Summary Of The Third Reich

Where Koonz attempts to cover different aspects of women's lives, the next text read for this study focuses on individual lives/stories of everyday women of the Third Reich: Alison Owings' 1993 text Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Much of the text was original research done Owings' herself, but for preliminary and background information Owings utilized the Koonz text and work (not read for this study) by Jill Stephenson. By presenting the individual stories of over twenty women who were alive under the Third Reich that she was able to obtain through four years of personally interviewing the women herself over a four-year time span, Owings set out to fill the gap of testimony of 'average' German women of the Third Reich. Because
Owings' text consists of individual stories it is hard to draw conclusions about women in the Third Reich as whole, but many of the women, although they shared different stories and had different experiences: some were Nazi supporters, married to Jewish men, defied their Nazi husbands, etc., also had many similarities between them. It is through these commonalities that the scholarship of women during the Third Reich can be advanced.
Two of the main topics among these women were their educations and the League of German Girls (BdM); often the two topics were intertwined.
According to the text, children had to be in the BdM or they were not promoted to the next grade, no matter how good their grades were. The Nazi Party, known for its indoctrination of children, utilized schools in other ways as well: trick questions were placed into home economics tests to test loyalty of the female students. The BdM also punished those who did not wish to conform to their wants and needs, "outlawing (excommunicating)" anyone who refused to take on a leadership role. These women's experiences demonstrate how the party infused itself into their everyday lives whether they wanted it to or
not.
While Owings' text does not place the focus on topics, but rather specific women, what is does do is put a face to all of the topics discussed by previous authors of this study: labor, religion, Judaism, resistance, etc. For example, more than one woman expressed their "annoyance" with the insistence of the usage of "Heil Hitler" and in their own form of resistance did not use the term or mocked it. Another woman described how she would "fake sick" to halt work production, therefore hindering the war effort. Another woman talked about her personal conflict with her Catholic religious morals and having the BDM forced on her. As previously mentioned, one woman's experience cannot account for the experience of all women, but these individual stories allow for more in depth understanding of the different aspects of life for the women during the Third Reich.
Owings' chooses to use her conclusion to address one topic in relation to all of interviewed subjects: Anti-Semitism.
For all of the women interviewed, Anti-Semitism had been present in Germany before the reign of the Third Reich (as discussed by Koonz). Many of the women discussed how Jewish people seemed take up most of the glamorous careers and that some Jewish business owners swindled their customers- many of these women wanted the Jews "curtailed" not killed. Owings also utilizes the powers of omission to surmise the overall group thought of the women interviewed- none of the women talked about how the Jews were already "out of site" prior to the usage of concentration camps: they were out of "'German' schools...homes, offices, and hospitals." Owings ends her text with a warning/reminder that we are all human and all interconnected and cannot happily live in
ignorance.
Aspects of the lives of women during the Third Reich are better understood through Owings text and she addresses women through various stages of their life- not just women of laboring/marriageable age. Where Owings discusses the everyday woman, the next author explores the women at the top of the Nazi Party.