Pen & Sword TBR Pile Review: Hitler’s Housewives, by Tim Heath

Blurb

The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party cowed the masses into a sense of false utopia. During Hitler’s 1932 election campaign over half those who voted for Hitler were women. Germany’s women had witnessed the anarchy of the post-First World War years, and the chaos brought about by the rival political gangs brawling on their streets. When Hitler came to power there was at last a ray of hope that this man of the people would restore not only political stability to Germany but prosperity to its people.

As reforms were set in place, Hitler encouraged women to step aside from their jobs and allow men to take their place. As the guardian of the home, the women of Hitler’s Germany were pinned as the very foundation for a future thousand-year Reich. Not every female in Nazi Germany readily embraced the principle of living in a society where two distinct worlds existed, however with the outbreak of the Second World War, Germany’s women would soon find themselves on the frontline.

Ultimately Hitler’s housewives experienced mixed fortunes throughout the years of the Second World War. Those whose loved ones went off to war never to return; those who lost children not only to the influences of the Hitler Youth but the Allied bombing; those who sought comfort in the arms of other young men and those who would serve above and beyond of exemplary on the German home front. Their stories form intimate and intricately woven tales of life, love, joy, fear and death. Hitler’s Housewives: German Women on the Home Front is not only an essential document towards better understanding one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies where the women became an inextricable link, but also the role played by Germany’s women on the home front which ultimately became blurred within the horrors of total war.

This is their story, in their own words, told for the first time.

My Review

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book. I’ve been reading it for three years. I said I’d review it and I meant it.

The book had first hand accounts from now elderly women who were young woman and girls during the period 1933 to 1945. Some were only babies, born in wartime. Translated diaries from now-dead people add to the oral accounts of events. The stories they tell are painful at times, relating their loss of parents or husbands, arrests and rape, exile to work camps, the bombings and subsequent loss of the war. They also talk about friendships built among girls and women forced into state organisations, or the strong relationships between siblings who had to survive the devastating events going on around them.

There was a sense of hope in the early 1930s but as the decade wore on their lives became more and more restricted by the polices of National Socialism. During the war they became the providers for their families, working from a young age, risking assault from male colleagues, and the increasing shortages and eventual rationing made lives harder. There are some sexually explicit passages, which are quoted from the diaries and letters of contributors.

The author has an interest in the social history period and has written several books on various aspects of the period. He has spoken to a lot of people to write this book, and included extensive extracts from interviews and diaries. He doesn’t refer to any of the existing primary and secondary sources currently available on the subject which could put these primary accounts and oral histories in context, nor does he discuss the limitations and strengths of oral history or his sources. Oral history is a fascinating area, it’s one I’ve explored in my own work and want to do more of, but you have to remember that a memory changes every time you remember it, that in people change their narrative to fit the current times and social mores.

I also found some of his responses to reviewers on GoodReads to be defensive and insulting; this goes against the bargain between reviewers and authors – you want an honest review, you don’t get to bitch about people pointing out limitations. If I wrote a book on, for example, contemporary experiences of autism, and didn’t reference so many of the primary and secondary sources currently available, relying only on the oral testimonies of a few people, I’d be doing my readers and the people trusting me with their personal histories a disservice. If someone pointed that out to me, I’d have to accept that and re-write.

This book contributes to the currently available information on women’s lives in Nazi Germany, adding new voices to those already heard; a starting point for exploration. The book is quite well written and sensitively covers difficult topics.