Women in National Socialist Germany: an analysis of legal policies and political instrumentalisation

This thesis analyses the role of women in National Socialist Germany, adopting a long-term perspective that considers the historical, legal, social and cultural context prior to the rise of National Socialism and its progressive transformation until the outbreak of the Second World War. Starting with an examination of the status of women in pre-industrial Germany and during the Kaiserreich period, characterised by the predominance of patriarchy, Christian moral influence and bourgeois ideology of domesticity, the thesis investigates the persistence of traditional models and their redefinition during the years of early industrialisation and the Weimar Republic, a period marked by partial and illusory female emancipation. The research reconstructs the formulation of the Nazi female model — the “new German woman” — by analysing the ideological principles of the regime and the policies implemented to regulate the role of women in the sphere of the family, education and society. Particular attention is paid to the birth and development of Nazi women’s organisations, their progressive subjugation to the Party, and the regime’s propaganda aimed at delineating the moral and biological superiority of the “Aryan” mother as the pillar of the Volksgemeinschaft. The thesis also explores Nazi demographic policies, supported by economic incentives, regulation of contraception and abortion, the Lebensborn programme, forced sterilisation and eugenic practices, interpreting them as instruments of biopolitical control and racial selection functional to the totalitarian project. Finally, it examines the phase of ideological and practical transformation on the eve of the Second World War, when the demands of war contradicted the ideals of domesticity and led to a new mobilisation of women in the productive and civil spheres. Through an interdisciplinary approach based on regulatory sources, archival documents and contemporary historiographical contributions, the thesis highlights the continuity, contradictions and tensions that characterised the definition of women’s roles under Nazism, showing how the regime simultaneously consolidated traditional models of subordination and produced new forms of involvement and exploitation of women in the service of totalitarian power.