Hitler's Handmaidens examines the role of women in the Third Reich through a contemporary lens of women as active participants in all aspects of German society.
The role of women in the rise and implementation of Nazi Germany is rarely featured in the history of World War Two. To the extent that women in the Third Reich are portrayed it is mostly as passive homemakers who were allocated a defined and subsidiary role in Nazi Project. The reality is more complex and far darker. Women play a central role in enabling Hitler to carry out the war and the holocaust.
The overarching thesis is that the Nazis could not have succeeded without women and the factors which lead to the Nazi/Fascist State and the genocidal practices are not a relic of history or a particular time and can repeat.
The approach looks at broad categories of female engagement in Nazi Germany and adopts a biographical examination of individual women to illustrate the types of engagement in the Nazi regime. There will be a particular focus on women and the Eastern territories of the Greater Reich- the bloodlands of the holocaust- where the bulk of the war was fought, and often downplayed in the Western narrative of the war.
