Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich by Alison Owings

Author:Alison Owings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-10T02:38:00+00:00

How does the Holocaust fit into such love? Simply to jog her memory, I showed Frau Sasowski photographs from a book called Fraueu unterni Hakenkreuz (Women under the swastika).' After scenes of smiling youth groups, we got to ones of naked Jewish women on the rim of a mass grave. Asked if they were publicized after the war, she said, "No, I never saw them. I also don't think that's true."

She does not believe these pictures are authentic?

"I don't believe it's all true. It's propaganda." She made a little laugh.

By whom?

"I cannot judge. I don't know. I didn't hear it, either." She repeated that she and others had thought the Nazis punished people by putting them in concentration camps, but not by killing them. Asked her reaction when she learned what had happened, she answered, "Of course we condemned it. The Jews, too, do have a right to live, nicht?"

After a long pause, she said, "But you can be assured the Russians weren't any better." She was speaking of the Russian soldiers' rapes of German women. And she said she knew of an American soldier who raped a girl.

Asked how she feels as a German, knowing this is what the German people did, that they built concentration camps, she said, "The terrible thing was, one could do nothing oneself. We were completely powerless under Hitler. One could not utter a free thought, for God's sake."

Yet does she feel less proud to be a German?

"Ooch, I'm a Prussian." German farm women have an uneven reputation in Germany, at least among nonfarmers. Because Nazi propagandists treated the farmer like an "ideological darling," tilling the true German soil or butchering the plump German pig, far from evil urban that is, Jewish-influences, and because this flattering attention did not fall entirely on deaf ears, German farmers are thought to have been in general pro-Nazi. Many were. But according to one historian, "The frequency of Party membership among farmers chronically lagged behind the frequency of farmers in the working population."2

To the German population at large, the political affiliation of farm women was less compelling than the women's behavior, especially at the end of and just after the Third Reich. By circumstance and default, they became power players in a practice that came to be known as bnmstern.' It derived from four facts. Farm families had food. City families, mostly women and children by then, did not. Farm families did not have a lot of citified possessions. City families did.

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