Professor Buzzkill History Podcast · Joe Coohill

Women in Nazi Germany, Part 2

·41 min·3 clips

Gerda Bormann proposes a child-producing menage a trois after hearing about Martin Bormann's affair.

1. Professor Buzzkill History Podcast's 'Women in Nazi Germany, Part 2' tracks elite women, wartime labor, female perpetrators, and resistance under Adolf Hitler. 2. The host is joined again by Professor Philip Nash, the show's Nazi and World War II expert, whose scholarship anchors the episode. 3. The episode asks what Nazi women did when they were close to power, when the war pulled them into labor, and when the occupation system moved east. 4. Nash says elite Nazi women were not monolithic, because some were devoted Nazis while others were apolitical wives and girlfriends. 5. Henrietta Schirach, the wife of Baldur von Schirach, raised the Holocaust directly with Hitler after seeing Jews rounded up in Amsterdam. 6. Hitler reacted badly, the Schirachs were excluded from the Berghof, and the story shows how fragile access to him could be. 7. Magda Goebbels is described as the Reich's de facto first lady, while Emmy Goering is framed as the empress around Hermann Goering's theatrical public image. 8. The discussion also treats the Goebbels children as Hitler's surrogate family, because he spent time with them and Magda depended on his favor. 9. Eva Braun is presented as a woman with intimacy but little leverage, since Hitler kept her secret, ignored her for weeks, and used her as a distraction. 10. Albert Speer's account of Hitler calling women primitive and stupid is used to contrast Braun's role with the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Clementine Churchill. 11. Nash corrects the common myth that German women rarely worked, saying their workforce participation stayed high even if industry used them less than farms did. 12. German agriculture remained labor-intensive, so women filled farm jobs, anti-aircraft crews, nursing posts, and clerical positions as the war deepened. 13. The regime had to reverse years of home-centered propaganda before it could recruit women, and many middle-class families tried to keep female servants from leaving. 14. Nash contrasts this with the Soviet Union, where women served in far larger combat roles, while Germany counted nurses, clerks, and Flakhelferinnen among only about 5 percent of the armed forces. 15. The episode notes the male hypocrisy of dismissing these women as Blitzmeidl after demanding their labor and service. 16. Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies is used to argue that roughly half a million German women went east as nurses, auxiliaries, secretaries, teachers, spouses, and other followers of the occupation system. 17. The most unsettling examples come from women like Irma Grese and Ilse Koch, and from Erna Petry, who shot Jews during roundups and later killed six Jewish boys. 18. Nash's delivery stays conversational and example-driven, with the host reacting to each anecdote and asking for clarifications. 19. Listeners interested in Nazi Germany, women's history, and occupation policy will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting a light World War II overview may skip it.

As heard by us

A clear account of how Nazi ideas about women collided with labor needs, class privilege, and wartime violence.

Women in Nazi Germany, Part 2 tracks the regime's contradictions through elite households, farms, domestic service, and the military. Professor Philip Nash shows how Nazi leaders depended on women to fill labor gaps even after years of propaganda insisting that the home was…

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Want to hear Nazi gender ideology collide with wartime labor needs once German women were needed outside the home?

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