Evolution and Creation

The inauguration of the Nazi Party’s own archive in January 1934 to gather material from which the NSDAP’s history in the Kampfzeit could be constructed ¹ brought requests during May 1935 that the Gau (region) offices of the NS-Frauenschaft provide information about the Party’s women’s activities before 1933. By the end of 1936 a number of ‘Gau Histories’ of the NSF had been duly submitted to the Party Archive; these were pieces of varying length and detail, since women’s group activity in the NSDAP had developed in an even more irregular way than the growth of the Party itself across Germany in the 1920s. ² It was probably inevitable that the official history of the NSF which was based on these submissions and which appeared for popular consumption in 1937 should be highly generalised and anodyne. ³ The authors had felt obliged to edit out even minor indiscretions about the NSF’s past which appeared in the Gau Histories, to maintain the Party’s public image of harmony and uniformity, while no reference whatever was permitted to the chronic rivalries which had bedevilled the Party’s embryonic women’s organisation from its inception. There was nothing unique about the ‘internal bickering [which] characterised the Women’s Auxiliary in Thalburg’; ⁴ but it was hardly the stirring, harmonious stuff of which the Party’s official history would be made. The authorised version was cosmetic, and therefore misleading.