The Home Front in “Total War”: Women in Germany and Britain in the Second World War

Abstract

In the aftermath of the German VIth Army's defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, asked members of an invited audience at the Berlin Sportpalast on February 18, 1943, if, to achieve final victory, they now wanted “total war.” The eighth of his ten questions on this theme was: “Do you, and especially you, the women, want the government to ensure that German women, too, devote all their energy to waging the war, by filling jobs wherever possible to free men for action and thus helping their men at the front?” The first implication of this is that, apparently, in the fourth winter of the war, Germany was not pursuing “total war”; the second is that German women were not fully participating in the war effort. By contrast, Britain was the first “civilized nation” to introduce labor conscription for women: “[i]n conscripting women, Britain went further than any other nation. . . far further than Hitler's Germany”; “only the Soviet Union outdid Britain in exploiting the potential of female labour.” While these orthodoxies have been challenged in recent years, nevertheless the impression has been cherished that British women made far more of a contribution to their home front than did German women. Yet it was in Germany that the theory of total war was most thoroughly developed in the interwar years, as a result of the belief that, in the First World War, a successful German army had been “stabbed in the back” by the home front – specifically, by socialists, Jews, and women – a home front which had collapsed under pressure of shortages of food, in particular, and which had not been sufficiently mobilized to give the fighting forces the support that they needed.