- 23/04/2025
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.
This episode will examine the women that surrounded Hitler once he came to power, and how they were propped up as the Aryan Ideal to strive for once Hitler approved of their positions.
This episode will examine the women that surrounded Hitler once he came to power, and how they were propped up as the Aryan Ideal to strive for once Hitler approved of their positions.
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00:00Nazi Germany, two words synonymous with barbarity, terror, hate, and death.
00:11A shock defeat in World War I sows the seeds for discontent in a once prosperous nation.
00:19Adolf Hitler, an unassuming, uninspiring man, seizes the opportunity to take control,
00:26promising to make Germany great again.
00:30But he won't do it alone.
00:32Willing accomplices rally from the most unlikely of places.
00:36The female Führers, Nazi she-devils, cougars, fantasists, and secret lovers.
00:49These are the forgotten Nazis.
00:53These are Hitler's handmaidens.
01:00In the dying days of World War II, Private Willie Anderson was dodging bullets fired from a sniper's nest
01:09in the once picturesque German town of Aachen, 500 kilometers southwest of Berlin.
01:16When his comrades took the shooter out with a bazooka round, what they discovered would haunt Willie for the rest of his life.
01:27Because the body they found wasn't the die-hard Nazi soldier they'd expected.
01:32It was a young girl.
01:34As the G.I.s picked through the ruined city, they likened it to a butcher's shop.
01:42What kind of madness had inspired Germans to send their daughters into a slaughterhouse?
01:52Nazi Germany is a horrific enigma.
01:54Who do we blame for what's been described as the politics of organized insanity?
02:09Adolf Hitler is an easy target.
02:11But he didn't do it alone.
02:13Without willing accomplices, he might just have been another demented dictator spewing hatred from his soapbox.
02:20To lay his empire's foundations, Hitler had to rally more than just Germany's men to his cause.
02:32Women had been called the architects of national socialist society.
02:37And Hitler knew he needed them, if he was going to build a thousand-year Reich.
02:42As Hitler and his henchmen led the nation to war,
02:49his handmaidens would indoctrinate a new generation of good little Nazis.
02:56These were the female Führers.
02:58Lenny Riefenstahl, Magda Goebbels, Gertrude Schultz-Klink and Jutta Ruttiger.
03:07Together, they would spawn the mother of all evil.
03:10Lenny Riefenstahl, Magda Goebbels, Gertrude Schultz-Klink and Jutta Ruttiger.
03:20After Germany's humiliating defeat in the First World War,
03:24crippling economic sanctions sent the nation to the brink.
03:28In 1921, there were 64 marks to the dollar.
03:32Just two years later, it was four trillion.
03:35Families starved as skyrocketing inflation saw people paying for a single loaf of bread
03:42with a wheelbarrow stuffed with banknotes.
03:44Through the Weimar era, it was the women, the women at home, that saw all the violence
03:52on the streets, that witnessed all the political and social chaos.
03:57So the women probably understood more so than ever how what a bad thing the Weimar Republic
04:03actually turned out to be.
04:05I think after World War I, Germany was in a very difficult place, and people were looking
04:10for a more positive future.
04:13Onto this rickety stage stepped Arnold Hitler and the National Socialist Party.
04:19Their brand of rabid nationalism would transform German society and write one of the darkest chapters
04:33of human history.
04:40At the center of the Nazi vision for the future was the ideal Aryan woman.
04:46Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and physically robust, she was a wife and mother above all else.
04:52It's more than a little bizarre that Hitler, a sickly, paunchy, dark-haired man, championed
05:01a physique so far removed from his own.
05:04It's less of a surprise that Hitler's ideal society revolved around a mother figure.
05:10Hitler's relationship to women appears to have been extremely complicated.
05:15So we know from the records that he had this Oedipus complex where he just so adored his
05:22mother and so hated his father, that this also really contributed to messing him up in
05:27extraordinary ways.
05:29Certainly no one here ever dreamed that the skinny son of the Hitlers would someday be the
05:35supreme dictator of one of the greatest nations of the world.
05:38Surely his father and mother, simple folk of this village, would have been the last to
05:43vision such an incredible future for their boy.
05:46I think it's really significant in terms of his wish to venerate women and respect them,
05:52but there's also a very opportunistic aspect, which is that he wanted the reproduction of
05:57Aryan children.
05:58After the First World War, women had been given the vote and encouraged to work and pursue
06:04higher education.
06:06But to Hitler and his henchmen, that progress was a hangover from the despised Weimar Republic.
06:15Worst of all, many of the intellectuals lobbying for women's rights were, you guessed it, Jewish.
06:22The Nazis wanted to turn back the clock.
06:25Hitler was going to emancipate women from women's emancipation.
06:30According to his warped way of looking at the world, women had little to fear from so-called
06:35oppressive men.
06:38Instead, their mortal enemies were Jews, Bolsheviks and feminists.
06:44I think the Nazi propaganda machine was incredibly effective.
06:48And using the Jew as the scapegoat, as the poison container for all the ills in the world, so convenient.
06:56It actually allowed Nazi men to divert Nazi women's potential anger, that they were being robbed of
07:04various rights and opportunities in the workplace, and direct that anger and sense of grievance
07:11towards Jewish women.
07:12In 1933, when the Nazis proposed abolishing women's right to vote, there was little pushback.
07:19Most young German women thought feminism was old news.
07:27They had more pressing concerns.
07:30After the Great War, Germany's male population had been served up a big slice of humble pie.
07:36And their women, their frowls, were in desperate need of a new generation of heroes.
07:43They liked what Hitler had to say about a return to traditional values.
07:48Women were to be pushed out of the workforce and back into the home and the domestic nirvana
07:55of Kinder, Küche, Kirche.
07:58Kinder, Küche, Kirche has always been women's job in Germany.
08:05That means church, kitchen, children.
08:08And this is what women were responsible for.
08:11It was almost like guidelines for German women to have as many German children as possible,
08:16to create a comfortable home environment so that the men who had been out perpetrating
08:21the Holocaust, committing crimes, murdering people could come home into a nice, comfortable
08:26environment.
08:27And the church to give them a faith, if you like, a collective.
08:36Within months of taking the reins of power, Hitler swung the axe on hard-won freedoms for
08:42women.
08:49University admission rules were changed so that only one in ten students could be a woman.
08:56All female public servants were given their marching orders.
09:01And female lawyers, judges and doctors were banned.
09:07But Hitler didn't stop there.
09:09The non-smoking and teetotalling Fuhrer added drinking and smoking to the growing list of
09:16no-go zones for women.
09:18The women, they were not allowed to use makeup.
09:22Perms of the hair were outlawed.
09:25Dyeing of the hair was outlawed.
09:28They weren't allowed to wear clothing that would accentuate the body shape.
09:31Flat shoes, no stilettos.
09:34They were just indoctrinated in banality.
09:38It's tempting to dismiss these edicts as yet another example of Nazi control freakery.
09:47But beneath this madness, there was a pernicious method and, as always, a hidden agenda.
09:54Jewish women had been at the forefront of the independent women's movement.
09:59They were also prominent in German medicine, law and education.
10:05Convincing women to leave the workplace and return to the home, however, would require quite a bit of spin.
10:11Luckily, Hitler had just the man for the job.
10:14To create a thousand-year Reich, Hitler and his Nazi regime needed women to stop working and start making babies.
10:33It was going to be a tough sell after the progress made during the Weimar years.
10:40But Hitler had the perfect spin doctor, Joseph Goebbels.
10:45It wasn't that Nazis thought women were inferior to men, he said.
10:57They were simply born with a different skill set that meant that they could fulfill a crucially important role as mothers of the Reich.
11:04They were caught up in this wonderful, wonderful idea.
11:09We are creating this new Germany.
11:11Just like the men are digging roads and putting down motorways, just as the men are joining the army,
11:17we are helping new Germany by providing a good home for them to come back to, by providing children for them.
11:23This is our duty.
11:25And it was universally accepted.
11:28Joseph Goebbels led by example by lining up his own perfect Frau, Magda Goebbels, First Lady of the Reich.
11:37Tall, blonde and blue-eyed, with seven picture book children, Magda was a favorite of the Fuhrer and a Nazi poster girl.
11:47Magda Goebbels was the mother, I suppose, of the whole country since Hitler didn't have a wife.
11:54And she was charming, she was beautiful.
11:58And all of her children were named H after Hitler, of course.
12:05From day one, it was all about keeping up appearances.
12:09Any dictatorship worth its salt needed its myth-maker in chief.
12:15Ironically, for a regime that claimed to want women chained to the kitchen sink,
12:20Lenny Riefenstahl did more than almost anyone else to package Nazi ideology and sell it to the masses.
12:27And she did it by conquering a male-dominated field.
12:31Riefenstahl's own career began in front of the camera.
12:35But it wasn't until 1932 that she caught the eye of a politician who had thwarted artistic ambitions of his own.
12:43Hitler recognized in Riefenstahl the skills needed to capture the Nazi dream on film and beam it into cinemas across Germany.
12:52Hitler recruited Riefenstahl to make a short film that would paint a picture of Germany's glorious rebirth on a grand scale.
13:02In 1933, she directed The Victory of Faith at the annual Nazi party rally at Nuremberg.
13:11It was a test run for Triumph of the Will, the film she'd make at the same rally the following year.
13:17It would be acknowledged as the most powerful propaganda film ever produced.
13:32And in 1936, her film Olympia captured the Berlin Games and projected images of an ascendant and powerful Germany around the world.
13:42Riefenstahl glorified the Germany of days gone by, with rosy-cheeked maidens in folk costume celebrating the harvest while their men did manly things.
13:57Her film seemed to usher in a return to the golden age, and they were a crucial ingredient in Hitler's plans to brainwash the nation.
14:07If you look at some of the Liene Riefenstahl films, and they always center, of course, on the young, the attractive, the physically attractive women.
14:15But 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.
14:22That person happens to be Adolf Hitler.
14:24He was like the pop star of his era, like a George Michael of his era almost.
14:31I mean, girls would go hysterical to get near him, to just touch him, to shake his hand.
14:36It beggars believe today, but Hitler believed an important part of his appeal, was that women found him sexually attractive.
14:45That meant he had to maintain the illusion of availability.
14:49So he remained childless, and kept his relationships with women on the down low.
14:55I think Hitler hid his relationships partly to embody a kind of pure masculine ideal.
15:03Someone who wasn't encumbered by domesticity, by a wife or a girlfriend.
15:09And he became this almost personification of masculinity.
15:14Also, a bit like a celebrity or pop star, it allowed other women in the general population to fantasize that they would be Hitler's girlfriend or wife.
15:26But when it came to involvement in the machinery of government and national leadership,
15:31even 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.
15:41At first, they, the Nazis, had no idea who was going to be in charge of women.
15:47They had men lined up for all the important jobs.
15:51At the head of the party, at the head of the state, foreign office, the cabinet members, and they had no women.
15:57There was a heck of a lot of devotion to Hitler in the 1920s.
16:02And 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.
16:10But how did the Nazis repay these women?
16:13They repaid them by limiting, severely limiting their involvement.
16:19Still, Hitler knew that he needed a figurehead to marshal the women of the Reich, even if she was a leader in name only.
16:27And they had a problem.
16:29If the woman had a husband, then her first duty was to a husband.
16:35And that didn't work because she wouldn't have time to take over control.
16:40What were they going to do?
16:42And so they looked and looked, and they found a leader in a little obscure place in southwestern Germany, Gertrude Schultz Klink.
16:51And she was a widow.
16:54Not only that, her husband had died on the battlefields in World War I, and I think she had seven children.
17:01Perfect.
17:02She also was blonde, blue-eyed, and very compliant.
17:08And she was the woman leader for the entire time.
17:12And all of those independent leaders from the old days just faded away.
17:21When Hitler appointed Schultz Klink as the Women's Fuhrer and put her in charge of running the Nazi Women's League, or NSF, she had virtually no leadership experience.
17:31And that suited the men at the top of the party just fine.
17:37Klink was excluded from important policy meetings.
17:40And although she was often seen by Hitler's side, she was never consulted on any decisions affecting women.
17:48That didn't trouble Klink, though, because at least in name, she was playing a key role at the forefront of Germany's resurgence.
17:56There was pageantry around everything.
17:59Everything was stage-managed.
18:02Every parade had floats.
18:04Uniforms were everywhere.
18:06Music was everywhere.
18:08And just remember, by 1936, Germany was the only country in the world that recovered from the Great Depression.
18:15There was full employment.
18:17There was rearmament.
18:18Germany was back on the road to prosperity.
18:21And the women, according to Schultz Klink, were very proud that motherhood was valued again.
18:30By 1939, the Nazi Women's League had two million members.
18:39During the war, a further 11 million joined its ranks.
18:44It all played into Hitler's grand plan to build a master German race.
18:50Change wouldn't happen if Nazi thinking was confined to the halls of power.
18:55It had to worm its way into German homes as well.
18:59The way that the German Women's Nazi League sort of operated, I mean, the German youth, for one thing, people like Gertrude Schultz Klink, she would come and visit the schools and they would discuss politics.
19:13And they'd be asked questions from Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, for example.
19:18If they couldn't answer a question, then it was pretty much frowned upon.
19:22So, yeah, they did a lot in indoctrinating the youth of Germany.
19:29The Nazi Party really encouraged the ideal woman to marry and to have children.
19:35And to enable that, there were marriage loans to help you pay towards the cost of your wedding and setting up at home.
19:41And then if you started having children, they would, you wouldn't have to pay back a certain amount of your loan.
19:47I think four children would wipe the loan off in its entirety.
19:51The incentive kicked off a rush to the altar and mass weddings became the in thing.
19:57More than 100 female employees from the Reemster Cigarette Company were married to their new husbands in a single ceremony.
20:06Always with uniforms, always with honour guards and with dignitaries from the local Nazi party there to help them on their way.
20:17They were encouraged to say, this is my role, I will get married.
20:22Giving birth to children, that was the key, that was the element that they wanted to push.
20:27So, marriage was a means to an end.
20:32And those women who had hoped to marry a member of Heinrich Himmler's SS were held to a higher standard.
20:41Himmler believed his men were the racial elite of Nazi Germany.
20:45So, he was keen for his men to spread their seed.
20:49But the women who wanted to bear their children had to prove their pedigree.
20:54Himmler was the most thoroughgoing racist, that is, of all of them.
20:59And for his SS men, he demanded absolutely Aryan wives.
21:08So, every SS man that wanted to get married had to have his marriage personally approved by Heinrich Himmler.
21:14And it involved reams of paperwork.
21:17You had to send in on both sides your birth certificates, your parents' birth certificates, your grandparents' birth certificates.
21:23You had to send in documents to show you had a clean bill of health.
21:26After that, they were expected to sign up for training at one of the elite Reich bridal schools that Himmler and Gertrude Schultz Klink had founded together.
21:39Himmler was very much in favour of elite schooling for SS wives or mistresses.
21:46And they had to go to special schools called Lebensborn.
21:49And these schools were in the Alps.
21:52They were beautiful chalets.
21:55They were super luxe.
21:57And being Nazi Germany, no educational program would be complete without lessons in racial theory and eugenics.
22:06Fairy tales were tweaked so they communicated the right messages to impressionable baby Nazis.
22:13Before graduating with a certificate they needed to walk down the aisle with their SS groom, the wannabe Nazi brides had to pledge their undying loyalty to Hitler.
22:26They even had to memorise a bedtime prayer to teach their children.
22:31My Führer, I know you well and I love you like my father and mother.
22:37They were taught they had no agency over their own bodies, that they belonged to the Reich.
22:43And it was their responsibility to keep fit so they were ready to perform their ultimate duty, to bear children.
22:52This was seen, the fact of a young woman's body becoming property of the state and the Führer.
22:59This was seen actually as a great honour to many of them.
23:04It wasn't seen as something dirty, this was a real honour to be considered as such.
23:10But certainly the younger ones, they were extremely patriotic, extremely excited about this 1,000 year Reich
23:16and out of Germany is going to be wonderful again.
23:22Get them young, keep them old. That was Hitler's dictum.
23:25You know, you get them at a young age and they'll stay with you right to the end.
23:29They were very clear, we got them very, very young.
23:32And we make it, we don't make it voluntary, we make it compulsory.
23:36So every girl in Germany has to belong to this, just like every boy has to belong to the Hitler Youth.
23:42And it created soldiers for the Reich, for the Wehrmacht, and it created wives for the men who would then propagate children.
23:51And that's more soldiers for the Wehrmacht.
23:55Adolf Hitler saw Germany's mothers as his secret weapon.
24:00They were his advanced troops readying the ground for a Nazi campaign of shock and awe that would engulf the world.
24:12In Nazi Germany there were two roles for women, care for the household and making Aryan babies.
24:27To incentivize both, the Nazi propaganda machine went to work celebrating mothers as the crowning glory of the Third Reich.
24:35The ultimate reward for Nazi mums was the mothers on a 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 Nazi events.
24:51The German Mutterkreuzer, or the German Mother's Cross, was a German award created specifically for the German mother.
25:01And it was graded in bronze, silver and gold.
25:07Bronze 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.
25:15Predictably, the first woman to be awarded the gold mothers on a cross was Magda Goebbels, the First Lady of the Reich, and mother to a swarm of Nazi children.
25:27Nazi women were being asked to breed like rabbits because Germany, like its European neighbours, was in the midst of a population crisis.
25:40One in 20 Germans had died in the First World War, many of them young men in their prime.
25:46More concerning was the fact that during the conflict, birth rates halved.
25:55As Heinrich Himmler put it, too few children meant a one-way ticket to the grave.
26:03Without a wave of baby Nazis, the Thousand Year Reich would remain little more than a pipe dream.
26:09Contraception was outlawed, abortion was outlawed.
26:17Hitler and Goering and Goebbels, they realised they needed numbers, pure numbers, if they're going to push for Lebensraum.
26:26The Spring of Life, or Lebensborn Programme, was the Nazi way of incentivising childbirth under any circumstance.
26:34It offered Aryan women financial assistance and adoption services in a series of private maternity homes.
26:46These even included single young women who had fallen for the charms of SS stormtroopers.
26:53So, Himmler set up homes for these single women who were impregnated by SS men.
26:59The Lebensborn Programme is part of that.
27:03It's about trying to support the German women who are having these babies,
27:09and provide them these subsidies, and provide all this kind of healthcare to promote that.
27:16In most European countries, unwed mothers were vilified, but not in Nazi Germany.
27:22Here, the contents of their wombs were precious.
27:25Mothers in the program were supported if they decided to keep their babies.
27:30If not, they could foster them to an SS family.
27:34Whether it was in their women's leagues, or the green countryside of the Lebensborn Programme,
27:47Nazism was a cradle-to-grave proposition for the future wives and mothers of the master race.
27:56After receiving their first lessons in Nazi indoctrination at their mothers' knees,
28:02young German girls moved into the classroom.
28:04Nazi officials had purged all Jewish or politically dubious teachers from the school system.
28:12And, of course, all anti-Nazi material and books by Jewish authors were consigned to the flames.
28:19And the training didn't stop when the school bell rang at the end of the day.
28:28Bund Deutscher Mädel, which was the League of German Girls, that was basically a Hitler Youth Organisation for girls.
28:40Now, it was basically a two-tiered Hitler Youth Organisation.
28:44You had the Young Madel Bund, which was the Young Girls League.
28:49Now, this catered for girls from 10 to 14 years of age.
28:53And the teachings, all the political ethos of the party, et cetera, would be taught to them.
28:59And then when they came to the age of 14, they would transfer into the Bund Deutscher Madel,
29:04which was the League of German Maidens, from 14 to 18.
29:09The most influential leader of the BDM, Jutta Rüdiger, took it over in 1937
29:17and stayed at the helm until Nazi Germany was crushed by the Allies in 1945.
29:25It didn't matter to Rüdiger that in accordance with Nazi policy,
29:30she would always be subordinate to the male leader of the Hitler Youth.
29:33As a pediatric psychologist, Rüdiger had the inside track on shaping impressionable young minds.
29:43She declared her intention to create what she called the New German Woman,
29:49who would be the bearer of German culture and moral standards for the nation.
29:53Part of the Nazi machinery was to put people in positions of power in ways that could be very useful.
30:06For example, Jutta Rüdiger, who was a pediatric psychologist, would be extremely useful in terms of indoctrinating young girls in the BDM.
30:18First of all, it was a problem because she had a doctorate.
30:23And they didn't like the idea of women with doctorates, but she pointed out that her doctorate was in gymnastics.
30:29So they said, OK, she was really good. She was a terrific bureaucratic fighter.
30:34While membership of the BDM eventually became compulsory, so powerful was the indoctrination that girls were willingly signing up in droves.
30:44Even before 33, a lot of those young women joined secretly because they loved joining the girls, Nazi Girls League.
30:53And they went off marching and they went to the party rallies and the party rallies were mixed, unlike the schools, which were gender separated.
31:06At weekly meetings, regular excursions and annual summer camps, girls were indoctrinated with Nazi ideology.
31:13They were taught how so-called defective Jewish genes had weakened German stock.
31:21They were told that Jews were dangerous and lecherous and that they should expect their men to protect them from the Jewish menace.
31:28Like every other aspect of life for women in Nazi Germany, this was all geared towards turning out compliant wives and mothers who would pass on their skills and attitudes to their Aryan children.
31:42There was a great deal of emphasis on home economics.
31:45And so they learned sewing and they also had very, very good education on maternal care and how to make sure that their health was protected.
31:58And those were very practical kinds of courses.
32:01It's about mixing with other people that were of the same desirable level, so other German Aryans.
32:06Some of it was a bit educational, so in the case of the Bundeutscher Mädel, learning how to be a good German woman, a good German wife and mother.
32:14And some of it was more practical, so they would do camping things like that, so that they had more practical skills.
32:21Their destiny was mapped out for them.
32:24As Rudiger explained it, German girls were responsible for keeping the nation's blood pure.
32:29She 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.
32:44Now the sweeteners were the camps they would go on, because this enabled them a sense of equality.
32:52They were going out into the hills, the forests in Germany, learning how to build fires, set snares to trap animals, and of course sleeping in tents of a night time.
33:02Just the things that the boys did, the youth boys did, so they were gaining some sense of equality.
33:07But when war broke out in 1939, attitudes towards women underwent a dramatic change.
33:25When the air raid sirens began to sound, it turned out that the ideal woman in Germany was not a mother.
33:31She was a warrior.
33:34It was no longer about rearing the Aryan race.
33:38Instead, German women were expected to sacrifice for the fatherland.
33:43In keeping with the change of policy, Gertrude Schultz Klink and the NSF urged women to get out of the kitchen and get back to work.
33:52It was, she said, a higher obligation.
33:56Women were expected to put their shoulders to the wheel as industry geared up for rearmament.
34:02And men rushed to join the armed forces.
34:09Millions of men had been called up to fight, to be on the front line, and women were needed to replace them in vital roles.
34:15The German army couldn't function without these women to support them.
34:19And so it was a contradiction from the Nazi party's earlier campaigns that women should stay at home and be good German mothers and good German wives.
34:28So the various organizations that women could join in the build-up to the war, such as the NSFrauenschaft or the Bund, once the war broke out, this was a really good opportunity of an untapped resource.
34:43With a female workforce of millions under her control, Jutta Rudiger dispatched her BDM girls wherever they were needed on the home front.
34:57They were put to work in munitions factories and farms.
35:01Well-to-do girls from families with connections were pressed into office work.
35:08Getting women back into the workforce wasn't going to be enough, though.
35:11Soon Hitler would have to turn to female conscription.
35:15But he was concerned that conscripting German women had the potential to damage troop morale.
35:22He knew it didn't sit well with the soldiers at the front.
35:26They've been sold the story that they were fighting to protect the women who were keeping the home fires burning.
35:31But with the failure of Operation Barbarossa and Hitler's plan to create Lieben's realm in the East by conquering the Soviet Union, the drain on manpower forced his hand.
35:45And the campaign to enlist women in the war effort accelerated.
35:51Germany was in a dire situation and even women were called to fight for the Führer.
36:01Hitler did say to one of the women, well, why shouldn't a woman have the right to fight for the Führer? Why should it be a man?
36:09If that woman can fight, let her do so. Let them come.
36:13This was the generally accepted position at that time.
36:17And the young girls of the Hitler Youth, they were given a Panzerfaust or a pistol.
36:21Anything that could cause a casualty to the enemy was seen as, yeah, this is what we have to do.
36:26Especially as the Russians were nearing Berlin.
36:29As the tides of war turned against Germany, all the promises the Nazi party made to women would be broken.
36:38Ultimately, as the German war effort faltered, the Nazi women's leagues and girls groups would be called to the front lines.
36:47But there was one more insult Hitler had in store for them.
36:59In the dying days of the war, Hitler and the Nazi party, one staunch proponents of the women's place in the home, would call them to the front lines.
37:20But even in defeat, they hadn't abandoned their dream of creating an Aryan race to advance the aims of the future German Reich.
37:29The Nazi hierarchy had done the maths and concluded that Germany would have four million fertile women in surplus after the war, to fewer than a million men.
37:45Hitler wanted all remaining physically and mentally fit German men to impregnate as many women as possible before the end of the war.
37:55Himmler was all for the idea, and soon bigamy was even floated as an option.
38:02Himmler told his men, when you go home on furlough, you come home from the Eastern Front, make sure you procreate as much as possible.
38:11And the wives had to just accept that their husbands had mistresses and multiple girlfriends.
38:18And 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.
38:29But now, these high-ranking SS men were encouraged to take a second wife so that she could produce more German children.
38:36Luckily for Hitler, the indoctrination of the Nazi youth had worked, and any resentment of the older population felt at the shifting goalposts was not shared by their Nazi children.
38:52Their daughters had been taught that Hitler came first.
38:57In the closing days of the war, this would have deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of young Germans.
39:04In February 1945, it was proposed that the BDM members should form a women's battalion in a desperate bid to defend the Reich.
39:13Several young BDM girls volunteered for the Volkssturm, or People's Storm, the civilian militia manned by old men, young boys and girls, as the Nazi fatherland's last line of defence.
39:32They were taught how to create explosive devices, improvised explosive devices, how to set them up, where to position them.
39:44They were trained on, first of all, small like air rifle type weapons, but then as they became more competent, they were using full-ball army rifles.
39:54And in fact, they would train how to use hand grenades.
39:57One girl, aged just 15, recalled the moment Allied troops were marching towards her home in Aachen.
40:07When she asked for help from one of the many SS soldiers, he warned her that when the Russian soldiers arrived in the city,
40:14first they'd rape her, then they'd shoot her.
40:18Despite all Hitler's big talk, this was how Germany fell in the end,
40:24with teenage boys and girls laying down their lives for his psychotic ambition and craven ideology.
40:34During the last four months of the war, 700 Germans died every hour.
40:40Hedlert's deluded refusal to admit defeat at the bitter end caused the death of an additional 1.2 million Germans,
40:47many of them, the women and girls, he'd sworn to protect.
40:52While the pride of Germany was being slaughtered in the streets,
40:56Hitler and his acolytes were cowering almost 30 feet below ground, beneath a 10-foot thick concrete slab.
41:03Hiding in his bunker, Hitler had left his womenfolk to do the fighting for him.
41:12As the Reich fell, as many as 2 million German women were raped by Allied soldiers, most of them Russian.
41:19This is perhaps the single most hardest part because with Hitler's girls,
41:27sheer number of women who'd suffered serious sexual assault from the Russians,
41:34mostly being beaten up and raped.
41:36The ghastly truth behind Nazi Germany's attitude to women found its expression in the horrific final chapter of Magda Goebel's life.
41:48It became apparent that the depth of her much-celebrated familial devotion was paper-thin.
41:54Having done nothing to save her Jewish stepfather, a man who raised her and gave her his name,
42:03she resorted at the end to an act of even greater cruelty and evil.
42:09As Allied troops closed in on Berlin, the Goebel's family was sheltering with the Führer in his bunker.
42:16As it became clear that the war was lost, the First Lady of the Reich made a fateful decision.
42:25She wrote to her eldest son, Harold, who was in a POW camp in North Africa,
42:31that a world without Hitler wasn't a world worth living in.
42:36Magda was the symbol of motherhood with seven children.
42:39Although I should say that in the very last days of the Reich, Magda and her husband poisoned all of those children,
42:50and they died in the bunker with Hitler.
42:53One escaped because he happened to be somewhere else.
42:58Women in Nazi Germany were portrayed as the heart of the family
43:03and the foundations upon which the Thousand-Year Reich was to be built.
43:07In fact, at the same time Hitler was championing mothers and wives as the most important people in Germany,
43:15his policies were aimed at eroding the very freedoms and rights that made them strong.
43:21The female Führers who worked with him to realize his dream of an Aryan nation
43:27helped bring Germany's women to their knees.
43:30But as the post-war dust settled on a nation that had been torn to pieces,
43:36it would be the widows, the mourning mothers and the girl soldiers who would put Germany back together again.
43:43The End
43:44The End
43:45The End
43:46The End
43:47Transcription by CastingWords
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