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Summary Of The Third Reich

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Summary Of The Third Reich
Where Koonz attempts to cover different aspects of women's lives, the next text read for this study focuses on individual lives/stories of everyday women of the Third Reich: Alison Owings' 1993 text Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Much of the text was original research done Owings' herself, but for preliminary and background information Owings utilized the Koonz text and work (not read for this study) by Jill Stephenson. By presenting the individual stories of over twenty women who were alive under the Third Reich that she was able to obtain through four years of personally interviewing the women herself over a four-year time span, Owings set out to fill the gap of testimony of 'average' German women of the Third Reich. Because …show more content…
According to the text, children had to be in the BdM or they were not promoted to the next grade, no matter how good their grades were. The Nazi Party, known for its indoctrination of children, utilized schools in other ways as well: trick questions were placed into home economics tests to test loyalty of the female students. The BdM also punished those who did not wish to conform to their wants and needs, "outlawing (excommunicating)" anyone who refused to take on a leadership role. These women's experiences demonstrate how the party infused itself into their everyday lives whether they wanted it to or …show more content…
For all of the women interviewed, Anti-Semitism had been present in Germany before the reign of the Third Reich (as discussed by Koonz). Many of the women discussed how Jewish people seemed take up most of the glamorous careers and that some Jewish business owners swindled their customers- many of these women wanted the Jews "curtailed" not killed. Owings also utilizes the powers of omission to surmise the overall group thought of the women interviewed- none of the women talked about how the Jews were already "out of site" prior to the usage of concentration camps: they were out of "'German' schools...homes, offices, and hospitals." Owings ends her text with a warning/reminder that we are all human and all interconnected and cannot happily live in
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