ABSTRACT
For a party that was able to celebrate a major political victory at the end of January 1933, the NSDAP was in a remarkable state of internal turmoil consequent on Strasser’s resignation and Hitler’s vindictive determination to discredit him and his work. As Orlow says, Hitler and the men between whom he deliberately divided Strasser’s former functions, Robert Ley and Rudolf Hess, 1 ‘showed far more enthusiasm for destroying the old than for developing a new programmatic or organisational synthesis’. 2 This had its effect on the NSF which, like other branches of the Party, now had to find a role as the official women’s organisation of the Third Reich, with the main tasks of the Kampfzeit obsolete. It was not unreasonable of the calendar of the ‘women’s work of the Third Reich’ to take February 1934 as its starting point, with the appointment of Gertrud Scholtz-Klink as NSF leader; 3 in the year preceding that date, maladroit leadership by successive unwise appointees and bitter internecine strife consumed most of the organisation’s energy. There were also problems caused by the claims of competing empire-builders to authority over the organisation of the mass of German women under the NSF’s leadership, with Hess and Ley — whatever their mutual differences within the Party organisation 4 — at least at one in denying the right of the new Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, to a share in this. Thus the NSF’s own peculiar internal difficulties were severely aggravated both by the Party’s confused condition after Strasser’s resignation and by the aspirations of the new leaders of Party and State agencies now that Hitler’s appointment had suddenly presented them with opportunities of which they had only dreamed for years.
