Volksgemeinschaft
Did the Nazis achieve a social
revolution between 1933- 1939?
How far did the Nazis succeed in
winning over the hearts and minds of
ordinary German citizens?
What is meant by Volksgemeinschaft?
Hitler aimed to create a ‘national
people’s community’
Weltanschauung- shared ideals- a
common world view
Volksgenossen- Fellow Germans
Blut und Boden- Blood and soil
Outsiders
What problems are there with the concept
of Volksgemeinschaft?
What do you think Hitler was really trying
to achieve?
Role of Women
‘One might be tempted to say that the
world of women is a smaller world. For her
world is her husband, her family, her
children and her house’
Kinder, Kirche, Kuche- Children, Church,
Kitchen
Family as the ‘germ cell of the nation’
State backed motherhood- made an
attractive financial proposition
How did women fit in with Nazi ideology?
 Volkisch ideas about role of women – subservient
wife, prolific mother, guardian of moral virtue & racial purity
 Three K’s – Kinder, Küche, Kirche
 Restrictions – women excluded from judiciary,
medicine & civil service; university places limited to 10%
 Incentives – free loans to newlyweds,, tax rebates,
medals
 Nuremberg Laws, 1935 – banned sexual intercourse
between Germans & Jews
 Lebensborn – impregnation by SS officers
 Organisations – National Socialist Womanhood;
German Women’s Enterprise
Interpretations
 Reactionary- in response to the Weimar trendfull employment, vote, fashion, freedom of
women- Nazis picked up on a Depression era
reaction
 Contradictions in Nazi policy- family unit, but
Hitler Youth, sterilisation programme,
euthanasia programme, Lebensborn
programme- birth outside marriage
 Nazi economic recovery-women stayed in
employment
 Ideology versus economic need- many laws
relaxed as demand for workers increased
Success?
 Did women absorb Nazi propaganda?
 Nazi family values an extreme version of
Catholicism
 Increase in social services for women
 Unable to reconcile social policy with
political,economic and military ambitions
 No evidence that policies were unpopularsecured the approval - ‘tolerance’ by women
 Modernism versus traditionalist tendencies
within the Third Reich
 Family used a tool of the totalitarian statereproduction
Church
 Shared values?- family / state / nationalism
(Lutheranism) anti- communism
 Church an obstacle to achieving total control
 Hitler speaks of a need for ‘Positive
Christianity’
 Catholic 32% population / Protestant 58%Lutheran / Calvinist
 Catholic Zentrum / BVP political parties
 Provincial religion- protestant state based
Third Reich and Religion
Reich Church- ‘coordination’ of
Protestant churches
German Christians- ‘racial based’
Christianity (Ludwig Muller)
Confessional Church- breakaway from
Reich Church- (Niemoller) (Bonhoffer)
German Faith Movement- ‘pagan’ Nazi
Faith (Alfred Rosenberg)
Stages of Nazi Policy towards the
Churches
Control
Weaken
Replace
Interpretation
 ‘Only insititution which had both an
alternative ideology…and retained
organisational autonomy’
 Subservience to the state
 Ensuring the survival of insititution through
cooperation- self defence- rather than
political oppostion
 Individuals rather than Institutions opposing
the regime
 Highlights the limits of the Totalitarian State
Overall- did Hitler break down the
classes?
 How much had society changed by 1945?
 Descriptions of life in the 1930s before the
outbreak of war (Lutz Niethammer 1986)comments about life - ‘quiet’, ‘good’, ‘normal’
 People seem more concerned with employment,
economic stability, order and peace.
 Class structures probably not altered as a result
of Nazi rule.
 ‘Revolution of form, not substance’- Hitler’s
aim to deceive the people. VMS a propaganda
gimmick.
Conclusions continued
 Social effects were at times contradictory- sometimes
modernising/ sometimes reactionary
 Deep social divisions and discontent existed beneath the
propaganda- this was dealt with by repression.
 If a social revolution was achieved it was as a result of
the elimination of people
 Strongest argument for social revolution is based on
the regime’s social destruction- things changed as a
result of war- but this was not intentional. Nazi
Germany had an impact on society beyond its own
existence.