ABSTRACT
Women’s contributions to the National Socialist war effort have been comparatively lightly researched. Historians have analysed women’s lives on the home front, but paid little attention to their direct mobilization in support of war, notably as military auxiliaries, and their role in German occupations Europe-wide. Women contributed to Hitler’s expansionism in different ways, keeping the wheels of occupation turning as secretaries, translators, book-keepers and telephone operators. Over time, a symbiotic relationship developed between expansionism and the employment of women. Female clerical and communications staff did much of the daily work that enabled Germany to control vast swaths of European land; equally, the requirements of occupation encouraged the employment of women in circumstances that challenged contemporaries’ notions of suitable female roles. This chapter highlights women’s role in supporting Hitler’s expansionist projects and, by looking at occupied Europe, enables us to better understand female involvement in the Third Reich more generally.
Even as looking at wartime occupations tells us more about women under Hitler, directing attention to women brings new aspects of war and occupation to the foreground. Nazi domination of occupied areas relied on infrastructure that was, to an increasing extent, operated by women. Clerical staff and a well-organized communications network made it possible to gather, organize and transmit information among occupiers, between them and front-line troops, and to connect outlying areas to the Reich. Although men performed military clerical and communications work at war’s outset, and continued to serve in front-line roles, the need for more men in active combat and broader trends toward the feminization of specific types of office work changed the composition of the occupation administrative staff. Whether serving as support staff or taking on roles equivalent to those of mid-level military administrators, women made the daily work of occupation possible. If conquest threw a net of exploitation over large parts of Europe, women formed the lattice-work of that net. Historians have tended to concentrate on the way the net was cast, and the goods and people it caught — looking at women redirects our attention to how the net itself was made and how it worked.
