While thinking about the Covid pandemic and health care, I began scrolling the internet and came across an article by Alexa R. Shipman: The German experiment: health care without a female or Jewish doctors.
Of course, I thought I knew a bit about women and the Nazis. For instance, the ideal blonde slim German woman was healthy and racially pure and committed to the 3 “Ks”- Kirche Küche Kinder – Church Kitchen Children. Women were to be perfect helpmates for their men and bearer of many children. But the details Shipman highlighted aspects regarding the gender issue told me I knew less than I ought to. Or had forgotten! After all, Josef Goebbels had promised in 1933 to liberate women from women’s emancipation. This had promptly led to the immediate dismissal of women from their positions as solicitors, civil servants, and other professional posts. A different school curriculum was designed then for boys, as they were excluded from positions of responsibility especially in politics and academia and discouraged from studying.
Thus, the NSDAP was a male party, where no woman could be a member of the leadership or the chairperson of any committee. Heinrich Himmler proclaimed “man conceives of everything through the mind, whereas women grasp everything through sentiment”. Thus no woman was ever fielded by the Nazi Party as a candidate for Parliament during the Weimar time. After the March 1933 election, Germany went from 37 female Parliamentarians of 577 to none. Virtually it meant that women’s vote became dormant. Goebbels justified this: it was necessary to leave to men that which belonged to men.
Dr Shipman pointed out that in 1933 there were 4,367 female German doctors, 587 of whom were Jewish. According to the definition of the 1936 Nuremberg laws, 15% of physicians in 1933 were Jewish.
Hitler‘s programs of “social Darwinism” and “racial hygiene,” led to the removal of all Jewish and female doctors from their posts. The latter could only practice midwifery. Naturally, Jewish doctors could not work at all. Eminent Jewish medical scientists lie all Jewish academics were also dismissed from their posts. Many emigrated, others perished in the Shoa, the Holocaust. Dedicated researchers such as Prof. Dr Peter Voswinckel have devoted themselves to trace the fate of members of the medical profession.
In 1936 women were stopped from practising medicine altogether. They were also no longer allowed to sit on a jury. Due to Hitler’s intervention, they could not be judges or prosecutors. In 1937 it was decreed only men could teach at universities, only 1% of women could do so in a social field.
The loss of a good proportion of experienced medical practitioners led to a deterioration of German health care. Shipman said: “A doubling of the death rate in a pre-war Germany, which was ostensibly flourishing under Hitler (if you were Aryan), suggests that good propaganda underlay a very different reality of a healthcare system bereft of experienced practitioners.” Statistics of the 1952 maternal mortality rate per 100,000 of 184 compared with United Kingdom (67 per 100,000) and United States (68 per 100,000) for that year, shows the German health service had then had not yet recovered.”
All this is so odd when one remembers that certain German influential socialites assisted Hitler’s rise, as did a strong women’s vote between 1930–1932 and that already in the 20s it was justifiably claimed: “women adored Hitler!” His single state and masculinity met their approval so that it was not surprising that he only married his companion within hours of his death.
The ideal Nazi woman could thus be seen as a victim of misogyny. This is a fallacy. The US historian Wendy Lower pointed out, German women, who numbered 40 million in 1939 cannot be seen as victims A third – 13 million – were active within the NSDAP, with the number constantly increasing till the end of the war. Just as the role of women is generally under-estimated “here too – and perhaps even more problematically, given the legal and moral implications – the agency of women in the crimes of the Third Reich has not been fully elaborated and explained. Vast numbers of ordinary German women were not victims, and routine forms of female participation in the Holocaust have not yet been disclosed.”
Such participation not only included the job of concentration camp guards: large numbers knew of the Holocaust for they typed orders, took phone calls, sent telegrams the meaning of which they had accepted without question or protest.
Needless to say, I am deeply grateful to those amazing brave women, who did resist, such as young Sophie Scholl and am aware that over half of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations are women.