NARRATOR: n*zi Germany,
two words synonymous with
barbarity, terror, hate and death.
A shock defeat in World w*r
One sows the seeds for discontent
in a once prosperous nation.
Adolf Hitler, an
unassuming, uninspiring man
seizes the opportunity
to take control,
promising to make
Germany great again.
But he won't do it alone.
Willing accomplices rally
from the most unlikely of places.
The female Fuhrers,
n*zi she-devils
..cougars, fantasists
..and secret lovers.
These are the forgotten Nazis.
These are Hitler's handmaidens.
- (cannons booming)
NARRATOR: In the dying
days of World w*r Two,
private Willi Anderson was
dodging b*ll*ts fired from
a sn*per's nest in the once
picturesque German town of Aachen,
500 km south-west of Berlin.
When his comrades took the
sh**ter out with a bazooka round,
what they discovered would
haunt Willi for the rest of his life.
Because the body
they found wasn't
the die-hard n*zi
soldier they'd expected.
It was a young girl.
As the GI's picked
through the ruined city,
they likened it to
a butcher's shop.
What kind of madness had inspired
Germans to send their daughters
into a slaughterhouse?
- (expl*si*n booms)
NARRATOR: n*zi
Germany is a horrific enigma.
Who do we blame for
what's been described
as the politics of
organised insanity?
- (speaking in German)
NARRATOR: Adolf
Hitler is an easy target,
but he didn't do it alone.
Without willing accomplices,
he might just have been
another demented dictator
spewing hatred from his soapbox.
- (speaking in German)
- (applause)
NARRATOR: To lay
his empire's foundations,
Hitler had to rally more than
just Germany's men to his cause.
Women had been called the
architects of national Socialist society.
And Hitler knew he needed them
if he was going to build
a thousand-year Reich.
As Hitler and his henchmen
led the nation to w*r
..his handmaidens
would indoctrinate
a new generation
of good little Nazis.
These were the female
Fuhrers: Leni Riefenstahl
Magda Goebbels
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink
..and Jutta Rudiger.
Together they would
spawn the mother of all evil.
After Germany's humiliating
defeat in the First World w*r,
crippling economic sanctions
sent the nation to the brink.
In 1921, there were
64 marks to the dollar.
Just two years later,
it was four trillion.
Families starved as
skyrocketing inflation saw people
paying for a
single loaf of bread
with a wheelbarrow
stuffed with banknotes.
- Through the-the Weimar era, it
was the women, the women at home
that saw all the
violence on the streets,
that witnessed all the
political and social chaos.
So, the women probably
understood more so than ever how
what a bad thing the Weimar
Republic actually turned out to be.
- I think after World w*r One,
Germany was in a
very difficult place.
And people were looking
for a-a more positive future.
NARRATOR: Onto this rickety
stage stepped Adolf Hitler
and the National
Socialist Party.
- (speaking in German)
NARRATOR: Their
brand of rabid nationalism
would transform German
society and write one of
the darkest chapters
of human history.
- (all shouting in German)
NARRATOR: At the centre
of the n*zi vision for the future
was the ideal Aryan woman.
Blonde haired, blue-eyed
and physically robust,
she was a wife and a
mother above all else.
It's more than a little bizarre
that Hitler, a sickly, paunchy,
dark-haired man,
championed a physique
so far removed from his own.
It's less of a surprise
that Hitler's ideal society
revolved around a mother-figure.
- Hitler's relationships to
women appears to have been
extremely complicated, so we
know from the records that he had
this Oedipus complex where
he just so adored his mother
and so hated his father,
that this also really
contributed to messing him up
in, um, extraordinary ways.
MAN: Certainly no one
here ever dreamed that
the skinny son of the
Hitlers would someday be
the supreme dictator of one of
the greatest nations of the world.
Surely his father and mother,
simple folk of this village,
would have been
the last to vision
such an incredible
future for their boy.
MOTZ: I think it's really
significant in terms of his wish
to venerate women
and respect them.
But there's also a very
opportunistic aspect
which is that he wanted the
reproduction of Aryan children.
NARRATOR: After the First World
w*r, women had been given the vote
and encouraged to work
and pursue higher education,
but to Hitler and his henchmen,
that progress was a hangover
from the despised
Weimar republic.
Worst of all, many
of the intellectuals
lobbying for women's rights
were, you guessed it, Jewish.
The Nazis wanted
to turn back the clock.
Hitler was going to emancipate
women from women's emancipation.
According to his warped
way of looking at the world,
women had little to fear from
so-called "oppressive men".
Instead, their mortal
enemies were Jews,
Bolsheviks, and feminists.
MOTZ: I think the n*zi propaganda
machine was incredibly effective.
And using the Jew as the scape
goat, as the poison container
for all the ills in the
world, so convenient.
It actually allowed n*zi men
to divert n*zi's
women's potential anger
that they were being
robbed of various rights
and opportunities
in the workplace
and direct that anger and sense of
grievance towards Jewish women.
NARRATOR: In 1933, when
the Nazis proposed abolishing
women's right to vote,
there was little push-back.
- (light piano music)
NARRATOR: Most young German
women thought feminism was old news.
They had more pressing concerns.
After the great w*r, Germany's
male population had been served up
a big slice of humble pie,
and their women, their Fraus,
were in desperate need of
a new generation of heroes.
They liked what
Hitler had to say about
a return to traditional values.
Women were to be pushed out of
the workforce and back into the home
and the domestic nirvana
of "kinder, kuche, kirche".
- Kinder, kuche, kirche has always
been women's job in Germany.
That means church,
kitchen, children,
and this is what women
were responsible for.
- It was almost like
guidelines for German women,
to have as many German
children as possible,
to create a comfortable home
environment so that the men
who had been out
perpetrating the Holocaust,
committing crimes,
murdering people,
could come home into a
nice, comfortable environment
and the church to give them a
a faith, if you
like, a collective.
- (speaking in German)
NARRATOR: Within months
of taking the reins of power,
Hitler swung the axe on
hard-won freedoms for women.
- (speaking in German)
NARRATOR: University
admission rules were changed
so that only one in ten
students could be a woman.
All female public servants
were given their marching orders.
And female lawyers, judges
and doctors were banned.
But Hitler didn't stop there.
The non-smoking
and teetotalling Fuhrer
added drinking and smoking
to the growing list of
no-go zones for women.
- The women, they were
not allowed to use makeup.
Perms of the hair were outlawed.
Dyeing of their
hair was outlawed.
They weren't allowed
to wear clothing
that would accentuate
the body shape.
Flat shoes, no stilettos.
They were just
indoctrinated in banality.
NARRATOR: it's tempting to dismiss
these edicts as yet another example
of n*zi control freakery
but beneath his madness, there
was a pernicious method and,
as always, a hidden agenda.
Jewish women had
been at the forefront of
the independent
women's movement.
They were also prominent in
German medicine, law and education.
Convincing women
to leave the workplace
and return to the home, however,
would require quite a bit of spin.
Luckily, Hitler had
just the man for the job.
ALL: Heil! Heil!
NARRATOR: To create
a Thousand-year Reich,
Hitler and his n*zi regime
needed women to stop working
and start making babies.
it was going to be a
tough sell after the progress
made during the Weimar years.
But Hitler had the
perfect spin doctor:
Joseph Goebbels.
- (speaking in German)
NARRATOR: It wasn't
that Nazis thought women
were inferior to men, he said,
they were simply born with
a different skill set that meant
that they could fulfil a
crucially important role
as mothers of the Reich.
- They were caught up in
this wonderful, wonderful idea.
We are creating this new Germany,
just like the men are digging roads
and putting down motorways,
just as the men
are joining the army.
We're helping new Germany
by providing a good home
for them to come back to,
by providing children for them.
This is our duty, and it
was universally accepted.
NARRATOR: Joseph
Goebbels led by example
by lining up his
own perfect Frau:
Magda Goebbels,
first lady of the Reich.
Tall, blonde and blue-eyed,
with seven picture book children,
Magda was a favourite of the
Fuhrer and a n*zi poster girl.
- Magda Goebbels was the mother,
I suppose, of the whole country
since Hitler didn't have a wife.
And she was charming,
she was beautiful,
and all of her children were
named 'H' after Hitler of course.
NARRATOR: From day one, it was
all about keeping up appearances.
Any dictatorship worth its salt
needed its myth-maker-in-chief.
Ironically, for a
regime that claimed
to want women chained
to the kitchen sink,
Leni Riefenstahl did more
than almost anyone else
to package n*zi ideology
and sell it to the masses,
and she did it by conquering
a male-dominated field.
Riefenstahl's own career
began in front of the camera,
but it wasn't until 1932 that
she caught the eye of a politician
who had thwarted artistic
ambitions of his own.
Hitler recognised in Riefenstahl
the skills needed to capture
the n*zi dream on film and beam
it into cinemas across Germany.
Hitler recruited Riefenstahl to
make a short film that would paint
a picture of Germany's
glorious rebirth on a grand scale.
in 1933, she directed
the Victory of Faith
at the annual n*zi
Party rally at Nuremberg.
It was a test run for
Triumph of the Will,
the film she'd make at the
same rally the following year.
REPORTER: Nazism has
held its great convention.
Masses of uniformed
men stupefying to the eye
and incredible
to the imagination
has stood in spell bound
audience of the Fuhrer.
NARRATOR: It would be
acknowledged as the most powerful
propaganda film ever produced,
and in 1936 her film, Olympia,
captured the Berlin Games and
projected images of an ascendant
and powerful Germany
around the world.
Riefenstahl glorified the
Germany of days gone by,
with rosy-cheeked
maidens in folk costume,
celebrating the harvest, while
their men did manly things.
Her films seemed to usher
in a return to a Golden Age,
and they were a crucial
ingredient in Hitler's plans
to brainwash the nation.
- If you look at some of
the Leni Riefenstahl films,
and they always centre, of
course, on the young, the attractive,
the physically attractive
women, but they
and they all got these
faces that are, you know,
they're really in love with
whoever this person is
in front of them talking.
That person happens
to be Adolf Hitler.
TIM HEATH: He was
like a pop star of his era,
like a George Michael
of his era almost.
I mean girls would go
hysterical to get near him,
to just touch him,
to shake his hand.
NARRATOR: It beggars
belief today, but Hitler believed
an important part of his appeal
was that women found
him sexually attractive.
That meant he had to maintain
the illusion of availability.
So, he remained childless
and kept his relationships
with women on the downlow.
- I think Hitler hid
his relationships
partly to embody a kind
of pure, masculine ideal.
Someone who wasn't
encumbered by domesticity,
by a wife or girlfriend,
and he became this almost
personification of masculinity.
Also, a bit like a celebrity
or pop star, it allowed
other women in the general
population to fantasise
that they would be
Hitler's girlfriend or wife.
NARRATOR: But when it came
to involvement in the machinery
of government and
national leadership,
even those women who
publicly stood by his side
and helped the
party rise to power
were left in the dust
like all his hidden lovers.
- First, they, the Nazis,
had no idea who was going
to be in charge of women.
They had men lined up
for all the important jobs,
at the head of the party,
at the head of the state,
foreign office, the cabinet
members, and they had no women.
- There was a heck of a lot of
devotion to Hitler in the 1920s
and yet a lot of the women
who voted for Hitler
And they did. You know,
can't make too many bones
about that, they
did vote for him.
But how did the Nazis
repay these women?
They repaid them by limiting,
severely limiting,
their involvement.
NARRATOR: Still, Hitler knew that
he needed a figurehead to marshal
the women of the Reich, even
if she was a leader in name only.
- They had a problem. If
the woman had a husband,
then her first duty
was to her husband.
And that didn't work because
she wouldn't have time
to take over control.
What were they going to do?
And so, they looked and
looked, and they found a leader in
a little obscure place in
southwestern Germany.
Gertrude Scholtz-Klink,
and she was a widow.
Not only that, her
husband had died
on the battlefields
in World w*r One,
and I think she
had seven children.
Perfect. She also
was blonde, blue-eyed,
and very compliant,
and she was the woman
leader for the entire time.
And all of those
independent leaders
from the old days
just faded away.
NARRATOR: When Hitler appointed
Scholtz Klink as the women's Fuhrer
and put her in charge of running
the n*zi Women's League, or NSF,
she had virtually no
leadership experience,
and that suited the men at
the top of the party just fine.
Klink was excluded from
important policy meetings,
and although she was
often seen by Hitler's side,
she was never consulted on
any decisions affecting women.
That didn't trouble Klink
though, because, at least in name,
she was playing a key role
at the forefront of
Germany's resurgence.
KOONZ: There was
pageantry around everything.
Everything was stage managed.
Every parade had floats,
uniforms were everywhere,
music was everywhere,
and just remember by 1936
Germany was the only country
in the world that recovered
from the Great Depression.
There was full employment,
there was rearmament,
Germany was back on the road
to prosperity, and the women,
according to Scholtz-Klink,
were very proud
that motherhood
was valued again.
NARRATOR: By 1939, the n*zi
Women's League had two million members.
During the w*r, a further
11 million joined its ranks.
It all played into Hitler's grand
plan to build a master German race.
Change wouldn't
happen if n*zi thinking
was confined to
the halls of power.
it had to worm its way
into German homes as well.
- The way that the German
Women's n*zi League,
sort of, operated, I mean, the
German youth, for one thing.
People like Gertrude Scholtz-Klink,
she would come and visit the schools
and they would discuss politics,
and they'd be asked
questions from Hitler's book.
Mein Kampf, for example,
if they couldn't answer the
question then they would
It was pretty much frowned upon.
So yeah, they, they did a lot in
indoctrinating the youth of Germany.
- The n*zi party really encouraged
the ideal woman to marry
and to have children,
and to enable that,
there were marriage loans
to help you pay towards
the cost of your wedding
and setting up a home.
And then if you started
having children they would
you wouldn't have to pay back
a certain amount of your loan.
And I think four children would
wipe the loan off in its entirety.
NARRATOR: The incentive
kicked off a rush to the altar
and mass weddings
became the in thing.
More than 100 female employees
from the Reemtsma cigarette company
were married to their new
husbands in a single ceremony.
CARRADICE: Always with
uniforms, always with honour guards,
and with dignitaries from the
from the local n*zi party there
to-to help them on their way.
They were encouraged
to say, "This is my role,
I will get married."
Giving birth to children
that was the key,
that was the element
that they wanted to push. So,
marriage was a means to an end.
NARRATOR: And those
women who had hoped to marry
a member of Heinrich Himmler's
SS were held to a higher standard.
Himmler believed his men were
the racial elite of n*zi Germany
..so he was keen for his
men to spread their seed
..but the women who
wanted to bear their children
had to prove their pedigree.
- Himmler was the most
thoroughgoing r*cist that is
of all of them.
And for his SS
men he demanded
..absolutely Aryan wives.
- So, every SS man that
wanted to get married had to have
his marriage personally
approved by Heinrich Himmler.
And it involved
reams of paperwork.
You had to send in on both
sides your birth certificates,
your parents'
birth certificates,
your grandparents'
birth certificates,
you had to send in documents to
show you had to clean bill of health.
NARRATOR: After that, they
were expected to sign up for training
at one of the elite Reich
bridal schools that Himmler
and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink
had founded together.
KOONZ: Himmler was very
much in favour of elite schooling
for SS wives or mistresses,
and they had to go to special
schools called Lebensborn.
And these schools
were in the Alps,
they were in beautiful
chalets; they were super luxe.
NARRATOR: And being n*zi
Germany, no educational programme
would be complete without
lessons in racial theory and eugenics.
Fairy tales were tweaked
so they communicated
the right messages to
impressionable baby Nazis.
Before graduating with
the certificate they needed
to walk down the aisle
with their SS groom,
the wannabe n*zi
brides had to pledge
their undying loyalty to Hitler.
They even had to memorise a
bedtime prayer to teach their children.
"My Fuhrer, I know
you well and I love you
like my father and mother."
They were taught they had no
agency over their own bodies,
that they belonged to the Reich,
and it was their responsibility
to keep fit so they
were ready to perform
their ultimate duty,
to bear children.
- This was seen
the fact of, um
particularly of a young woman's
body becoming property of the state,
uh, and the Fuhrer, this
was seen actually as a
as a great honour
to many of them.
It wasn't seen as
something dirty.
This was this was a real
honour to be considered as such.
But certainly, the younger
ones they're extremely patriotic,
extremely excited about
this 1,000-year Reich,
now Germany's going
to be wonderful again.
- (speaking in German)
CARRADICE: Get them
young, keep them old.
That was Hitler's dictum.
You know, you get
them at a young age,
and they'll stay with
you right to the end.
They were very clear, we get
them very, very young, we
and we make it We
don't make it voluntary,
we make it compulsory.
So, every girl in Germany
has to belong to this.
Just like every boy has to
belong to the Hitler youth.
And it created soldiers for
the Reich, for the Wehrmacht,
and it created wives for the men
who would then propagate children,
and that's more soldiers
for-for-for the Wehrmacht.
NARRATOR: Adolf Hitler saw
Germany's mothers as his secret weapon.
They were his advance
troops, readying the ground
for a n*zi campaign of shock
and awe that would engulf the world.
NARRATOR: In n*zi Germany
there were two roles for women:
care for the household,
and making Aryan babies.
To incentivise both, the
n*zi propaganda machine
went to work celebrating mothers
as the crowning glory
of the Third Reich.
The ultimate reward for n*zi mums
was the Mother's Honour Cross,
a pin to be worn in public
that would help boost their pension,
score the best seats on the bus,
and park in pole
position at n*zi events.
- The German Mutterkreuz,
or the German Mother's Cross,
was a German award created
specifically for the German mother,
and it was graded in
bronze, silver and gold.
Bronze was for a woman
who had four children,
silver was for a
woman who had six,
and gold was given to a
woman with eight children.
NARRATOR: Predictably,
the first woman to be awarded
the gold Mother's Honour
Cross was Magda Goebbels,
the first lady of the Reich,
and mother to a
swarm of n*zi children.
n*zi women were being
asked to breed like rabbits
because Germany, like
its European neighbours,
was in the midst of
a population crisis.
One in 20 Germans had
died in the First World w*r,
many of them young
men in their prime.
More concerning was the
fact that during the conflict,
birth rates halved.
As Heinrich Himmler put it,
too few children meant a
one-way ticket to the grave.
Without a wave of baby
Nazis, the Thousand-Year Reich
would remain little
more than a pipe dream.
CARRADICE: Contraception was
outlawed, ab*rtion was outlawed.
Hitler, and Gerring, and Goebbels,
they realised they needed numbers,
pure numbers if they're
going to push for Lebensraum.
NARRATOR: The 'spring of
life', or Lebensborn programme
was a Nazis way of incentivising
childbirth under any circumstance.
It offered Aryan women
financial assistance
and adoption services in a
series of private maternity homes.
These even included single
young women who had fallen
for the charms of
SS storm troopers.
WENDY LOWER: So,
Himmler set up homes
for these single women who
were impregnated by SS men.
The Lebensborn
programme is part of that.
It's about trying to
support the German women
who are having these babies, um,
and provide them these
subsidies and provide all this, um,
kind of, healthcare
and to promote that.
NARRATOR: In most
European countries,
unwed mothers were vilified,
but not in n*zi Germany.
Here, the contents of
their wombs were precious.
Mothers in the
programme were supported
if they decided to
keep their babies.
If not, they could
foster them to an family.
- (cheering)
NARRATOR: Whether it
was in their women's leagues
or the green countryside of
the Lebensborn programme,
Nazism was a
cradle-to-grave proposition
for the future wives and
mothers of the master race.
After receiving their first
lessons in n*zi indoctrination
at their mothers' knees,
young German girls
moved into the classroom.
n*zi officials had purged all
Jewish or politically dubious teachers
from the school
system, and, of course,
all "anti-n*zi" material
and books by Jewish authors
were consigned to the flames.
And the training didn't stop
when the school bell
rang at the end of the day.
HEATH: Bund Deutscher Madel,
which was the League
of German Girls,
that was basically a Hitler
Youth organisation for the girls.
Now you had two It
was basically a two tiered,
um, Hitler Youth organisation.
You had the Jungmadelbund,
which was the Young Girls' League.
Now, this catered for girls
from 10 to 14 years of age,
and the teachings or the
political ethos of the party, etc.,
would be taught to them, then
when they came to the age of 14
they would transfer into
the Bund Deutscher Madel,
which was the League
of German Maidens,
and from 14 to 18.
NARRATOR: The most influential
leader of the BDM, Jutta Rudiger,
took it over in 1937,
and stayed at the helm
until n*zi Germany was
crushed by the Allies in 1945.
It didn't matter to Rudiger that
in accordance with n*zi policy,
she would always be subordinate
to the male leader
of the Hitler Youth.
- (all chanting "Heil")
NARRATOR: As a
paediatric psychologist,
Rudiger had the inside-track on
shaping impressionable young minds.
She declared her intention
to create what she called
the "new German woman", who
would be the bearer of German culture
and moral standards
for the nation.
- Part of the n*zi machinery
was to put people
in positions of power
in ways that could
be very useful.
For example, Jutta Rudiger,
who was a paediatric psychologist,
would be extremely
useful in terms of, uh,
indoctrinating young
girls in the, uh, BDM.
- First of all, it was a problem
because she had a doctorate,
and they didn't like the idea
of women with doctorates.
But she pointed out that her
doctorate was in gymnastics.
So, they said OK.
She was really good.
She was a terrific
bureaucratic fighter.
NARRATOR: While
membership of the BDM
eventually became compulsory,
so powerful was the indoctrination
that girls were willingly
signing up in droves.
- Even before 33, a lot of those
young women joined secretly
because they loved joining
the Girls' n*zi Girls League.
And they went off marching,
and they went to the party rallies.
and the party rallies were
mixed, unlike the schools,
which were gender separated.
- (all chanting "Heil")
NARRATOR: At weekly
meetings, regular excursions,
and annual summer camps, girls
were indoctrinated with n*zi ideology.
They were taught how
so-called 'defective'
Jewish genes had
weakened German stock.
They were told that Jews
were dangerous and lecherous
and that they should expect
their men to protect them
from the Jewish menace.
Like every other aspect of
life for women in n*zi Germany,
this was all geared towards turning
out compliant wives and mothers
who would pass on their skills
and attitudes to their Aryan children.
- There was a great deal of
emphasis on home economics.
And so, they learned
sewing, and they-they also had
very, very good
education on maternal care
and how to make sure that
their health was protected,
and those were very
practical kinds of courses.
CENTURY: It's about mixing
with other people that were of
the same desirable level,
so other German Aryans.
Some of it was
a bit educational.
So, in the case of the
Bund Deutscher Madel,
learning how to be a
good German woman,
a good German wife and mother,
and some of it was more practical.
So, they would do
camping, things like that,
so that they had
more practical skills.
NARRATOR: Their destiny
was mapped out for them.
As Rudiger explained it,
German girls were responsible
for keeping the
nation's blood pure.
She was careful, however, to
obscure the political purpose of the BDM
because, like all good
cults, its real appeal
to its female membership
was that it offered them
a strong sense of
comradeship and belonging.
- Now, the sweeteners were
the camps they would go on
because this enabled
them a sense of equality.
They were going out into
the hills, the forest in Germany,
learning how to build fires,
set snares to trap animals,
and, of course, sleeping
in tents of a nighttime.
Just the things that the boys
did, the Hitler Youth boys did.
So, they were gaining
some sense of equality.
NARRATOR: But when
w*r broke out in 1939,
attitudes toward women
underwent a dramatic change.
When the air-raid
sirens began to sound,
it turned out that the ideal woman
in Germany was not a mother,
she was a warrior.
It was no longer about
rearing the Aryan race.
Instead, German women were
expected to sacrifice for the fatherland.
In keeping with the
change of policy,
Gertrud Scholtz Klink and the
NSF urged women to get out
of the kitchen and
get back to work.
It was, she said, a
"higher obligation".
Women were expected to
put their shoulders to the wheel
as industry geared
up for rearmament,
and men rushed to
join the armed forces.
- Millions of men had been called
up to fight, to be on the front line,
and women were needed
to replace them in vital roles.
The German Army couldn't function
without these women to support them.
And so, it was a contradiction from
the n*zi party's earlier campaigns
that women should stay at home
and be good German mothers
and good German wives.
So, the various organisations
that women could join
in the build-up to the w*r,
such as the NS Frauenschaft
or the Bund Deutscher
Madel, once the w*r broke out,
this was a really good opportunity
of an untapped resource.
NARRATOR: With a female
workforce of millions under her control
Jutta Rudiger
dispatched her BDM girls
wherever they were
needed on the home front.
They were put to work in
munitions factories and farms.
Well-to-do girls from
families with connections
were pressed into office work.
Getting women back
into the workforce
wasn't going to
be enough though.
Soon, Hitler would have to
turn to female conscription.
But he was concerned that
conscripting German women
had the potential to
damage troop morale.
He knew it didn't sit well
with the soldiers at the front.
They'd been sold the story
that they were fighting to protect
the women who were
keeping the home fires burning.
But with the failure of
operation Barbarossa
and Hitler's plan to create
Lebensraum in the east
by conquering the Soviet Union,
the drain on manpower
forced his hand
..and the campaign to enlist
women in the w*r effort accelerated.
HEATH: Germany, it was
in a in a dire situation,
and even women were-were
called to fight for the Fuhrer.
Like, Hitler did say
to one of the women,
well, why shouldn't a woman
have the right to-to-to fight
for the Fuhrer? Why
should it be a man?
If that woman can fight,
let her do so, let them come.
And this was the generally
accepted position at that time.
Then the young girls
of the Hitler Youth,
they were given a Panzerfaust or
a p*stol, anything that could cause
a casualty to the enemy was seen
as, yeah, this is what we have to do.
Especially as the Russians
were nearing Berlin.
- (g*nf*re)
NARRATOR: As the tides of
w*r turned against Germany,
all the promises the n*zi Party
made to women would be broken.
Ultimately, as the
German w*r effort faltered,
the n*zi women's
leagues and girls' groups
would be called
to the front lines.
But there was one more insult
Hitler had in store for them.
- (tense music)
NARRATOR: in the dying days of
the w*r, Hitler and the n*zi Party,
once staunch proponents of
the women's place in the home,
would call them
to the front lines.
But even in defeat, they hadn't
abandoned their dream of creating
an Aryan race to advance the
aims of the future German Reich.
- (cheering)
NARRATOR: The n*zi
hierarchy had done the maths
and concluded that Germany
would have four million fertile women
in surplus after the w*r to
fewer than a million men.
Hitler wanted all remaining
physically and mentally fit
German men to impregnate
as many women as possible
before the end of the w*r.
Himmler was all for the idea,
and soon bigamy was
even floated as an option.
LOWER: Himmler told his men,
when you go home on furlough,
you come home from
the Eastern Front,
make sure you procreate
as much as possible.
And the wives had to just
accept that their husbands
had mistresses and
multiple girlfriends.
- And again, that's a
little bit of a contradiction
because it was showing
that marriage wasn't important,
despite the fact that women earlier
had been given loans to get married.
and support to get married. and
were encouraged to get married.
But now these high-ranking
SS men were encouraged to take
a second wife so that she could
produce more German children.
- (crowd chanting "Heil")
NARRATOR: Luckily for Hitler,
the indoctrination of the n*zi Youth
had worked, and any
resentment of the older population
felt at the shifting goalposts was
not shared by their n*zi children.
Their daughters had been
taught that Hitler came first.
In the closing days of the w*r, this
would have deadly consequences
for hundreds of thousands
of young Germans.
in February 1945, it was proposed
that the BDM members should form
a woman's battalion in a
desperate bid to defend the Reich.
- (speaking in German)
NARRATOR: Several
young BDM girls volunteered
for the Volkssturm
or "people's storm",
the civilian militia
manned by old men,
young boys and girls as the n*zi
fatherland's last line of defence.
- They were taught how
to-to create expl*sive devices,
improvised expl*sive devices,
how to set them up,
where to position them.
They were trained on, first of all,
small, like, air r*fle type weapons,
but then as they became
more competent, they were using
full boar army
r*fles, and, in fact,
they were trained how
to use a hand grenade.
NARRATOR: One girl, aged just
15, recalled the moment Allied troops
were marching towards
her home in Aachen.
When she asked for help from
one of the many SS soldiers,
he warned her that
when the Russian soldiers
arrived in the city, first, they'd
r*pe her, then they'd sh**t her.
Despite all Hitler's big talk,
this was how
Germany fell in the end,
with teenage boys and
girls laying down their lives
for his psychotic ambition
and craven ideology.
During the last four
months of the w*r,
700 Germans died every hour.
Hitler's deluded refusal to
admit defeat at the bitter end
caused the death of an
additional 1.2 million Germans,
many of them the women
and girls he'd sworn to protect.
While the pride of Germany was
being slaughtered in the streets,
Hitler and his
acolytes were cowering
almost 30 feet below ground,
beneath a ten-foot-thick
concrete slab.
Hiding in his
bunker, Hitler had left
his womenfolk to do
the fighting for him.
As the Reich fell, as many
as two million German women
were r*ped by Allied
soldiers, most of them Russian.
- This is perhaps the
single most hardest part
because with Hitler's girls
um, sheer number of women who
had suffered serious sexual as*ault
from the Russians, mostly
being beaten up and r*ped.
NARRATOR: The ghastly
truth behind n*zi Germany's
attitude to women
found its expression
in the horrific final chapter
of Magda Goebbels' life.
It became apparent that the
depth of her much-celebrated
familial devotion
was paper-thin.
Having done nothing to
save her Jewish stepfather,
a man who raised her
and gave her his name,
she resorted at the last to an
act of even greater cruelty and evil.
As Allied troops
closed in on Berlin,
the Goebbels family was sheltering
with the Fuhrer in his bunker.
As it became clear
that the w*r was lost,
the first lady of the Reich
made a fateful decision.
She wrote to her
eldest son, Harald,
who was in a POW
camp in North Africa,
that a world without Hitler
wasn't a world worth living in.
KOONZ: Magda was the symbol
of motherhood with seven children.
Although I should say that in
the very last days of the Reich,
Magda and her husband
poisoned all of those children
and they died in the
bunker with Hitler.
One escaped because he
happened to be somewhere else.
NARRATOR: Women in
n*zi Germany were portrayed
as the heart of the family,
and the foundations upon which
the Thousand-Year
Reich was to be built.
In fact, at the same time
Hitler was championing mothers
and wives as the most
important people in Germany,
his policies were aimed at
eroding the very freedoms
and rights that
made them strong.
The female Fuhrers who worked
with him to realise his dream
of an Aryan nation helped bring
Germany's women to their knees.
But as the post-w*r
dust settled on a nation
that had been torn to pieces,
it would be the widows,
the mourning mothers
and the girl soldiers who would
put Germany back together again.
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01x01 - Female Fuhrers
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Hitler's Handmaidens examines the role of women in the Third Reich through a contemporary lens of women as active participants in all aspects of German society.
Hitler's Handmaidens examines the role of women in the Third Reich through a contemporary lens of women as active participants in all aspects of German society.