1. How did the Nazis try to control women?

2. Learning objective – to be able to explain how the Nazis treated women in their regime.
I can describe some of the features of how the Nazis tried to control women.
Grade D
I can explain the impact of the Nazis policy towards women.
Grade B
I can explain and assess the impact of Nazis policy towards women.
Grade A

3. Starter – What does this source reveal about the Nazis attitude towards women?

4. What was the position of women in Weimar Germany?
The position of women changed during the 1920s in a number of ways.
The main changes were –
All women over the age of 20 could vote.
Women could stand for political representation – 20 women had seats in the Reichstag during the 1920s.
Women were more likely to go out and work. This included the professions – 100,000 female teachers in Germany by 1933.
Women gained more social freedoms, such as fashion choices and remaining single.

5. What was the Nazi view on the place of women in society?
The Nazis felt that women should serve society by taking on the responsibility of domestic duties, such as looking after the family and being good mothers.
In the Nazi vision, women should –
Stay healthy.
Learn housecraft.
Marry and enable their husbands to be useful workers.
Have children and bring them up to be good Germans.
Stay at home and concentrate on domestic matters and stay out of work and politics.

7. What were the key ideas behind the Nazis vision of women?
The formation of the German Women’s Enterprise which arranged classes and broadcasts teaching good motherhood.
Women were encouraged to leave work and concentrate on the 3 Ks – Kinder, Küche, Kirche.
Some professional women were forced to leave their jobs, such as doctors and teachers.

8. How did the Nazis manage their policy towards women?
Gertrud Scholz-Klink was appointed Head of the Nazis Women Bureau in 1934.
She was the model Aryan women that the Nazis promoted. She had blonde hair, blue eyes and in good physical condition.
However, her powers were very limited and she was expected to do as she was told by the Nazi Party. She was excluded from key decision making issues, such as the conscription of female labour in 1942.

9. How did the Nazis encourage women to focus upon marriage and child rearing?
The birth rate in Germany was falling in the 1930s and the Nazis saw this as a problem. They introduced a number of schemes to try and reverse this.
The Law for the Encouragement to Marry passed in 1933 gave loans of 1000 marks to young couples who got married and the wife would leave work. The loan could be kept if the couple produced four children.
The Mother’s Cross was an award to mothers who had a number of children with a bronze cross for four, silver cross for six and a gold cross for eight or more children. All were awarded on Hitler’s mother’s birthday – 12th April.
In 1935, the Lebensborn [fountain of life] programme was initiated. This encouraged childbirth for families of SS men providing first nurseries and financial aid. Later it offered SS men ‘pure Aryan’ women to start a family with.

10. What role did propaganda play in encouraging support for the Nazis view on women?
The Nazis had very fixed ideas about what women should look like. Using make up, smoking in public, wearing trousers and slimming were frowned upon.
However, the Nazis knew it was impossible to impose such views on the public. Although, those Germans loyal to the Nazis did publicly chastise women who were deemed acting outside the Nazi vision.
Instead the Nazis produced a huge propaganda campaign to persuade women to act in the way they wanted. It had a very limited impact.

11. How far was the Nazi policy towards women successful?
Between 1933 and 1936, there was a 30% increase in the birth rate. Although there was an increase in births outside marriage – frowned upon at the time.
The booming economy by the late 1930s saw a shortage of workers and women stepped into the gap. The rate of married women who were working increased from 4.2 million in 1933 to 6.2 million by 1939.
Employers encouraged this as women worked for lower wages compared with men and wages were rising faster than prices, allowing for families to buy more goods. This helped the ‘feel good’ factor in the Nazi regime for many women.

12. Task
This word cloud summarises the content of the Nazi vision of women.
In pairs, find the 10 terms in the word cloud and using the PowerPoint and the sheet given to you, list the 10 terms and, for each term, write their relevance to the Nazi vision of women in two sentences.

13. Terms Kinder Küche Kirche Marriage Birth Rate Mother’s Cross
German Women’s Enterprise
Scholz-Klink
Lebensborn
Domestic Work

14. Tasks
Complete a mind map outlining the Nazi Party’s policy towards women. Your mind map should include the following features –
Central title ‘ The Nazis and women’.
Four arms with the headings – Weimar and Women, Birth and Marriage, Women and Work and Success and Failure.
No more than 20 words.
Colour coded.
Extension Task
Design a propaganda poster that summarises the position of women in the Nazi State.

15. Plenary – a touch of Scrabble
What are the three key words from this lesson that sums up your learning?
Which word has the highest value if you used in a game of Scrabble?
Compare with the person next to you. Which word has the highest value?