Des femmes allemandes au service de la guerre : participations actives aux politiques raciales nationales-socialistes, à la déportation et au génocide (1939-1945)

National Socialism as a movement and mode of exercising power generated a new set of relationships between the sexes that can only be understood by using categories of race and class. The context of the war and National Socialist policies of race and colonization are elements of primordial importance, which radically modified the relationship between the sexes in occupied Poland (General Government). In the regime’s aggressive policies of conquest and persecution, the social role of “Aryan” women was important, because of their active support for the regime and the great power of action at their disposal. This article is shaped around the discussion of three recent works of research: Elizabeth Harvey, in her study Women and the Nazi East. Agents and Witnesses of Germanization, published in English in 2003, examines the way that women participated in the National Socialist policy of colonization. In 2009, Franka Maubach published Hold the Line [German: Die Stellung halten] examining the female corps of the Wehrmacht. The same year, Elissa Mailänder published her work on the violence of female concentration camp guards in occupied Poland [German: Gewalt im Dienstalltag]. Although the commanding roles largely remained in the hands of men, with women occupying subaltern positions, all three studies demonstrate that German women in the most diverse stations and levels found themselves endowed with considerable power to act and to give orders (Heinrich Popitz). In the context of National Socialist domination, violence represented for women an entirely concrete mode of action that was used in multiple ways. Taking as an example the three groups of women studied, this contribution first proposes to analyze the lives and experiences of women before their engagement in the war; secondly, the article examines the behavior and concrete spaces of action of women working in the occupied territories of the East, in order to determine in the third section the individual responsibility of women in the Nazi occupation, persecutions and murders. Using “gender” as a category to analyze social and political power allows us to shed light on the violent acts of these women, all born between 1918 and 1928