Suchergebnisse

This article discusses the connections between collaboration and the prisoner of war question in the early Vichy period by tracing the evolution of the Franco-German agreement of 16 November 1940 and its repercussions on French POWs. Based on the Scapini Papers and French and German archival materials, the article argues that the agreement happened in the context of a voluntary policy of collaboration initiated by the Vichy authorities, who hoped that collaboration would trigger German concessions on the POW question, but did not push collaboration to ease the fate of the POWs. Hitler likely offered the agreement as a concession that would allow Vichy to demonstrate to the French public an apparent success of collaboration, detracting from some hostile German measures that occurred at the same time. Vichy took the bait because it hoped to win over the French POWs in Germany to Pétainist ideology and because it was eager to bolster its own legitimacy. But humanitarian considerations also played a role in the French consent to this agreement, which to some extent can be seen as preventive collaboration. Plausibly, the agreement and the framework it established, despite undeniable dangers, represented a lesser evil for the French POWs.

Traces the motivations for joining the right-wing Deutschnational Volkspartei ([German Nationalist People's Party] DNVP), the focus of activities, & the ideologies of four high-profile women in the Weimar Republic. After a brief description of the DNVP & its politics, attention turns to case studies of Paula Mueller-Otfried, Margarethe Behm, Kathe Schirmacher, & Annagrete Lehmann. The absence of a housewife representative is noted, along with the relative power these women had on getting involved with the DNVP. Demonstrated is that the primary concerns of women were radical nationalism -- often linked to anti-Semitism & racism -- & religiously based conservatism. Further, different priorities emerged among female activists regarding women's rights; however, it is observed that the analysis here challenges the thesis that the gender-specific focus of German women activists was decisive for German women's affinities with Nazism. It is concluded that DNVP women were able to make Wiemar legislation more conservative while showing that women could well represent right-wing interests in parliament & the wider public sphere. J. Zendejas

The DNVP, until 1930 the predominant party of the Weimar Right, attracted a crowd of able women politicians with experience in religious and professional leagues, housewives' associations, and nationalist pressure groups. The article examines to what degree these women partook in right-wing ideology and politics. It first presents statements by party women on the issues that tended to split the party into a moderate and an intransigent wing and concludes that women usually committed themselves to party unity and to a stand on principle that tended to favour the intransigents. An inner view of women's activism in the DNVP then focuses on two programmatic statements, one from 1921 and one from 1933, and argues that the politics of DNVP women shifted emphasis from practical women's rights demands to radical right-wing ideology. The ideological parameters of 1933, however, were always present, whereas the equal rights demands of 1921 were increasingly condensed in the claim of women to make a contribution to the nazi racial state not only as mothers and housewives. The evidence thus shows that women from the DNVP partook in right-wing ideology and politics, mostly by stressing racism and militarism, even though they rejected nazism on the grounds of the nazis' hostility to women's rights.