319
MARY NOLAN
regime like National Socialism, and it will not diminish the centrality of
the latter in twentieth-century German history.
Work and workers' cultures

For the first three decades after the collapse of National Socialism, the
history of the working class on and off the shopfloor was all but ignored.
It was assumed that class and class conflict had ceased to exist, that
politics and the state merited study, while economics and the factory
were of distinctly secondary importance, that workers' cultures were
destroyed as effectively as workers' organisations. Since the mid-1970s
working-class history and Alltagsgeschichte have revealed the persist-
ence of class, the waging of class conflict from above, the existence of
oppositional behaviour, and the incomplete integration of workers into
the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.
This rich and persuasive body of local studies, firm histories, and
analyses of leisure, reading, and attitudes toward work and skill, has
shown equally clearly that the cultural and social expressions of class as
well as class politics changed fundamentally. As the attention of
historians has shifted from the 1930s to the war years, the evidence of
opposition and of class as the central category has receded, while the
manifestations of integration and the importance of race have emerged.
And many of the changes initiated during the Third Reich persisted
after 1945 as well.23 These permanent changes, which contrasted rather
markedly with the reemergence of pre-fascist forms of working-class
culture and politics in post-World War II Italy, cannot be explained
solely by the Nazis' repression of the Communist, Social Democratic,
and Catholic workers' movements, important as terror and Gleichschalt-
ung were in reshaping political organisations and attitudes.
More recent studies focus less on oppositional behaviour and atti-
tudes than on the labour process, the composition of the working class,
and Nazi and popular attitudes toward work. They suggest that the
restructuring of work and the working class and the transformation of
workers' cultures on and off the shopfloor played a crucial role in the
remaking of the German working class. National Socialism picked up
on, continued, and partially distorted processes of rationalisation that
were initiated during the mid-1920s and continued in both the Federal
Republic and the German Democratic Republic. Work, wages, skill
23
Contrast, for example, Franz Neumann's Behemoth (New York, Harper Torch 1966) with
such works as Mason, Social Policy; Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany; Sachse et al., Angst;
and Alf Liidtke, Eigensinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis
in den Faschismus (Hamburg, Ergebnisse 1993).
320
hierarchies, and job training were transformed in fits and starts. These
transformations were clothed in varied combinations of traditional and
modern rhetoric, and were supported with varied degrees of enthusi-
asm by industry, the state, and, at times, even the workers' movements.
An exploration of economic and social rationalisation will shed light not
only on the fate of the German working class under Nazism, but also on
the broader themes of continuity, modernity and normality.
During the 1920s, economic and social rationalisation were enthusi-
astically endorsed by industrialists and trade unionists, engineers,
industrial sociologists and psychologists. Rationalisation was a slogan
for productivity and efficiency, for science and prosperity, for ill-
defined visions of modernity more broadly.24 It was an umbrella term
for the various means through which and levels on which this modern-
isation was to occur. Technological and organisational rationalisation
referred to those changes most directly effecting production. Concentra-
tion mechanisation, flow production, the assembly line, standardisa-
tion, and various Taylorist measures, such as time and motion studies,
fell under this rubric. Negative rationalisation was a euphemism for the
ruthless closing of inefficient plants. And human rationalisation (men-
schliche Rationalisierung) referred not only to industrial psychology,
personnel management, and vocational aptitude testing, but also to new
skill-training programmes and a new and comprehensive range of
company social and welfare policies, aimed both at tying workers to the
firm and at creating a new worker and new working-class family, suited
to the new rationalised work.25 The Weimar rationalisation campaign
was accompanied by an enthusiasm for Fordism, as the technical system
and economic ideology associated with the Ford Automobile Company
were called. The incompatible economic reform visions of industrialists
and trade union functionaries, of engineers and politicians, were
couched in terms of irreconcilable understandings of American econ-
24
For a discussion of the many meanings of this term and an analysis of the Weimar
rationalisation movement, see Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and
the Modernization of Germany (New York, Oxford University Press 1994).
25
Robert Brady, The Rationalization Movement in German Industry (Berkeley, University of
California 1933) remains the best survey of technical and economic rationalisation in
English, while the Handbuch der Rationalisierung published by the Reichskuratorium fiir
Wirtschaftlichkeit is the most comprehensive contemporary survey in German. For
Weimar rationalisation, see Thomas von Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung in der
Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, Campus 1989) and Heidrun Homburg, Rationalisierung
und Industriearbeit (Berlin, Haude and Spener 1991). Peter Hinrichs, Um die Seele des
Arbeiters: Arbeitspsychologie, Industrie- und Betriebssoziologie in Deutschland (Cologne,
Pahl-Rugenstein 1981) and Carola Sachse, Siemens, der Nationalsozialismus und die
moderne Familie. Eine Untersuchung zur sozialen Rationalisierung in Deutschland im 20.
Jahrhundert (Hamburg, Rasch und Rohring 1990) provide the best overviews of human
rationalisation.
321
MARY NOLAN
omic success and of the roles of mass production, mass consumption,

and high wages in it.26
Rationalisation was not only widely preached but also widely
practised during Weimar. In heavy industry, giant integrated firms
such as Vereinigte Stahlwerk, Krupp, and Gutehoffnungshlitte closed
unprofitable operations, integrated production from the mining of coal
to the construction of sophisticated machines, and invested heavily in
reorganising plants and increasing productivity. Ruhr mining was
extensively mechanised and flow production and an ever more minute
division of labour spread in the finished goods sector.27 And there were
even elaborate campaigns to Taylorise the practices of the working-class
housewife.28
During the 1930s and 1940s, rationalisation continued, but the
enthusiasm for Americanism vanished. Even without the Nazi seizure
of power, rationalisation measures would probably have continued.
During the Depression, firms carried out rationalisation plans already
embarked upon, even though that contributed to excess productive
capacity, because only by so doing could they hope to reap benefits in
the long run.29 Under the Nazis, the need to revive the economy, the
shortages of raw materials and foreign currency, and the primacy of
rearmament all pushed concentration, work reorganisation and new
technologies.30 As Tilla Siegel has shown, the German Labour Front
made the promotion of productivity its foremost ideological mission.31
Although historians such as Heidrun Homburg, Thomas von
Freyberg, and Rudi Hachtmann disagree about when and to what
extent rationalisation entailed new technology and automation and to
what extent it was, as in the 1920s, built around reorganising work
while retaining flexibility and utilising skilled labour, they all ac-
knowledge the prevalence of rationalisation efforts from the mid-
19308 on.32 Total war only intensified what rearmament and full
employment had begun. As the macroeconomic context became ever
26
Nolan, Visions, passim.
27
See Brady, Rationalization, passim; Nolan, Visions, pp. 131-53. See also the multi-volume
Gesamtbericht des Enquete Ausschusses zur Untersuchung der Erzeugungs- und Absatzbed-
ing-ungen der deutschen Wirtschaft published by the Reichskuratorium in the late 1920s
and early 1930s.
28
Mary Nolan, '"Housework made Easy": The Taylorized Housewife in Weimar
Germany's rationalized Economy', Feminist Studies (Fall 1988), pp. 549-78.
29
Nolan, Visions, pp. 227-32.
30
Ulrich Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft im "Dritten Reich"', Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15
(1989); pp. 329-30.
31
Tilla Siegel and Thomas von Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung unter dem National-
sozialismus (Frankfurt am M., Campus 1991), pp. 39-135.
32
Siegel and Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung, pp. 322-4; Homberg, Rationalisierung;
Rudiger Hachtmann, Industriearbeit im 'Dritten Reich' (Gottingen, Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht 1989).
322
more irrational, the factory became ever more rationalised. As the

state became ever less modern in the sense of bureaucratised, rational,
and predictable,33 production became ever more modernised in an
organisational and technical sense.
What then were the effects of these rationalisation processes, which
proceeded first in a democratic context which protected workers'
rights, then in a fascist context which denied them, and after 1945 once
again under both a democratic but less worker-oriented state and
under a state socialist regime?
Rationalisation restructured both work and the relations among
workers in factories and mines. We know most about this in the
Weimar era, when rationalisation produced mixed results for capital
and labour alike. In the chemical, mining, iron and steel, the metal-
working industries, rationalisation intensified work, introduced new
technologies, worsened working conditions and made supervision
more pervasive and interventionist. Inefficient plants were closed and
structural unemployment increased while in some sectors the number
of unskilled and often female workers expanded. But rationalisation
did not lead to extensive deskilling, for German industry continued to
rely on specialised 'quality work' and the flexible skilled worker who
produced it. Wages for those employed did not drop, but the gulf
between the employed and the unemployed widened and working-
class insecurity was pervasive. Rationalisation destroyed the 'quasi-
institutions' and loose networks on the shopfloor that had united
workers of varied political persuasions and worsened the possibilities
of communication and informal organisation.34
This reshuffling and fragmentation of workers continued in the
Third Reich as did a reorganisation of the wage system and greatly
intensified pressure for productivity. The consequences of these pro-
cesses were more divisive than in Weimar, for there were no workers'
movements on the shopfloor to bring together what rationalisation
split apart or to defend wages and social policy in the political arena.
The restructuring of work and wages and the absence of trade unions
fed into the individualised and often instrumental attitudes toward
33
Martin Broszat, The Hitler State (London and New York, Longmans 1981) remains the
classic study of the Nazi state; Hans Mommsen, 'Nationalsozialismus als vorgetauschte
Modernisierung', in W. H. Pehle, Der Historische Ort des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt
am Main, Fischer 1990), pp. 31-46.
34
Nolan, Visions, pp. 160-5,167-78. Eva Cornelia Schock, Arbeitslosigkeit und Rationalis-
ierung: Die Lage der Arbeiter und die kommunistische Geiverkschaftspolitik 1920-1928
(Frankfurt a.M., Campus 1977); Uta Stolle, Arbeiterpolitik im Betrieb: Frauen und Manner,
Reformisten und Radikale, Fach- und Massenarbeiter bei Bayer, BASF, Bosch und in Solingen
(1900-1933) (Frankfurt a.M., Campus 1980); James Wickham, 'Social Fascism and the
Division of the Working Class Movement: Workers and Political Parties in the
Frankfurt Area (1929-1933)', Capital and Class 7 (Spring 1979), pp. 1-34.
323
MARY NOLAN
work that Detlev Peukert among others has discerned.35 Rationalisa-

tion may well have promoted a search for compensation and diversion
outside of work, and those compensations and diversions were pro-
vided primarily by the Nazi Labour Front.
Rationalisation also created new divisions and hierarchies among
workers. In the late 1920s the most important division was between those
who retained jobs in rationalised industries and those who suffered from
structural unemployment. The effects of the depression were so detri-
mental to the workers' movements because of the demoralisation and
demobilisation that already existed from unemployment that had soared
to 18 per cent in 1926 and hovered between 8.5 per cent and 9 per cent in
the following two years.36 By 1936 the Nazis were to eliminate unemploy-
ment and thereafter the regime was plagued by labour shortages, but the
effects of the previous decade of economic insecurity and unemployment
on workers were more lasting, as the Ruhr oral history project has shown
so clearly. Younger workers were cut off from the experience of work and
the workers' movement before 1933 and came to associate integration
into wage labour and adulthood with National Socialism.37 For young
and old alike, perceptions of the 'good' and the 'bad' times were based
more on the availability of employment and the prospects of security
than on political events.38
Skill hierarchies and the sexual division of labour in industry were
reshaped by rationalisation. Neither in Weimar nor in the Third Reich
was there massive deskilling; rather, the universal skills of the Facharb-
eiter became more limited and plant specific, but industry continued to
rely on the flexibility that skill provided.39 Just as rationalisation in
Weimar had created large numbers of low-paying assembly jobs, for
which women were considered suitable due to their purported physi-
cal, mental, and emotional peculiarities, so too did National Socialism
continue them. Its ideological opposition to women's waged labour
notwithstanding, the regime found itself unable to force working-class
women out of industrial jobs, even if it could limit the economic and
professional activity of middle-class women. Indeed, the number of
women workers increased steadily.40
35 %
Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, p p . 103-15, 1 7 1 ^ . Schock, Arbeitslosigkeit, p. 155.
37
See Niethammer, 'Die Jahre weiss man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soil'.
38
Herbert, '"Die guten und die schlechten Zeiten'", ibid., pp. 67-96.
39
Von Freyberg has shown this most persuasively for the machine-tool industry in both
Weimar and Nazi Germany. Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung; and Siegel and
Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung.
40
Annemarie Troger, The Creation of a Female Assembly-Line Proletariat', in When
Biology Became Destiny, pp. 237-70. Tim Mason, 'Women in Nazi Germany', History
Workshop Journal 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 74-113 and 2 (Fall 1976), pp. 5-32. Stephan Bajohr,
Die Halfte der Fabrik (Marburg 1979). Dorte Winkler, Frauenarbeit im 'Dritten Reich'
(Hamburg, Hoffmann and Campe 1974).
324
From the inception of the rationalisation movement in the mid-1920s,

its capitalist proponents as well as many engineers and scientists of
work attempted to tie wages to productivity, to introduce the Leistungs-
prinzip (performance principle). Individuals should not be paid accord-
ing to the crude categories of skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled. Nor
should the 'political wage', that is the setting of wages by compulsory
state arbitration, prevail. But precisely these two forms of payment did
persist in Weimar, due to the power of the Social Democratic Party and
the trade unions, and the pro-worker proclivities of the arbitration office
of the Labour Ministry.41
After 1933 these obstacles to a recasting of the wage system were
eliminated. Moreover, the 1934 Law for the Ordering of National
Labour vastly increased the power of the firm over its employees.
Although the law couched this increased power in the traditional or
neofeudal terms of leader and follower, of factory community and
loyalty, industrialists used their new authority in quite modern, ration-
alising ways.42 As Tilla Siegel has shown, the state set maximum wages,
but the firm had sole control over the wage form. And firms strove
successfully to achieve the maximum differentiation so that occupation,
skills levels, and sex would no longer be the sole determining factors.
Wages were to depend as well on actual output, and any increases over
the low base pay would come in the form of bonuses, overtime pay, and
social benefits. While the regime and industry were not uniformly
successful in increasing wage differentials, their efforts did contribute
to disciplining workers and undermining any community of interests
among them.43
Economic rationalisation fragmented the working class in multiple
ways; human or social rationalisation suggested some of the ways in
which it was being recomposed. As conceived in the mid- and late
1920s, the amorphous phenomenon of Menschliche Rationalisierung,
Menschenbezvirtschaftung, or Menschenfilhrung included vocational apti-
tude testing, skill-training programmes, general worker education
courses, company newspapers and company social programmes for
both workers and their families. Engineers, sociologists and psychol-
ogists of work, and industrialists hoped to create a new worker, or
41
Nolan, Visions, pp. 160-5. For an overview of discussions of the performance principle
and performance wage, see Joan Campbell, Joy in Work, German Work: The National
Debate 1800-1945 (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1989).
42
Tim Mason, The origins of the Law on the Organization of National Labour of 20
January 1934. An investigation into the relationship between "archaic" and "mod-
ern"elements in recent German history', in Mason Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1995).
43
Tilla Siegel, Leistung und Lohn in der nationalsozialistischen 'Ordnungder Arbeit' (Opladen,
Westdeutscher Verlag 1989), and 'Wage Policy in Nazi Germany', Politics & Society 14:1
(1985), pp. 1-52.
325
MARY NOLAN
rather several different kinds of new worker, differentiated by their sex,

skill level, and employment sector. What these workers would share
was a commitment to productivity, a belief in rationalisation, a sense of
vocation {Berufsethos), and a heightened 'joy in work', however menial
and meaningless that work might be. Workers were to develop a
competitive and individualistic work ethic and simultaneously to see
themselves as part of the factory community. They were to be loyal to
their firm, but not their class.44
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the proponents of human rationalis-
ation were by no means idle propagandists. Rather, they astutely
translated their new management and company welfare strategies into
concrete programmes. To take one significant example, DINT A, run by
the right-wing engineer Karl Arnhold and supported enthusiastically
by Ruhr heavy industry, established apprenticeship training pro-
grammes and adolescent education schools in 100 to 300 major firms. By
1934 it published roughly 100 company newspapers with a circulation
of over one million. It was also instrumental in establishing home
economics education, kindergardens, and health and maternity care in
the firms with which it worked.45
National Socialism by no means brought such efforts to an end.
DINT A, for example, joined the Labour Front, becoming the Office for
Vocational Education and Firm Leadership. By the late 1930s over two
million workers had been through its courses and training programmes,
which dispensed a mixture of skills training, work discipline, and Nazi
ideology.46 Carola Sachse has chronicled the diverse social-policy
measures, ranging from housing and health programmes to family
policy, undertaken by the Siemens electrotechnical firm and the con-
flicts between the firm on the one hand and the Labour Front on the
other about who would control them and about the relative weight to be
given to economic and labour-market needs as opposed to the racial
goals of Nazi population politics.47
Whether or not these policies succeeded in altering workers' attitudes
toward work and politics, they did succeed in making them more
dependent on the firm - for training, for social benefits, for work and
44
In addition to the citations in fn. 25, see Nolan, Visions, pp. 179-205.
45
DINTA's accomplishments were chronicled in its own numerous Tatigkeitsberichte and
special publications, as well as in Peter C. Baumer, Das deutsche Institut fiir technische
Arbeitsschulung, Schriften des Vereins fur Sozialpolitik, 181/1 (1930); and Rudolf
Schwenger's two studies, Die betriebliche Sozialpolitik im Ruhrkohlenbergbau (Munich and
Leipzig, Duncker and Humblot 1932) and Die betriebliche Sozialpolitik in der westdeut-
schen Grosseisenindustrie (Munich and Leipzig; Duncker and Humblot 1934).
46
Ronald Smelser, Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Front Leader (Oxford, Oxford University Press
1988), pp. 191-2.
47
Sachse, Siemens, passim. See also Carola Sachse, Industrial Housewives: Women's Social
Work in the Factories of Nazi Germany (New York, Haworth 1987).
326
leisure opportunities. The destruction of workers' organisations after

1933 and the specific wage policies of the Nazi regime reinforced such
dependence. Simultaneously, many workers sought to take refuge from
the larger society within the factory, for whatever its hierarchies and
oppressions, it was a place where one could try to display one's skills
and do quality work, where one would earn a living wage, where one
could avoid politics in their most explicit forms.48 War seems to have
heightened the 'flight into the factory'.49 On the one hand workers
became ever more dependent on the firm for material and social
support; on the other hand the factory was a source of continuity, a
symbol of stability as cities were bombed, families were evacuated, and
the Nazi regime crumbled. Both factors remained operative when the
war ended and reconstruction began. Workers and factory councils
looked first to the firm for help; formal organisations and informal
networks were feeble in comparison.50
The specific Nazi contribution to the reconceptualising of work and
the restructuring of the working class was racism. The Nazis were not
the first to praise the virtues of work nor to preach the gospel of
efficiency and individual productivity. Indeed, many of the most vocal
propagandists of Arbeit (work) and Leistung (performance) in the Third
Reich, such as Karl Arnhold of DINTA, had played a similar role in late
Weimar. But Nazi ideology did make Leistung a central measure of an
individual's worth and conceived of the Volksgemeinschaft as a pseudo-
egalitarian association of those who were 'leistungsfahig' and racially
pure. The Nazis not only condemned but proved appallingly willing to
punish and kill those deemed 'leistungsunfdhig'', regardless of whether
their alleged incapacity came from physical and mental handicaps, race,
social circumstances, or attitudes.51 On top of this composite hierarchy
of race and productivity stood the skilled German quality worker (who
48
Alf Liidtke, 'Deutsche Qualitatsarbeit', 'Uebereinstimmung und Dissenz zwischen den
Klassen in Deutschland', Kommune 7A (1989), pp. 62-6; ' "Formierung der Massen"
oder Mitmachen und Hinnehmen? Alltagsgeschichte und Faschismusanalyse', in
Normalitat oder Normalisierung 'Wo blieb die "rote Glut" : Arbeitererfahrungen und
deutscher Faschismus', and '"Ehre der Arbeit" : Industriearbeiter und Macht der
Symbole. Zur Reichweite symbolischer Orientierung im Nationalsozialismus', both in
Eigensinn, pp. 221-350. See also, Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', pp. 339-40.
49
For a long view of workers' increasing focus on the firm from late Weimar to late 1940s,
see Michael Fichter, 'Aufbau und Neuordnung. Betriebsrate zwischen Klassen-
solidaritat und Betriebsloyalitat', in Von Stalingrad zur Wahrungsreform. Zur Sozialge-
schichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland, ed. by Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke and
Hans Woller (Munich, R. Oldenbourg 1990), pp. 469-549.
50
We still lack studies of working-class neighbourhoods that would trace their
restructuring from the late 1920s through the early 1950s. The Ruhr oral history project
provides some suggestive material.
51
Martin Geyer, 'Soziale Sicherheit und wirtschaftlicher Fortschritt: Ueberlegungen zum
Verhaltnis von Arbeitsideologie und Sozialpolitik im "Dritten Reich"', Geschichte und
Gesellschaft 15 (1989), pp. 390-2.
327
MARY NOLAN
was male, of course), in the middle ranks were less skilled German men
and, below them, women, and at the bottom the less efficient, purpor-
tedly racially inferior foreign workers. Outside the hierarchy, but
nonetheless central to its construction, were Jews on the one hand and
on the other, the unproductive, a diverse and quintessentially Nazi
category containing the 'asocials' and the 'eugenically unfit', the
'work-shy' and the undisciplined, the homeless and the handicapped.
As Germany moved from rearmament through Blitzkrieg to total war,
the number of foreign workers, voluntary or coerced, increased ex-
ponentially even though their presence violated the Nazi desire for a
racially homogeneous nation.52 By the summer of 1941 there were 3
million foreign workers, by the autumn of 1944 7.7 million. By 1944 over
one-quarter of all employees were foreigners; in the key sectors of
mining, construction, and metals, the figure was nearly one-third and in
agriculture almost one-half.53 If foreign workers could not be dispensed
with, in part because the regime was not willing to mobilise all
women,54 they could be classified by race, in a carefully graded
hierarchy that placed Danes on top and Russians on the bottom. Wages
and working conditions, food and housing, restrictions and punish-
ments became ever harsher as one moved down the racial hierarchy. In
factories and on farms, the invisible Leistungsunfdhige were replaced by
the ever present foreign worker, labelled inferior in race, efficiency and,
if female, still further discriminated against. Many German workers
moved into supervisory positions in this restructured workforce,
elevated both by new tasks and by the elaboration of categories
ostensibly inferior to themselves.
Racism and rationalisation were inextricably intertwined not only in
the Nazi economy at home but in Nazi plans to restructure Central and
Eastern Europe, economically and racially. Economists and population
planners, agronomists and statisticians, working for the Four-Year Plan
and a variety of other Nazi agencies, developed and implemented a
blueprint to 'modernise' the economies of Austria, Poland, and Russia
by eliminating inefficient productive units - many of which were Jewish
- and by solving the problem of overpopulation. The methods sanc-
52
See Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des 'Auslander-Einsatzes' in der
Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin, Dietz 1989) for the debates about this at
various stages of the war. The book also contains a detailed history of the treatment of
foreign workers. An English summary of his findings appears in Herbert, A History of
Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880-1980 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 1990),
pp. 127-92.
53
Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor, pp. 155-6.
54
Drafting all women would not only violate the regime's ideological precepts, but more
importantly, might heighten male discontent and demoralisation, something Hitler
greatly feared because he believed that dissatisfied civilians had stabbed a potentially
victorious military in the back during World War I. Mason, Social Policy, pp. 19-40.
328
tioned to achieve this rationalisation included resettlement, evacuation,

forced labour deployment, starvation, ghettoisation and, eventually,
extermination.55
The effects of these transformations on German workers were
uneven, contradictory, and extremely difficult to assess, but overall they
seem to have encouraged the emergence of instrumental attitudes
toward work and skill, isolated and individualistic attitudes toward
co-workers and class comrades.56 Even oppositional behaviour gen-
erally entailed a retreat into the private sphere, where individuals
pursued higher wages, consumer-oriented leisure or isolated family
life. A multiplicity of new, individualising and hierarchising work
experiences were created in the two and half decades after the
beginning of rationalisation in 1925. And after 1933 these were per-
meated by the racial categories of the regime. Once the workers'
movements, which had offered a common analysis of different experi-
ences, were destroyed, workers had to give meanings to their experien-
ces individually or allow the regime and Nazi organisations, such as the
Labour Front, to impose them.57 It was neither the rationalisation
movement of the 1920s nor the depression nor National Socialist
recovery and rearmament nor World War II nor post-war reconstruc-
tion alone that fundamentally restructured work and the working class
and eroded the basis of traditional workers' cultures, but rather the
cumulative and reinforcing effects of each.
Women and gender

Until recently gender, women, and family have not featured prominent-
ly in discussions of fascism, war, and genocide, and in most analyses
they still do not. Yet, these issues were central in Weimar and Nazi
Germany - central to people's political consciousness, to state policy
and to political ideologies as well as to the micropolitics of worker
education and company social policy, of social work and the medical
profession. In the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic the Nazis
were not alone among political parties in propagating traditional ideas
about women, gender, and family.58 Nor were they alone in represen-
55
Aly and Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung, passim.
56
Peukert argues this most strongly in his Inside Nazi Germany, pp. 103-25.
57
Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', pp. 344-5. He asserts workers suffered less from a multiplic-
ity of experiences than from the lack of a common working through of them. I think it
was both.
58
Uta Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation
(Oxford, Berg 1989), pp. 168-85; Renata Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, 'Beyond Kinder,
Ktiche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work', in When Biology Became Destiny,
pp. 33-65.
329
MARY NOLAN
ting perceived social threats and anxieties in female or gendered terms,

as Klaus Theweleit's analysis of the memoirs of Free Corps members
shows so clearly.59 The Nazis' anti-feminist, anti-emancipatory rhetoric
was extreme, but their insistence on separate spheres and women's
different nature was shared in many circles, including the bourgeois
women's movement. Nazi concern with the birth-rate and women's
roles as mothers built up a pervasive discourse about eugenics and
motherhood - one that proved compatible with Communist and Social
Democratic politics as well as with conservative and fascist ones.60 And
the contradictory and partial character of women's emancipation in
Weimar made women susceptible to anti-feminist appeals long before
women actually turned to the Nazi party or women's organisations
coordinated by the Nazi state. Women, gender, and family, in short,
were at the heart of political rhetoric and policy throughout the interwar
period, even if those preoccupations were most evident under National
Socialism.
The growing body of work on women and gender in the Third Reich
has focused on three principle themes, the first of which involves
modernity and tradition in Nazi ideology and policies. Did the regime's
anti-emancipatory, misogynist rhetoric translate into policies which
reversed long-term trends in women's waged work, political roles, and
reproductive practices? The second issue concerns the relationship
between gender and race and explores whether National Socialist
biological politics, especially sterilisation, were directed primarily
against women rather than men and whether their intention was
primarily sexist rather than racist? The third, and most contentious issue
is that of agency and responsibility. Was National Socialism both
gendered and the responsibility of both genders or was it an affair of men
(Mannersache)? Were women - by which is all too often meant only
ethnically German women - victims (Opfer) or perpetrators (Taterinnen)?
The first efforts to uncover women and recover the history of gender
in the Third Reich, such as the essays in Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuchjill
Stephenson's work on Nazi Women's organisations, and Tim Mason's
articles on work and family, explored how National Socialism reshaped
women's public political and economic roles and private fertility
strategies. Rhetorically the regime promised to reverse the transform-
ations in women's roles wrought by industrialisation, democratisation,
and feminism and return women to the traditional realms of 'children,
59
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vols. I and II (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press 1987, vol. I, and 1989, vol. II).
60
Frevert, Women, pp. 185-93; Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for
Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (New York, Oxford University Press 1995);
Weindling, Health, pp. 399-440.
330
church and kitchen'. But in regard to women, as in regard to the petty

bourgeoisie and small farmers, reality fell far short of the regime's
reactionary promises. Certainly women were pushed out of all high
political positions in state and party, but not out of all public roles. They
could exert significant influence on social welfare and family policy
within the vast Nazi women's organisations.61 And the new Nazi public
arena, with mass leisure and youth organisations, was certainly no more
inhospitable to women than earlier forms. For some groups, such as
adolescents in the League of German Girls, or women in isolated and
traditional villages, Nazism even seemed to have opened new possibili-
ties.62
Statistics on work reveal similar trends. From 1933 to 1939 middle-
class women were pushed out of jobs in the public and private sectors
and the number of women students dropped steadily. During the war,
the universities became feminised, but middle-class women were still
able to avoid waged work. Despite this, the Nazis never succeeded in
reducing overall female labour-force participation. On the contrary,
whereas 34.4 per cent of women worked in 1933, 36.7 per cent did in
1939 and a greater percentage were in trade, industry, service, and
government than previously while the proportion of domestic servants
declined. Moreover, the number of married working women increased
by two million. Modern trends in women's labour-force participation
could not be reversed for neither industry nor the state could dispense
with a sex-segregated labour market. Manufacturing and clerical jobs
that were considered 'women's work' before 1933 remained the pre-
serve of women - ideologically and in practice - thereafter, and as full
employment drew rural men into more lucrative factory jobs, agricul-
ture became feminised.63
Whether a German woman worked or not, and whether she worked
only as a youth or moved in and out of the labour force as she alternated
paid employment and child bearing, or stayed in the factory or office life
long, thus depended on her class position. It also - and increasingly -
depended on her ethnicity and race. Labour-market politics and
biological, population politics were inextricably intertwined from the
early stages of the regime.64 In the 1930s some women were to specialise
61
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland (New York, St Martin's 1987); Jill Stephenson,
The Nazi Organization of Women (London, Croom Helm 1981).
62
Gerhard Wilke, 'Village Life in Nazi Germany', in Life in the Third Reich, ed. by Richard
Bessel (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1987), pp. 17-24. Dagmar Reese, 'Straff, aber
nicht stramm - herb aber nicht derb.' Zur Vergesellschaftung von Madchen durch den Bund
Deutscher Madel im sozialkulturellen Vergleich zweier Milieus (Weinheim and Basel 1989).
63
Frevert, Women, p. 218; Mason 'Women in Nazi Germany'; Troger, 'Creation'.
64
Dagmar Reese and Carola Sachse, 'Frauenforschung zum Nationalsozialismus. Eine
Bilanz', in Tb'chter-Fragen. NS-Frauengeschichte, pp. 81-2.
331
MARY NOLAN
in reproduction, some in production, while still others were expected to

alternate between the two; it all depended on the purported eugenic and
racial value assigned to women by the regime and the eugenic policies it
pursued.
During World War II, the links between race on the one hand and
production and reproduction on the other were much more explicit,
determining, and brutal as the German war economy came to rely
heavily on foreign labour and increasingly slave labour. If imported
labour from Western Europe was heavily male, slave labour from
Eastern Europe included millions of women. Like their male counter-
parts, they were treated, or more accurately, mistreated, according to
their place in the Nazi ethnic and racial hierarchy. Whatever that place
was, they were expected to produce, not reproduce. Pregnancy would
result in deportation back to the home country, dangerously late forced
abortions, complications or death from lack of food and medical care, or
the possibility that a baby deemed of racially 'good' stock would be
taken away.65 Thus while the Nazis failed to reverse long-term secular
trends in women's work, they did mix racism and labour-market
policies in ways that were new, explicit, and state sanctioned.
The effects of Nazi fertility policies were similar. Although the Nazi
regime has traditionally been considered pro-natalist, some recent
historians have argued that it was, in fact, anti-natalist, while others have
more convincingly insisted that it was pro-natalist toward some women
and anti-natalist toward others.66 In regard to reproduction, race,
ethnicity, and purported eugenic value were all determining, while class
was relatively insignificant. Both the negative Nazi pro-natalist
measures, such as the prohibition of birth control and abortion, and the
positive inducements of marriage loans, maternity classes and mothers'
crosses, applied only to those ethnically German women deemed to be
politically acceptable and free of ostensibly hereditary defects and
symptoms of asocial behaviour. These measures produced ambiguous
results among their target group. Motherhood propaganda and mar-
riage loans, aided by economic recovery, did lead to an upsurge of
marriages in the 1930s, but they did not produce an increase in average
family size. Despite the fact that contraception and abortion were illegal,
people limited the number of children they had, continuing a trend
toward the small nuclear family that had begun in earlier decades.67
What are we to make of the contrast between the modernity which
statistics reveal and the traditionalism on which ideology insisted?
65
Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor, pp. 169-72.
66
For an introduction to these debates, see Atina Grossmann, 'Feminist Debates about
Women and National Socialism', Gender & History 3:3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 350-8.
67
Mason, 'Women in Nazi Germany', part I, pp. 101-5.
332
Three observations seem relevant. First, although ideology treated the

category 'woman' uniformly, policy differentiated sharply among
women by race, class, age, geographic location, and 'eugenic value'.68
Second, the coexistence of traditional rhetoric and modern reality was
hardly restricted to issues involving women; rather it was an essential
characteristic of the regime in many areas. The emphasis on tradition
masked the increasingly modern character of women's practices at
home and outside and thereby may have made women's modern roles
more palatable to men and women. Third, it is too simple to say that
ideology was irrelevant given the statistically 'modern' trends, for we
know too little about how women understood their roles in public and
private, about the identities that they developed. We know too little
about how this mixture of modern work patterns and traditional
ideology was redeployed in the Federal Republic to push women out of
the workforce and in the German Democratic Republic to keep them in
it.69
The centrality of biological politics to labour-market policies encour-
aged feminists to turn their attention to the regime's racial and
biological rhetoric and practices. Attention has focused above all on the
intentions behind eugenics and compulsory sterilisation and their
consequences for women. During the 1930s the Nazi state performed
involuntary sterilisations on approximately 400,000 Germans, roughly
half of whom were men. Historians of Nazi medicine, such as Robert J.
Lifton and Robert Proctor, see compulsory sterilisation and the eugenic
justification of it as a crucial foundation for the formulation of the Nazi
regime's racial policies and a key preparatory stage for the policies of
euthanasia and genocide that were to follow, albeit neither in a straight
line nor inevitably.70 Gisela Bock, who has reconstructed the formula-
tion and implementation of the compulsory sterilisation programme at
the top levels of the regime, likewise sees compulsory sterilisation as
chronologically and logically prior to euthanasia and genocide, but she
stresses gender rather than race in analysing its formulation and
impact.71 At the level of conceptualisation and high-level execution,
Nazi racial policy in general and sterilisation in particular were the
68
Rosenhaft, 'Women'; Troger, 'Creation'; and essays in Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch, all
made this point, but it has frequently been forgotten in recent works which speak
globally of German women.
69
Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar
West Germany (Berkeley, University of California 1993) is a first step.
70
Proctor, Racial Hygiene, and Lifton, The Nazi Doctors.
71
Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und
Frauenpolitik (Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag 1986). In an earlier article, she stressed
the interaction of race and gender more than the primacy of one or the other. 'Racism
and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State', in
When Biology Became Destiny, pp. 271-96.
333
MARY NOLAN
work of men. As others have noted, however, at the level of reporting

and selecting those to be sterilised and actually performing the sterilisa-
tions, women doctors and social workers, teachers and women's
movement activists were deeply involved.72 More provocatively, Bock
argues that although compulsory sterilisation was performed on equal
numbers of men and women, women were both its primary target and
its primary victim. Women were more likely to suffer medical complica-
tions and death from sterilisation, and, even more importantly, they
were denied the opportunity of motherhood, which was more central to
their identity and social status than fatherhood was to men. Whereas in
her early work Bock emphasised the complex mixture of pro-natalism
and anti-natalism that characterised Nazi policy, a position still en-
dorsed by many, she now argues for its anti-natalist character, citing
both sterilisation and the payment of marriage loans to men instead of
women.73 Annette Kuhn spelled out the more general implications of
this kind of argument by insisting that the seizure of political power by
the Nazis cannot be separated from their seizure of women's bodies. For
the Nazis, the solution to the 'woman question' was every bit as
important as the solution to the 'working-class question' and the 'Jewish
question'. Perhaps, she concluded, anti-feminism was even more
fundamental to Nazi biological politics than racism.74
The debates about biological politics and gender confront us with
the question that haunts all studies of women and National Socialism:
were women, i.e. ethnically German women, victims or agents/perpe-
trators? Given that women were at best the second sex of the master
race, given that they were excluded from the inner circles of state and
party power, given that the regime undertook extensive efforts to
control their reproductive activity, should they be considered Opfer? If
so, how does their status as victims compare with that of Jews and
Gypsies? To put women on a continuum of victimisation, as Bock
does, is to ignore that the difference between being a live victim of
sterilisation and a dead victim of genocide was total and absolute.75
Yet, if women are to be considered Taterinnen, by virtue of what?
Their real or imagined withdrawal into women's separate and un-
political sphere? The pursuit of domestic normality, which soothed
those who carried out the regime's atrocities directly? Their insistence
that women were fundamentally different from rather than identical
72
Reese and Sachse, 'Frauenforschung', p. 94.
73
Frevert and Koonz both disagree. See Grossmann, 'Feminist Debates', p. 352.
74
Annette Kuhn, 'Der Antifeminismus als verborgene Theoriebasis des deutschen
Faschismus', Frauen und Faschismus in Europa. Der faschistische Korper, ed. by Leonore
Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Gerda Stuchlik (Pfaffenweiler, Centaurus 1990), pp. 40-2.
75
Reese and Sachse, 'Frauenforschung', p. 93; Grossmann, 'Feminist Debates', p. 352. The
original formulation is Dan Diner's.
334
to men and could best serve their interests by emphasising differ-

ence?76
Historians, particularly German women writing the history of Ger-
man women, are deeply divided on this issue.77 Some historians see
women - all women, up to and including those involved in the party
and its genocidal practices - as victims of fascism's anti-feminism,
misogyny and manipulation of reproduction. A second position sees
women as co-conspirators (Mittaterinnen) but attributes this coagency to
women's victimisation.78 Women were involved in the regime, suscep-
tible to its ideological appeals and material inducements, and willing to
support its policies because they followed the lead of men, were
dependent on them, and had been robbed of autonomy by patriarchy. In
short, not their agency, but their lack thereof; not their pursuit of real or
imagined self-interest or group interest, but their promotion of male
interests, involved them in National Socialism. A third view, articulated
most strongly by Lerke Gravenhorst, insists that during the Third Reich
women were active and autonomous parts of a German collective agent
(Handlungskollektiv Deutschland) and that feminist scholars today must
accept that as a 'negative heritage'.79 A fourth alternative, and by far the
most persuasive, rejects the polarised terms of the debate, pleading
instead for detailed historical reconstruction of the different experiences
of different women, their particular forms of repression, their possibili-
ties for action, and their degree of responsibility.80
Ethnically German women, like male workers, were targeted by the
regime for subordinate incorporation into the Volksgemeinschaft rather
than for persecution, wholesale exclusion or extermination. It is import-
ant to chronicle the multiple forms of discrimination to which they were
subject, for the limits on what even these women could do were very
real. But it is also important to investigate the ways in which these
women, and differently by class, age, politics, and eugenic 'value', were
incorporated and actively participated in Nazi society. It is important to
explore which ideological goals they shared, which they rejected and
76
Koonz has answered these questions affirmatively. Gisela Bock, review of Koonz,
Mothers in the Fatherland, in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London 2 (1989), pp.
16-25. Angelika Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Taterinnen. Frauenbiographien im Nationalsozialis-
mus (Nordlingen 1987).
77
As Tochter-Fragen, Ebbinghaus and Bock's review of Koonz, indicates, this is an
extremely acrimonious debate, which involves not only the past of German women, but
the present of both German and American feminism and the advantages and dangers of
arguing for rights and power by stressing difference rather than sameness.
78
The term comes from Christina Thumer-Rohr, 'Aus der Tauschung in die Ent-
Tauschung - Zur Mittaterschaft von Frauen', Beitrage zur Feministischen Theorie und
Praxis 8 (1983), pp. 11-26.
79
Lerke Gravenhorst, 'Nehmen wir Nationalsozialismus und Auschwitz ausreichend als
unser negatives Eigentum in Anspruch?', in Tochter-Fragen, pp. 17-37.
80
Reese and Sachse, 'Frauenforschung', p. 74.
335
MARY NOLAN
whether this changed over the course of the Third Reich. The Nazi
women's organisations, for example, were vast and among middle-
class women popular; their popularity came in part from imitating what
bourgeois feminist and religious women's organisations had previously
done, especially around social work and motherhood education. Simul-
taneously, the Nazi women's organisations exposed women much more
directly to the regime's eugenic and racial ideas.81 Women shared, albeit
very unequally, in the new leisure activities of the Strength Through Joy
organisation, and the League of German Girls offered young females an
appealing alternative to domestic drudgery and an opportunity to
develop skills.82 The regime did not just discipline and subordinate
women; it also bribed and benefitted them. It denied motherhood to
some women, even as it instrumentalised the idea of motherhood to
mobilise others.83
Women, especially middle-class ones who could avoid waged work,
sought to defend a separate women's sphere, a realm of domestic
comfort that was ostensibly uncontaminated by Nazi ideology and
policies. There is no simple way to assess the meaning and effects of
such actions. Some may have avoided employment out of dislike of the
regime, others from an aversion to waged labour. This avoidance of
waged work helped stabilise and legitimise the regime, by aiding
economic recovery before 1936, but contributed to the regime's labour
shortages and the workers' higher wages thereafter. The Nazis' refusal
to upset men by conscripting women undermined rearmament and
limited Nazi Germany's economic mobilisation for war prior to 1940 but
it also limited deprivations on the homefront and increased the regime's
popularity. The same complex of forces that protected ethnically
German women and men alike, however, led to the hyperexploitation of
foreign workers - female and male - within Germany after 1940.
Whether employed or not, ethnically German women were incorpor-
ated into the racial hierarchies that permeated and dominated wartime
Nazi Germany.
The meaning of women's everyday life for the fate of the regime is
also difficult to assess. Did women's traditional activities as mothers
and homemakers represent an escape into a neutral, genuinely private
sphere, or did Nazism eradicate any clear line between public and
private by its invasive practices and ideological mobilisation? Did a
retreat into domesticity - real or imagined - help create a refuge from
81
Koonz, Mothers, pp. 218, 252-62.
82
Hasso Spode, 'Arbeiterurlaub im Dritten Reich7, in Sachse et al., Angst, pp. 275-328;
Frevert, Women p. 242.
83
As Grossmann correctly points out, the issue of motherhood is central to this debate.
'Feminist Debates', pp. 354-5.
336
the regime, or did retreat into that haven, like retreat into the workplace,
help stabilise the regime? Was it one factor among many that enabled
some individuals to ignore the crimes of the regime and others to
perpetrate them, as Koonz has argued?84 Or does that posit a collective
guilt that blurs genuine responsibility and precludes an historically
nuanced understanding of participation and distancing, of intention
and outcome? Explorations of everyday life, which unfortunately often
ignore gender, nonetheless suggest how we might answer such ques-
tions.
Politics, agency and everyday life

Two decades of scholarship on everyday life in the Third Reich raise
troubling questions about politics and agency. The initial excitement of
discovering Resistenz during the 1930s, which occurred at the same time
that the polycratic rather than totalitarian character of the regime was
being argued for, led historians to overestimate how much oppositional
behaviour there was and how subversive its effects were. Similarly,
efforts to discover an unpoliticised, a normal sphere of everyday life
into which Germans could have retreated have proven elusive. Nazi
policies and personnel, but, more importantly, Nazi attitudes, catego-
ries, and language seem to have been everywhere and contaminated
everyone. Both Blitzkrieg and total war significantly worsened the
situation, for they led to the creation of a multiplicity of racist structures
and practices from which it was difficult to distance oneself, whatever
one's attitude toward Nazi ideology. Let us look first at selected aspects
of the 1930s and then at World War II at home and on the Eastern Front.
It is difficult to delineate the line between and the links between the
public and private in any historical period, but in none more so than in
the Third Reich. Few regimes have made as extensive an effort to
penetrate, politicise and restructure the private, be it in terms of
sociability, reproductive behaviour, family life, or attitudes toward the
relationship of individual to state and society.85 Yet, popular memory of
the Third Reich - or more accurately the memory of those who were not
victims of the regime - remembers the family and the factory as
unpolitical refuges in which one could pursue one's own interests, cling
to one's own attitudes, and distance oneself from the demands of the
84
Koonz, Mothers, pp. 419-20.
85
More systematic comparisons with both Fascist Italy and the family and welfare
policies of other European countries are necessary before one could argue with
precision about which policies were unique and which were an extension of policies
adopted in other countries. Pro-natalism would be a good place to start.
337
MARY NOLAN
regime.86 Recent works, however, suggest that the private was trans-
formed and politicised much more than memory acknowledges.
The private was impoverished and isolated on the one hand, but it
was penetrated by selected Nazi categories and ideas (although not by
the Nazi ideology wholesale) on the other hand.87 Anson Rabinbach's
study of reading habits in the Third Reich indicates one form of this
penetration. Women who were surveyed by Strength Through Joy
about how they preferred to spend their leisure time, stated unequivo-
cally their wish to read. This Lesehunger revealed a desire for nonpar-
ticipation in Nazi organisations, just as it showed an individualisation
of activities and the isolation of people in the private realm. But
Rabinbach's analysis of what was read uncovered just how many Nazi
ideas about race and gender, about the Volksgemeinschaft and the threats
to it, structured the ostensibly unpolitical fiction that was preferred.88
Heidi Gerstenberger's exploration of the public discourse around such
issues as the homeless, reveals that people adopted new Nazi social
science categories such as Nichtsesshafte in place of older, more picar-
esque ones, such as Landstreicher and in the process learned to see the
homeless as part of an inferior group of 'asocials'.89
Works on eugenics and sterilisation suggest how pervasive accept-
ance of Nazi 'racial science' was, and not just among the medical
profession.90 To be sure, there were innumerable protests against
individual sterilisation orders, but people did not object to the idea of
sterilisation as a solution to social problems or to the categories
considered for sterilisation; rather they questioned whether an individ-
ual in fact belonged to the category of, for example, the schizophrenic or
the handicapped. It is impossible to know whether this was done from
conviction or convenience, but in either case Nazi categories were
legitimated even as Individual exemptions were sought.91
Robert Gellately's study of the Gestapo revealed from a somewhat
different perspective the complex intertwining of public and private.
86
Die Jahre weiss man nicht. The recent oral history project of the former German
Democratic Republic uncovered similar memories of the family as an unpolitical
refuge. Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die volk-
seigenen Erfahrungen. Eine Archaologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin,
Rowohlt 1991).
87
Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, pp. 209-23, 240.
88
Anson Rabinbach, 'The Reader, the Popular Novel and the Imperative to Participate:
Reflections on Public and Private Experience in the Third Reich', History and Memory 3:2
(Fall/Winter 1991), pp. 5-44.
89
Heidi Gerstenberger, 'Alltagsforschung und Faschismustheorie', in Normalitat oder
Normalisierung, p. 44.
90
Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State, pp. 136-82; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, passim;
Weindling, Health, pp. 489-564.
91
For discussions of protests against sterilisation, see Bock, Zwangssterilisation and
Koonz, work in progress on the Rassenpolitisches Amt.
338
His analysis of surviving Gestapo records in Lower Franconia showed

that a high percentage of secret police investigations were initiated in
the wake of denunciations by private citizens. Whereas Sarah Gordon
saw Gestapo charges of violations of the racial laws as evidence of
opposition to the regime's antisemitism and racism, Gellately, noting
that there were many fewer convictions than charges, viewed them as
evidence of a willingness by Germans to inform on neighbours and
co-workers.92 After reconstructing the complex reasons behind de-
nunciations, which included neighbourhood and workplace feuds, a
desire for personal gain, and, more rarely, ideological commitment,
Gellately concluded that'... the question of the popularity of the regime
is to a very large extent beside the point. . . Successful enforcement of
Nazi racial policies depended on the actions of enough citizens,
operating out of an endless variety of motives, who contributed to the
isolation of the Jews by offering information to the Gestapo and other
authorities of Party and state'.93
Alf Liidtke's reflections on workers in the Third Reich suggest that a
politicisation of the private occurred not only because of successful
intervention by the regime or because of individual willingness to
inform and thereby help criminalise private behaviour, but also because
of the seductions National Socialism offered. For most workers the
dominant concerns were survival for oneself and one's family and
distancing oneself from authorities inside and outside the workplace.
The effort to preserve and remain within the sphere of Eigensinn, of
self-determined activities, led to an attitude of Hinnahme (acceptance)
toward the regime - an acceptance that did work to stabilise the regime
but that nonetheless stemmed from workers' own needs, interests and
practices rather than from integration into or deep ideological commit-
ment to the regime. Yet, as Liidtke acknowledges, passive acceptance
and distancing were accompanied by a certain attraction to the regime's
ceremonies and symbols, by 'a wait-and-see curiosity' about the
regime's promises to workers about improved social policy, leisure, and
consumption.94 The Nazis' endless rhetorical praise of work and
Leistung, the repeated affirmations of 'German quality work' appealed
to values with a long and honourable tradition, at least among older and
more skilled workers.95
92
Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945
(Oxford, Oxford University Press 1990); Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the "Jezvish
Question" (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1984).
93
Gellately, Gestapo, p. 214.
94
Ludtke, 'Wo blieb die "rote Glut"?'
95
Ludtke, 'Deutsche Qualitatarbeit', and Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', pp. 339^1. Peukert's
work on youth gangs suggests that at least some of the younger generation rejected this
older conception of work: Inside Nazi Germany, pp. 154-66.
339
MARY NOLAN
A growing body of research on both the home front and the Eastern
Front suggests that World War II marked a significant break in the
relationship of everyday life to the institutions and racial policies of the
regime. People's attitudes and behaviour on racial issues changed as
did the context in which they lived. If many people could distance
themselves from the regime's racial ideology and policies before 1940, it
was much harder to do so thereafter both because of foreign workers
within Germany and because of the antisemitic and racist policies of the
army and SS on the Eastern Front and in occupied Poland.
As we saw earlier, rationalisation and racism interacted to reshape
the structure of the working class and the organisation of factories and
farms in wartime Germany. This wartime experience reshaped the
consciousness of ethnically German workers. The presence of a large
number of foreign, and often slave labourers, working with Germans
but living in virtual apartheid, led German workers to reassess notions
of hierarchy and to question the permanence of the preexisting social
order.96 Nationality proved a more important basis for solidarity than
class, as the pervasive lack of concern shown by German workers
toward the foreigners in their midst showed.97 Workers, like the rest of
the population, came to accept the racial ordering of work as given, and
this racial ordering promoted passivity.98 After 1941 morale on the
home front was not notably high and the growing burdens of the war
economy were not shouldered enthusiastically, but they were not
resisted.99
Nor was there evidence of resistance on the Eastern Front, where the
overwhelming majority of German soldiers fought. As Mason con-
cluded, the army's morale was much higher than that of civilians;
German soldiers displayed 'enthusiasm, commitment and discipline ...
Making war seems to have been experienced as a more positive activity
than making munitions or mining coal'.100 Why this was so and what
this meant for the conduct of the war in the East has been the subject of
intensive research by historians of the Germany army.
From Christian Streit's indictment of the officer corps for actively
formulating the Commissar Order and annihilating Soviet POWs
through Omer Bartov's study of the brutal behaviour of three frontline
units to Theo Schulte's investigation of the actions of occupying forces
behind the front lines to Christopher Browning's reconstruction of the
96
Ulrich Herbert, 'Apartheid nebenan, Erinnerungen an die Fremdarbeiter im Ruhr-
gebiet', in Die Jahre weiss man nicht, pp. 233-67.
97
Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', p. 332.
98
Ulrich Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft unter der NS-Diktatur', in Burgerliche Gesellschaft in
Deutschland, ed. Lutz Niethammer et al. (Frankfurt a.M., Fischer Taschenbuch 1990), p.
465. " Mason, 'Women in Nazi Germany', pp. 333-4.
100
Mason, 'Women in Nazi Germany, p. 334.
340
participation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the Holocaust in Poland,

a devastating picture of army behaviour has been painted.101 As with
assessments of everyday life on the homefront, controversy centres less
on what the army did than on why it did it. Was the officer corps
motivated by ideological conviction or by a professional ethic of
modern industrial warfare?102 Did junior officers and men plunder and
pillage from fear, isolation, and limited resources, or from commitment
to the regime's policy of domination and racial reconstruction in eastern
Europe? Were loyalties to the 'primary group' rather than to the
regime's ideologies?103
Recent works agree that the army on the Eastern Front must be seen
not as a world apart, but as a microcosm of German society, in which
more than half of all German male workers of military age served.104 It
was, in Bartov's words, 'the army of the people and a willing tool of the
regime, more than any of its military predecessors'.105 But they disagree
about why that army of the people in all its ranks committed atrocities
and participated in genocide. At issue is less agency than ideological
motivation.
Browning insists that the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101
rounded up and killed Jews not from belief in the ideological race war
that the regime was waging, but from peer pressure, conformity,
careerism. As in the famous Milgram experiment, Browning argues that
ordinary men could under certain circumstances torture and kill.106
Their individual pasts, the 'everyday racism'107 of the society in which
they lived, the propaganda to which they were subjected in Poland, are
all deemed insignificant in comparison to the situation in which they
found themselves.
For others, it is precisely the character of the society from which they
came, a society which shaped both the army and the type of war being
101
For an overview of this literature see Theo Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in
Occupied Russia (Oxford, Berg 1989), pp. 1-28 and Bartov, 'Soldiers, Nazis, and War in
the Third Reich'.
102
Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen
1941-1945 (Stuttgart 1978) emphasises ideology while Michael Geyer explores the
professional ethic of violence. See Schulte, German Army, pp. 16-17.
103
Bartov argues that real primary groups rapidly disintegrated, but that the ideological
construction of the idea of primary group loyalty played a significant role in
motivating people. The conflict is between which ideological postulate people adhered
to, not between ideology and a deideologized personal realm: 'Soldiers, Nazis, and
War in the Third Reich', pp. 49-50.
104
Bartov, 'Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich', p. 8. Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', pp.
105
462-3. Bartov, Hitler's Army, p. 10.
106
Browning, Ordinary Men, passim. For a critical review, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
'The Evil of Banality', The New Republic (13 & 20 July 1992), pp. 49-52.
107
The term is Peukert's, 'Alltag und Barbarei, Zur Normalitat des Dritten Reiches', in 1st
der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? p. 57.
341
MARY NOLAN
waged, that was crucial. As the war progressed those on the battlefront
as well as those on the homefront were surrounded by racist structures
and practices of domination. The many forms of Resistenz which had
proliferated in the 1930s seem to have all but ceased after 1940.
According to Michael Geyer:
. . . by 1942-43 it needed an extraordinary effort and strong
convictions to evade the emerging new society; for racism per-
meated every aspect of life in occupied Europe. It had ceased to be a
matter of individually embracing racist ideologies. Rather, it was
the established practice of social organization that was almost
impossible to evade.108
This argument captures the prevalence of racism as the governing and
structuring principle of wartime Germany, but it circumvents the issue
of agency, of motivation. Did individuals, in fact, embrace racist
ideologies?
Ulrich Herbert suggested that participation in conquest and occupa-
tion reinforced existing ideas of racial superiority (both Nazi and
pre-Nazi) in the population at large.109 Recently discovered correspon-
dence from soldiers on the Eastern Front lends support to this. It was not
merely that Wehrmacht officers on all levels preached antisemitism and
racism, that they deified Hitler and dehumanised the enemy. The
private correspondence of soldiers to their families and to their
co-workers in factories in Germany reproduced this political and racial
demonisation of the enemy. These letters contained repeated endorse-
ments of the regime's hatred of those perceived as inferior 'others' - be
they Jews, Poles, or Russians; they expressed unequivocal adulation for
Hitler, and promised to fight to the death for the cause.110 The line
between public rhetoric and private perception was blurred, and the
regime mobilised prevailing conceptions of masculinity and work for
ideological race war. As Liidtke concluded after reading many such
letters from blue- and white-collar workers:
many individuals perceived their masculinity in military terms and
images. To these people, their original claim to perform a 'clean' job
at home increasingly became linked to the efficient killing oper-
ations of the army. In the end, participation in the extermination of
'others' might appear to many as the ultimate fulfilment of those
cherished notions of 'German quality work'.111
108 109
Michael Geyer, The State', p. 218. Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', p. 353.
110
Bartov, Hitler's Army, pp. 145-52. Alf Liidtke, The Appeal of Exterminating "Others":
German Workers and the Limits of Resistance', Journal of Modern History 64,
Supplement (December 1992), pp. S46-S67.
111
Ludtke, The Appeal of Exterminating "Others",' pp. S66-S67.
342

13 Work, Gender and Everyday Life: Reflections On Continuity, Normality and Agency in Twentieth-Century Germany

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13

Work, gender and everyday life: reflections

voices and suppressed alternatives, especially within the working class.

as they acknowledge continuities between Nazism and the preceding

Work and workers' cultures

omic success and of the roles of mass production, mass consumption,

more irrational, the factory became ever more rationalised. As the

work that Detlev Peukert among others has discerned.35 Rationalisa-

From the inception of the rationalisation movement in the mid-1920s,

rather several different kinds of new worker, differentiated by their sex,

leisure opportunities. The destruction of workers' organisations after

tioned to achieve this rationalisation included resettlement, evacuation,

Women and gender

ting perceived social threats and anxieties in female or gendered terms,

church and kitchen'. But in regard to women, as in regard to the petty

in reproduction, some in production, while still others were expected to

Three observations seem relevant. First, although ideology treated the

work of men. As others have noted, however, at the level of reporting

to men and could best serve their interests by emphasising differ-

Politics, agency and everyday life

His analysis of surviving Gestapo records in Lower Franconia showed

participation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the Holocaust in Poland,

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