Herkommer, Christina. “Women under National Socialism: Women’s Scope for Action and the Issue of Gender.”

In her text, Christina Herkommer offers a detailed account on the development of the study of the role of women under the National Socialist rule.

The study of the role of women under the Nazi regime was not a real point of discussion up until the 1970’s, when women’s movements and studies began. A very initial—and clearly still androcentric—perspective concluded that women were vulnerable to systemic manipulation and ended up idolizing Hitler (100). The scholarship developed further during the 1980s, when two opposing theses emerged. The first proposal saw women as victims, since the Nazi regime was “an extreme manifestation of patriarchy” (101) that oppressed them; the other focused on women as perpetrators: either joint perpetrators—who supported and maintained the patriarchal structure; as supporting housewives, wives and mothers of perpetrators; and as women directly involved in the genocide. The opposition between these two orientations emerged from the fact that the first one took gender differentiation between men and women as inherent, while the second tried a more egalitarian approach. However, during the 1990s, the concept of sexual difference itself was being deconstructed, which allowed a different focus. Thus, the use of binary concepts like male-female, and victim-perpetrator started to come under scrutiny: while they were certainly useful, indiscriminate use could end up being detrimental. From this emerged, first, the discussion regarding the multiple positions women had during the National Socialist rule, which also explained a varied scope of action for each one. On the other hand, another topic that appeared was the post-war reception of female criminality and innocence, and the idealization and naturalization of certain public expectations. These last two are the main lines of inquiry today, which try to avoid gender essentialism and see positioning as a complex categorization.

Author of this entry: Claudia Vasquez-Caicedo Rainero

Herkommer, Christina. “Women under National Socialism: Women’s Scope for Action and the Issue of Gender.” In Ordinary People As Mass Murderers : Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives, edited by O. Jensen, and C. Szejnmann, 99-119. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.