Authors: Elizabeth Harvey
ISBN-13: 9780300100402, ISBN-10: 030010040X
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Yale University Press
Date Published: November 2003
Edition: New Edition
This pioneering book examines the role of women in Nazi Germany's "nationality struggle" during the 1930s and in measures to Germanize occupied Poland during World War 2. Drawing on previously untapped materials from Polish and German archives, as well as memoirs and oral testimony from German women who were sent to wartime Poland, Elizabeth Harvey analyzes the function of female activism within Nazi imperialism, its significance, and the extent to which women embraced policies intended to segregate Germans from non-Germans and to persecute Poles and Jews. Casting fresh light on women's attitudes and involvement in Nazi policies, the book emphasizes the distinctive nature of female complicity in the system of racist domination. Harvey offers a new perspective on Nazi occupation policies, with vivid insights into regime practices at the grass roots and German civilian responses to the treatment of the Polish and Jewish population. In addition, she explores the complex ways in which Germans after 1945 remembered the Nazi East.
Author Biography: Elizabeth Harvey is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Liverpool, the author of Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany, and co-editor, with Lynn Abrams, of Gender Relations in German History.
List of Illustrations | ||
Preface | ||
Abbreviations | ||
Note on Place Names and Terminology | ||
Ch. 1 | Introduction: Women, 'Germandom' and Nazism | 1 |
Ch. 2 | Weimar Women and the Mission to the Eastern Borderlands | 23 |
Ch. 3 | The Nazification of Women's Borderland Activism, 1933-39 | 44 |
Ch. 4 | The Recruitment Drive: 'Womanly Tasks' and Germanization in Occupied Poland | 78 |
Ch. 5 | 'Uncanny Space' or 'German Homeland'? German Women's Constructions of the 'East' | 119 |
Ch. 6 | Motherliness and Mastery: Making Model Germans in the Annexed Territories | 147 |
Ch. 7 | Moulding the Next Generation: Village Schoolteachers in the 'Reichsgau Wartheland' | 191 |
Ch. 8 | Childcare and Colonization: Kindergartens on the Frontiers of the Nazi Empire | 232 |
Ch. 9 | Building on the Volcano: Training Village Advisers in Kreis Zamosc | 261 |
Ch. 10 | Leaving the East Behind | 283 |
Ch. 11 | Conclusion | 294 |
App.: Biographical Data on Respondents | 302 | |
Notes | 305 | |
Bibliography | 358 | |
Index | 373 |