Nazi Women of the Third Reich

Serving the Swastika

Paul Roland

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788887267
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Deutsche Geschichte

• Four months pregnant, Vera Wohlauf, wife of a serving SS officer, took sadistic pleasure in rounding up victims for Treblinka.• Like creatures from a Grimms' fairytale, female members of a Nazi 'welfare' organization scoured the towns and villages of Poland and Slovenia, luring blond children out of hiding with bread and sweets. They were abducted to be raised as Germans by 'Aryan' families who told them their parents were dead.• Test pilot Hanna Reitsch flew on a suicide mission to rescue Hitler from his bunker.• Not even Hitler could resist the charms of Princess Stephanie, a femme fatale and Nazi agent who smoked cigars which she lit by striking a match on the heel of her shoes.The Nazis had no doubts about a woman's place in the Third Reich. Hermann Goering urged every woman to 'take a pot, a dustpan and brush, and marry a man.' Many women welcomed the arrival of Hitler's regime with childlike enthusiasm believing that the dictatorship would make Germany master of Europe, but as the war dragged on, their blind faith in Hitler was betrayed.

CHAPTER ONE
Paula, Hitler’s Sister

The diaries of Hitler’s sister Paula support the generally accepted version of Hitler’s early years, in which he suffered at the hands of a brutal and domineering father and was supported by a doting and indulgent mother.

However, her account of Hitler’s ‘extra-ordinary interest’ in scholastic subjects is at odds with that of his teachers, who criticized his poor academic results. Her description of her young brother as ‘cheerful’ also conflicts with the many instances in which he struck her hard and repeatedly with his ‘loose hand’.

Paula’s diaries call into question Hitler’s later account of the time when he had to live on the streets of Vienna, sleeping in doss-houses, because she reveals that he was in receipt of a modest but adequate pension at the time.

Her description of her brother as a man who was ‘radiant with kindness’ is perhaps the furthest from the truth, but this does not necessarily suggest that the contents of the diaries are untrue. It perhaps just means that as a loving sister Paula could not see the monster that her brother had become.

The notorious forged ‘Hitler Diaries’ hoax, perpetuated in the 1980s, has made historians naturally wary of anyone claiming to have unearthed handwritten journals by eminent Nazis and particularly by those who were close to Hitler. Thought to have been written by Adolf Hitler himself, the Hitler Diaries had in fact been forged by illustrator Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. In 1983, they were bought by the German magazine Stern and publication rights were sold to, among others, the UK’s Sunday Times. The hoax was uncovered when the diaries were belatedly subjected to a proper forensic examination, by which time a number of eminent academic reputations and editorial careers had been destroyed.

But the recently discovered diaries of Hitler’s sister, Paula, have proved to be authentic, according to Dr Timothy Ryback, the head of Germany’s Obersalzberg Institute of Contemporary History, and author Florian Beierl. Her journal records the often traumatic experiences of the Hitler children at the hands of their brutal, domineering father Alois and the effect that they had on Adolf, his older half-sister Angela and his half-brother, also called Alois.

Paula began the diary when she was eight and Adolf was fifteen. His volatile temper was already in evidence by then and he habitually lashed out at his little sister at the slightest provocation. She complained of being struck hard and repeatedly by his ‘loose hand’, then timorously found excuses to justify his abusive behaviour. She also described the beatings meted out by an enraged and often inebriated Alois Snr. and their mother’s vain attempts to intervene.

More significantly, her account reveals that she was not the naive innocent that she later claimed to be, but was at one time engaged to Austrian physician Dr Erwin Jekelius, who was active in the Nazi euthanasia programme. He was accused of having gassed 4,000 of the mentally and physically disabled who were deemed by the Nazis to be ‘unworthy of life’. Ironically, it was Adolf who prevented her from marrying Jekelius. On hearing that Jekelius was intending to ask for his sister’s hand, the Führer had the physician arrested by the Gestapo on his arrival in Berlin and reassigned to the Russian front.

Early days of a dictator

The journal is not the only surviving record of Paula’s early years with Hitler. On 5 June 1946, she was interviewed by American Intelligence and her testimony recorded in English. Paula was born in Hafeld (upper Austria) when her parents still owned a small farm, but as Alois, a retired customs official, was by then 58 years old and in poor health, he was forced to sell it. Of the four surviving children from her father’s third marriage, she was fondest of Adolf, who had been christened Adolphus but was known in the family as Adi.

Paula maintained that her parents’ marriage was a ‘very happy one’ despite their age difference – Alois was 23 years older than his wife – and the contrast in their temperaments. Their mother was docile and indulgent while her husband was strict and easily enraged. He was quick to find fault with his children who were ‘very lively and difficult to train’ though he ‘spoiled’ Paula, which must have angered Adolf even more and would have given him cause to resent her. According to Paula, the children were the cause of the majority of arguments between the ‘harsh’ disciplinarian and the ‘tender’ mother. Adolf resisted his father’s authority and provoked him at every opportunity, for which he suffered almost daily beatings.

He was a scrubby little rogue, and all attempts of his father to thrash him for his rudeness and to cause him to love the profession of an official of the estate were in vain. How often on the other hand did my mother caress him and try to obtain with her kindness where the father could not succeed with harshness!

Her highly selective memory and description of her brother as ‘cheerful’ and possessing an ‘extraordinary interest for history, geography, architecture, painting and music’ is in stark contrast to his teachers’ assessment, which criticized the boy’s sullen, opinionated personality, insolent attitude and poor academic results. At home, Paula remembers being ‘lectured’ by her brother on history and politics, subjects on which he considered himself to be an authority. Brother and sister would ‘quarrel frequently’ and she submitted to his will very reluctantly. It ‘spoiled’ the atmosphere of the home, she recalled, and yet they remained fond of each other.

An embittered boy

Alois died in January 1903 from heart failure, to the relief of his eldest son, providing his widow with a decent pension, a portion of which she used to purchase a piano for her darling Adi. Paula recalls her brother ‘sitting for hours’ at the ‘beautiful Heintzman grand’, although he had only the most rudimentary understanding of music and no patience for learning the instrument. It was the idea of being an artist that appealed to the indolent adolescent. Adolf Hitler was a dreamer who lacked the self-discipline to study anything seriously and he became even more embittered as he grew older, when he realized he would never fulfil his artistic ambitions. But in the years following his father’s death he indulged his passion for operas, particularly those written by Richard Wagner, whose mythical Ring cycle he saw 13 times in one year.

Four years later, on 21 December 1907, their mother died of cancer. Paula and Adolf nursed her during her protracted illness and Paula remembered that he proved to be a loving son; tender, considerate and eager to do whatever he could to make her final days tolerable.

With both parents gone, their mother’s widow’s pension was discontinued and Adolf was obliged to find work. An aunt made a final attempt to persuade him to seek a position in the civil service, but the 17-year-old was determined to pursue his artistic ambitions as either a water colourist or an architect.

He had abandoned his hopes of becoming a pianist after his only childhood friend, August Kubizek, had been accepted into the conservatoire in Vienna and in doing so had exposed Hitler’s grand plans as nothing but the idle dreams of youth.

When Hitler was rejected by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts that year, and again the following year, he blamed the selection committee whom he imagined had conspired to deny him his destiny, rather than admit the possibility that his work was simply not up to standard. In his largely fictitious biography and manifesto Mein Kampf, he described how he had suffered at the hands of the predominantly Jewish committee and how he was forced to live on the streets of Vienna selling his crude watercolours and sleeping in doss-houses. In fact, he was at the time living comparatively comfortably on a legacy of 900 Kroner per year (it would perhaps be worth £8,000 to £9,000 [some $12,000] in 2018), as revealed by the family accounts which were discovered at the same time as Paula’s journal.

Living in her brother’s shadow

Paula lost contact with her brother during this time, only meeting him again in 1921, 13 years later, after she too had moved to Vienna. He had not lost his appetite for self-aggrandizement, informing her that he had had ‘wonderful adventures’ during the 1914–18 war and raving about the bond of ‘comradeship’ he had enjoyed. The truth was that he was despised by his comrades, who considered him ‘intolerable’ because he never laughed unless it was at the misfortune of others and named him the ‘White Crow’ because he was radically different from everyone else. Despite demonstrating his bravery under fire, he was not promoted because his superiors believed that the men would not follow him.

By the time of their brief reunion, Hitler had become leader of the nascent NSDAP and was living in Munich. The reason for his temporary return to Vienna is unknown, but it enabled the pair to renew their friendship and allowed Paula to see that her brother had not died in the trenches as she had assumed. Evidently, he had not thought to contact her on his return, contradicting her idealized image of him as a considerate older sibling. She then returned to her job as a secretary ‘in an insignificant office’, while he went back to Munich where he shared a house with his half-sister, Angela.

While Hitler’s star was then in the ascendant, Paula’s life was made more difficult by his increasing notoriety. She was dismissed from her job as the result of her family connection with a political agitator and felt it necessary to change her surname to Wolf, which oddly enough was the nickname Hitler adopted.

When he was made aware of Paula’s situation he immediately offered to pay her a regular income of 250 marks a month, rising to 500, with an annual Christmas ‘bonus’ of 3,000 marks.

She claimed never to have been a member of the Nazi Party, but said that she would have joined had her brother asked her to. Predictably, she also maintained that she had not known of the crimes committed by his regime, nor of the existence of the concentration camps, a statement which her interrogator noted was ‘unworthy of belief’. He also dismissed her assertion that she had been ignorant of her brother’s threat to ‘destroy the Jews in Europe’ as these policies had been widely broadcast and publicized in the German and Austrian press and were common knowledge. Such ‘tactics’ were all too familiar to the Allies, who were already engaged in the denazification process. Paula’s assertion that her brother was ‘radiant with kindness’ contrasted with the facts of his brutality and the merciless cruelty meted out to his enemies, combatants and civilians alike.

Because of her feigned ignorance and guileless appearance, her interrogators concluded that Paula was a lonely and ‘guiltless woman’. As with the surviving members of the Hitler family, she did not profit from her brother’s influence, privilege and power and with the destruction of the Nazi state she and her kin returned to the peasant roots from which their most notorious relative had risen.

A BDM girl exemplifying the ideals of Nazi beauty photographed in 1937 by Max Ehlert, an official combat photographer for the Armed Forces Propaganda Company or PK. The Bund Deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls, was the girls wing of the Hitler Youth and its members were indoctrinated with Nazi values designed to make them dutiful wives, mothers and home-makers.

It’s 1934, and a young mother enjoys the attention as she wheels her two yo...