Examines the lives of eight women who were a part of the Nazi regime or played a role in its ascendency.

Analyses the group and individual decision making processes in terms of the sociological, psychological, and quantitative aspects.

About the participation of German women in World War II and in the Holocaust.

“An intriguing, but also shocking insight into the thoughts of those young German women and how they saw their part in Hitler’s thousand-year Reich.” —Armorama The women of the Third Reich were a vital part in a complex and vilified system. What was their role within its administration, the concentration camps, and the Luftwaffe and militia units and how did it evolve in the way it did? We hear from women who issued typewritten dictates from above through to those who operated telephones, radar systems, fought fires as the cities burned around them, drove concentration camp inmates to their deaths like cattle, fired Anti-Aircraft guns at Allied aircraft and entered the militias when faced with the impending destruction of what should have been a one thousand-year Reich. Every testimony is unique, each person a victim of circumstance entwined within the thorns of an ideological obligation. In an interview with Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary, she remembers: ‘There was so much hatred within it’s hard to understand how the state functioned . . . I am convinced all this infighting and competition from the males in Hitler’s circle was highly detrimental to its downfall’. Women of the Third Reich provides an intriguing, humorous, brutal, shocking and unrelenting narrative journey into the half lights of the hell of human consciousness—sometimes at its worst. “Tim Heath investigated the experiences of women in Nazi Germany before and during World War II . . . What is special is that women speak candidly about their experiences, which were sometimes violent.” —Traces of War “A fascinating book, chilling at times.” —Books Monthly

This book compares female administrators who specifically chose to serve the Nazi cause in voluntary roles with those who took on such work as a progression of established careers. Under the Nazi regime, secretaries, SS-Helferinnen (female auxiliaries for the SS) and Nachrichtenhelferinnen des Heeres (female auxiliaries for the army) held similar jobs: taking dictation, answering telephones, sending telegrams. Yet their backgrounds and degree of commitment to Nazi ideology differed markedly. The author explores their motivations and what they knew about the true nature of their work. These women had access to information about the administration of the Holocaust and are a relatively untapped resource. Their recollections shed light on the lives, love lives, and work of their superiors, and the tasks that contributed to the displacement, deportation and death of millions. The question of how gender intersected with Nazism, repression, atrocity and genocide forms the conceptual thread of this book.

While Nazi Germany has been the subject of countless scholarly works, gender studies, as a category of analysis, has largely been neglected in interpretative surveys of Nazi Germany. This book examines the female half of the German population during the years of the Third Reich and asks why such a sizeable portion of the population was ready to rally around a movement both blatantly anti-feminist and determined to exclude women from public life. It explains how ordinary Germans translated Nazi beliefs into action and what factors, in addition to gender, influenced women's political choices between 1933 and 1945.

This is the first book in English to deal comprehensively with German fashion from World War I through to the end of the Third Reich. It explores the failed attempt by the Nazi state to construct a female image that would mirror official gender polic ies, inculcate feelings of national pride, promote a German victory on the fashion runways of Europe and support a Nazi-controlled European fashion industry. Not only was fashion one of the countrys largest industries throughout the interwar period, but German women ranked among the most elegantly dressed in all of Europe. While exploding the cultural stereotype of the German woman as either a Brunhilde in uniform or a chubby farmers wife, the author reveals the often heated debates surrounding the issue of female image and clothing, as well as the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between official Nazi propaganda and the reality of womens daily lives during this crucial period in German history. Because Hitler never took a firm publ ic stance on fashion, an investigation of fashion policy reveals ambivalent posturing, competing factions and conflicting laws in what was clearly not a monolithic National Socialist state. Drawing on previously neglected primary sources, Guenther un earths new material to detailthe inner workings of a government-supported fashion institute and an organization established to help aryanize the German fashion world.How did the few with power maintain style and elegance? How did the majority experie nce the increased standardization of clothing characteristic of the Nazi years? How did women deal with the severe clothing restrictions brought about by Nazi policies and the exigencies of war? These questions and many others, including the role of anti-Semitism, aryanization and the hypocrisy of Nazi policies, are all thoroughly examined in this pathbreaking book.