Jewish Women in Hitler's Germany

Paper Summary:

Mary Kaplan, in her book Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany", explores the era and the Holocaust from a different perspective, from the role of Jewish women as she tries to answer questions that have never really been answered like: Why didn't they leave as they witnessed a consuming hate manifest itself in Nazism? This essay, relying upon the research and writing of Kaplan and others, attempts to understand, from a woman's perspective, how Jews and Germans disentangled themselves emotionally, socially, as Germans, culturally in a way that led to the destruction of five million men, women, and children in a near successful attempt to carry out Adolf Hitler's final solution.

Outline:
Before and After the Eradication of Jewry from German Life
The Jewish Woman in Nazi Germany

From the Paper:

"However, by the time hostilities turned into war, it was too late for those Jews who had remained in Germany with hopes that the conditions would run through a course of social change, then, revert back to some sense of normality (Kaplan, 1998, p. 50). Life that had centered around families would soon experience the horror of being torn apart with deportation to the ghettos and to concentration camps. Even as families were being uprooted from their homes and transported to ghettos or concentration camps, it was the women whose lives continued in an as near normal fashion as possible; they remained the magnetic north of the family circle (Kaplan, 1998, p. 52). Their work in cooking, mending, cleaning and in support of their husbands who now suffered an idleness that many were unaccustomed to went on, only perhaps with greater importance especially in the lives of their husbands (Kaplan, 1998, p. 52). "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Cosner, Shaaron, and Victoria Cosner. Women under the Third Reich: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Questia. 7 Apr. 2008 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=29226652>.
• Fox, Jo. Filming Women in the Third Reich /. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Questia. 7 Apr. 2008 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=102309122>.
• Guenther, Irene. Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich. Oxford, England: Berg, 2004. Questia. 7 Apr. 2008 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=104617844>.
• Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Questia. 7 Apr. 2008 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=37056561>.

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