Friday, December 2, 2011

Propagandizing German Women in 1941

I have a lot of instructional material on the site, directives aimed not at the public, but at propagandists.  Today I am adding instructions for leaders of Nazi women’s groups from September 1941. This was three months after the invasion of the Soviet Union had begun.  The first item works to build morale for coming difficult days.  The second section deals with sexual relations with foreigners.  Relations with Jews, of course, were prohibited. However, there was a range of other groups, and an interesting gender difference.  It was OK for men to have relationships with racially-related foreigners such as the Dutch or Scandinavians. If they married, their wives would join the German racial community.  Women, however, were not to have such relationships, since even though their partners might be “racially desirable,” the women would likely move to their husbands’ countries and thus be lost to Germany, which “needed every German.”