ABSTRACT
Gregor Strasser’s careful construction of the Nazi Party’s apparatus, at the centre and across the country, with an array of affiliates corresponding to the various social and professional group interests in Germany, was designed to enable the Party to take over the leadership of the State and society once the political struggle was won. 1 But the anathematising of all his works on the eve of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, along with the blurred division of his former authority between Hess and Ley, and, further, the revelation in 1933 that Hitler did not propose to permit the Party to take over the State, resulted in there being no coherent strategy for Nazifying Germany. Destroying the aspects of Weimar political life which most offended the Party was easy enough, and was the one area in which there appeared to be a genuine sense of direction. Constructing the living ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) which had been promised remained an aim, but not one which was unequivocally delegated to the Party in the new State, as Frick’s pretensions demonstrated; nor was there much agreement at Party headquarters as to how to set about it. 2 While the Party’s ambitions were explicitly monopolistic, the reality of trying to take control of the entire population of a sophisticated and industrially-advanced country, when only a minority had given the NSDAP its support, combined with the Party’s internal problems to produce strange ambiguities, not least in the women’s organisation. Under the faltering direction of the NSF, hamstrung by its leadership crisis and compromised by Paula Siber’s appointment in Frick’s Ministry, a hybrid solution emerged to the problem of reconstructing German women’s organisational life in the Third Reich whose evolution during the 1930s from a federal to a centralised system only thinly disguised its origins.
