Most of the time there were no female Fascists who participated directly in combat. After all, the Fascist (and protofascist) slogan for women was ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (‘children, kitchen, church’): these were supposed to be the only priorities for the ideal woman under Fascism. The reality, however, was not—and could not be—always in step with the ideal.
The situation became more complicated near the war’s end in 1945, when (as seen in the motion picture Downfall) the Greater German Reich was so desperate for survival that pretty much anybody who could fire a gun was allowed a combative rôle.
For example, quoting D’Ann Campbell’s Women in Combat: The World War II Experience in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union:
In November 1944, [the Chancellery] issued an official order that no woman was to be trained in the use of weapons. The only exception was for women in the remote areas of the Reich which could be easily overrun by the Soviets. In one such area, a twenty‐two‐year‐old Pomeranian woman, “Erna,” was awarded the Iron Cross (second class) when she, together with a male sergeant and private destroyed three tanks with bazookas. Indeed, [Axis] propaganda suggested that the bazooka was the most feminine of weapons.
The Freikorps Adolf Hitler was formed in 1945 and trained in the use of bazookas, hand grenades, and automatic rifles. Lore Ley, daughter of a leading [Fascist], once knocked out a Soviet armored scout car and took from its commander military documents and money. In all, thirty‐nine [Axis] women received the Iron Cross (second class) for their duty near the front. The majority of these women, however, were nurses.
Perry Biddiscombe’s Into the Maelstrom: German Women in Combat, 1944–45 gives a more complete picture:
[The Chancellor] had already shown interest in the battlefield performance of Polish women fighting in the Warsaw Revolt — he personally questioned the SS counter‐insurgency chief, Erich von dem Bach‐Zelewski, on this matter — and in February 1945, prodded by Bormann, he conceded that all available human resources now had to be mobilized, ‘even women’.
‘That’s all the same to me’, he shrugged. ‘So many women who want to shoot are volunteering now, that I am of the opinion that we ought to take them immediately. They are braver anyway’. Several days later, the Führer observed that ‘innumerable women are volunteering for the front’, and he suggested that such recruits would ‘undoubtedly fight fanatically’.
Click here for events that happened today (March 8).
1936: August von Mackensen, Adolf Schicklgruber, Werner von Blomberg, Hermann Göring, Werner von Fritsch, and Erich Raeder attended a memorial ceremony in Berlin.
1937: Spanish Nationalist forces threatening Madrid received orders to attack around the northeast of the city in an attempt to cut it off from the rest of the Republic. Two Nationalist armies advanced towards Guadalajara, which was thirty‐four miles from Madrid, and pushed back the inexperienced Republican troops who faced them.
1938: The Imperialists lost a Ki‐2 light bomber over Tengxian.
1940: Ferdinando Calda became Leonardo da Vinci’s commanding officer.
1941: Erich Raeder warned his Chancellor of a possible Yankee landing in northwest Africa should Imperial America officially enter the war, and the Panzer Regiment of German 5th Light Division departed Naples, Italy aboard freighters Alicante, Arcturus, Wachtfels, and Rialto bound for Tripoli, Libya in two convoys. The Axis also directly bombed west Indian jazz band leader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, his musicians and many dancers in an assault on Café du Paris night club in London.
1942: A He 111 bomber of the Luftwaffe group I./KG 100 claimed the sinking of a Soviet submarine south of Yalta, and at dawn, Axis warships bombarded the invasion beaches at Lae and Salamaua on eastern New Guinea island.
1943: In the Third Reich, over 1,000 gentile wives of deported Jews continued to protest in Berlin, and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels released 1,500 Jewish men to stabilize the situation. Aside from that, Axis troops assaulted the Allied forces on Hill 700 in Bougainville, Solomon Islands.
1944: The Axis exterminated 3,791 Czech Jews at the Auschwitz‐Birkenau camp in occupied Poland, massacring the men in Crematorium III and the women and children in Crematorium II. Axis troops began a five‐day offensive against U.S. positions at Bougainville, and other Axis troops launched a major offensive across the Chindwin River in Burma toward Imphal, India. Meanwhile, another regiment from the Imperial Japanese 33rd Division crossed the Manipur River in Burma toward the Burmese–Indian border toward Tiddim, Burma. On the other hand, Berlin and Erkner both experienced aerial assault, and there was a large aerial battle over Steinhude Lake, but the Axis managed to take down thirty‐four Allied bombers.
1945: Between 1,070 and 1,150 Hungarian Jews arrived at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia. (They were originally deported to the Austrian border in 1944.) Highly secret negotiations began in Switzerland between Allan Dulles of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, Wehrmacht Colonel General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, and Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff of the SS for the possible early surrender of Wehrmacht troops in Italy. The Axis’s synthetic oil plant at Gelsenkirchen and six benzol plants elsewhere took significant damage from the Allies, but an Axis commando raid from Guernsey sabotaged three of the four ships in the Normandy harbour at Granville, damaging port facilities and installations including cranes, a railway engine and rolling stock in the docks.
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