Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Nazi Germany,

two words synonymous with barbarity, terror, hate and death.

A shock defeat in World War One sows the seeds for discontent

in a once prosperous nation.

Adolf Hitler, an unassuming, uninspiring man

seizes the opportunity to take control,

promising to make Germany great again.

But he won't do it alone.

Willing accomplices rally from the most unlikely of places.

The female Fuhrers,

Nazi she-devils...

..cougars, fantasists...

..and secret lovers.

These are the forgotten Nazis.

These are Hitler's handmaidens.

- (cannons booming)

NARRATOR: In the dying days of World War Two,

private Willi Anderson was dodging bullets fired from

a sniper's nest in the once picturesque German town of Aachen,

500 km south-west of Berlin.

When his comrades took the shooter out with a bazooka round,

what they discovered would haunt Willi for the rest of his life.

Because the body they found wasn't

the die-hard Nazi soldier they'd expected.

It was a young girl.

As the GI's picked through the ruined city,

they likened it to a butcher's shop.

What kind of madness had inspired Germans to send their daughters

into a slaughterhouse?

- (explosion booms)

NARRATOR: Nazi Germany is a horrific enigma.

Who do we blame for what's been described

as the politics of organised insanity?

- (speaking in German)

NARRATOR: Adolf Hitler is an easy target,

but he didn't do it alone.

Without willing accomplices, he might just have been

another demented dictator spewing hatred from his soapbox.

- (speaking in German)

- (applause)

NARRATOR: To lay his empire's foundations,

Hitler had to rally more than just Germany's men to his cause.

Women had been called the architects of national Socialist society.

And Hitler knew he needed them

if he was going to build a thousand-year Reich.

As Hitler and his henchmen led the nation to war...

..his handmaidens would indoctrinate

a new generation of good little Nazis.

These were the female Fuhrers: Leni Riefenstahl...

Magda Goebbels...

Gertrud Scholtz-Klink...

..and Jutta Rudiger.

Together they would spawn the mother of all evil.

After Germany's humiliating defeat in the First World War,

crippling economic sanctions sent the nation to the brink.

In 1921, there were 64 marks to the dollar.

Just two years later, it was four trillion.

Families starved as skyrocketing inflation saw people

paying for a single loaf of bread

with a wheelbarrow stuffed with banknotes.

- Through the-the Weimar era, it was the women, the women at home

that saw all the violence on the streets,

that witnessed all the political and social chaos.

So, the women probably understood more so than ever how...

what a bad thing the Weimar Republic actually turned out to be.

- I think after World War One,

Germany was in a very difficult place.

And people were looking for a-a more positive future.

NARRATOR: Onto this rickety stage stepped Adolf Hitler

and the National Socialist Party.

- (speaking in German)

NARRATOR: Their brand of rabid nationalism

would transform German society and write one of

the darkest chapters of human history.

- (all shouting in German)

NARRATOR: At the centre of the Nazi vision for the future

was the ideal Aryan woman.

Blonde haired, blue-eyed and physically robust,

she was a wife and a mother above all else.

It's more than a little bizarre that Hitler, a sickly, paunchy,

dark-haired man, championed a physique

so far removed from his own.

It's less of a surprise that Hitler's ideal society

revolved around a mother-figure.

- Hitler's relationships to women appears to have been

extremely complicated, so we know from the records that he had

this Oedipus complex where he just so adored his mother

and so hated his father,

that this also really contributed to messing him up

in, um, extraordinary ways.

MAN: Certainly no one here ever dreamed that

the skinny son of the Hitlers would someday be

the supreme dictator of one of the greatest nations of the world.

Surely his father and mother, simple folk of this village,

would have been the last to vision

such an incredible future for their boy.

MOTZ: I think it's really significant in terms of his wish

to venerate women and respect them.

But there's also a very opportunistic aspect

which is that he wanted the reproduction of Aryan children.

NARRATOR: After the First World War, women had been given the vote

and encouraged to work and pursue higher education,

but to Hitler and his henchmen, that progress was a hangover

from the despised Weimar republic.

Worst of all, many of the intellectuals

lobbying for women's rights were, you guessed it, Jewish.

The Nazis wanted to turn back the clock.

Hitler was going to emancipate women from women's emancipation.

According to his warped way of looking at the world,

women had little to fear from so-called "oppressive men".

Instead, their mortal enemies were Jews,

Bolsheviks, and feminists.

MOTZ: I think the Nazi propaganda machine was incredibly effective.

And using the Jew as the scape goat, as the poison container

for all the ills in the world, so convenient.

It actually allowed Nazi men

to divert Nazi's women's potential anger

that they were being robbed of various rights

and opportunities in the workplace

and direct that anger and sense of grievance towards Jewish women.

NARRATOR: In 1933, when the Nazis proposed abolishing

women's right to vote, there was little push-back.

- (light piano music)

NARRATOR: Most young German women thought feminism was old news.

They had more pressing concerns.

After the great war, Germany's male population had been served up

a big slice of humble pie, and their women, their Fraus,

were in desperate need of a new generation of heroes.

They liked what Hitler had to say about

a return to traditional values.

Women were to be pushed out of the workforce and back into the home

and the domestic nirvana of "kinder, kuche, kirche".

- Kinder, kuche, kirche has always been women's job in Germany.

That means church, kitchen, children,

and this is what women were responsible for.

- It was almost like guidelines for German women,

to have as many German children as possible,

to create a comfortable home environment so that the men

who had been out perpetrating the Holocaust,

committing crimes, murdering people,

could come home into a nice, comfortable environment

and the church to give them a...

a faith, if you like, a collective.

- (speaking in German)

NARRATOR: Within months of taking the reins of power,

Hitler swung the axe on hard-won freedoms for women.

- (speaking in German)

NARRATOR: University admission rules were changed

so that only one in ten students could be a woman.

All female public servants were given their marching orders.

And female lawyers, judges and doctors were banned.

But Hitler didn't stop there.

The non-smoking and teetotalling Fuhrer

added drinking and smoking

to the growing list of no-go zones for women.

- The women, they were not allowed to use makeup.

Perms of the hair were outlawed.

Dyeing of their hair was outlawed.

They weren't allowed to wear clothing

that would accentuate the body shape.

Flat shoes, no stilettos.

They were just indoctrinated in banality.

NARRATOR: it's tempting to dismiss these edicts as yet another example

of Nazi control freakery...

but beneath his madness, there was a pernicious method and,

as always, a hidden agenda.

Jewish women had been at the forefront of

the independent women's movement.

They were also prominent in German medicine, law and education.

Convincing women to leave the workplace

and return to the home, however, would require quite a bit of spin.

Luckily, Hitler had just the man for the job.

ALL: Heil! Heil!

NARRATOR: To create a Thousand-year Reich,

Hitler and his Nazi regime needed women to stop working

and start making babies.

it was going to be a tough sell after the progress

made during the Weimar years.

But Hitler had the perfect spin doctor:

Joseph Goebbels.

- (speaking in German)

NARRATOR: It wasn't that Nazis thought women

were inferior to men, he said,

they were simply born with a different skill set that meant

that they could fulfil a crucially important role

as mothers of the Reich.

- They were caught up in this wonderful, wonderful idea.

We are creating this new Germany, just like the men are digging roads

and putting down motorways,

just as the men are joining the army.

We're helping new Germany by providing a good home

for them to come back to, by providing children for them.

This is our duty, and it was universally accepted.

NARRATOR: Joseph Goebbels led by example

by lining up his own perfect Frau:

Magda Goebbels, first lady of the Reich.

Tall, blonde and blue-eyed, with seven picture book children,

Magda was a favourite of the Fuhrer and a Nazi poster girl.

- Magda Goebbels was the mother, I suppose, of the whole country

since Hitler didn't have a wife.

And she was charming, she was beautiful,

and all of her children were named 'H' after Hitler of course.

NARRATOR: From day one, it was all about keeping up appearances.

Any dictatorship worth its salt needed its myth-maker-in-chief.

Ironically, for a regime that claimed

to want women chained to the kitchen sink,

Leni Riefenstahl did more than almost anyone else

to package Nazi ideology and sell it to the masses,

and she did it by conquering a male-dominated field.

Riefenstahl's own career began in front of the camera,

but it wasn't until 1932 that she caught the eye of a politician

who had thwarted artistic ambitions of his own.

Hitler recognised in Riefenstahl the skills needed to capture

the Nazi dream on film and beam it into cinemas across Germany.

Hitler recruited Riefenstahl to make a short film that would paint

a picture of Germany's glorious rebirth on a grand scale.

in 1933, she directed the Victory of Faith

at the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg.

It was a test run for Triumph of the Will,

the film she'd make at the same rally the following year.

REPORTER: Nazism has held its great convention.

Masses of uniformed men stupefying to the eye

and incredible to the imagination

has stood in spell bound audience of the Fuhrer.

NARRATOR: It would be acknowledged as the most powerful

propaganda film ever produced,

and in 1936 her film, Olympia,

captured the Berlin Games and projected images of an ascendant

and powerful Germany around the world.

Riefenstahl glorified the Germany of days gone by,

with rosy-cheeked maidens in folk costume,

celebrating the harvest, while their men did manly things.

Her films seemed to usher in a return to a Golden Age,

and they were a crucial ingredient in Hitler's plans

to brainwash the nation.

- If you look at some of the Leni Riefenstahl films,

and they always centre, of course, on the young, the attractive,

the physically attractive women, but they...

and they all got these faces that are, you know,

they're really in love with whoever this person is

in front of them talking.

That person happens to be Adolf Hitler.

TIM HEATH: He was like a pop star of his era,

like a George Michael of his era almost.

I mean girls would go hysterical to get near him,

to just touch him, to shake his hand.

NARRATOR: It beggars belief today, but Hitler believed

an important part of his appeal

was that women found him sexually attractive.

That meant he had to maintain the illusion of availability.

So, he remained childless

and kept his relationships with women on the downlow.

- I think Hitler hid his relationships

partly to embody a kind of pure, masculine ideal.

Someone who wasn't encumbered by domesticity,

by a wife or girlfriend, and he became this almost

personification of masculinity.

Also, a bit like a celebrity or pop star, it allowed

other women in the general population to fantasise

that they would be Hitler's girlfriend or wife.

NARRATOR: But when it came to involvement in the machinery

of government and national leadership,

even those women who publicly stood by his side

and helped the party rise to power

were left in the dust like all his hidden lovers.

- First, they, the Nazis,

had no idea who was going to be in charge of women.

They had men lined up for all the important jobs,

at the head of the party, at the head of the state,

foreign office, the cabinet members, and they had no women.

- There was a heck of a lot of devotion to Hitler in the 1920s

and yet a lot of the women who voted for Hitler...

And they did. You know, can't make too many bones

about that, they did vote for him.

But how did the Nazis repay these women?

They repaid them by limiting,

severely limiting, their involvement.

NARRATOR: Still, Hitler knew that he needed a figurehead to marshal

the women of the Reich, even if she was a leader in name only.

- They had a problem. If the woman had a husband,

then her first duty was to her husband.

And that didn't work because she wouldn't have time

to take over control.

What were they going to do?

And so, they looked and looked, and they found a leader in

a little obscure place in southwestern Germany.

Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, and she was a widow.

Not only that, her husband had died

on the battlefields in World War One,

and I think she had seven children.

Perfect. She also was blonde, blue-eyed,

and very compliant,

and she was the woman leader for the entire time.

And all of those independent leaders

from the old days just faded away.

NARRATOR: When Hitler appointed Scholtz Klink as the women's Fuhrer

and put her in charge of running the Nazi Women's League, or NSF,

she had virtually no leadership experience,

and that suited the men at the top of the party just fine.

Klink was excluded from important policy meetings,

and although she was often seen by Hitler's side,

she was never consulted on any decisions affecting women.

That didn't trouble Klink though, because, at least in name,

she was playing a key role

at the forefront of Germany's resurgence.

KOONZ: There was pageantry around everything.

Everything was stage managed.

Every parade had floats,

uniforms were everywhere, music was everywhere,

and just remember by 1936 Germany was the only country

in the world that recovered from the Great Depression.

There was full employment, there was rearmament,

Germany was back on the road to prosperity, and the women,

according to Scholtz-Klink, were very proud

that motherhood was valued again.

NARRATOR: By 1939, the Nazi Women's League had two million members.

During the war, a further 11 million joined its ranks.

It all played into Hitler's grand plan to build a master German race.

Change wouldn't happen if Nazi thinking

was confined to the halls of power.

it had to worm its way into German homes as well.

- The way that the German Women's Nazi League,

sort of, operated, I mean, the German youth, for one thing.

People like Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, she would come and visit the schools

and they would discuss politics,

and they'd be asked questions from Hitler's book.

Mein Kampf, for example,

if they couldn't answer the question then they would...

It was pretty much frowned upon.

So yeah, they, they did a lot in indoctrinating the youth of Germany.

- The Nazi party really encouraged the ideal woman to marry

and to have children, and to enable that,

there were marriage loans to help you pay towards

the cost of your wedding and setting up a home.

And then if you started having children they would...

you wouldn't have to pay back a certain amount of your loan.

And I think four children would wipe the loan off in its entirety.

NARRATOR: The incentive kicked off a rush to the altar

and mass weddings became the in thing.

More than 100 female employees from the Reemtsma cigarette company

were married to their new husbands in a single ceremony.

CARRADICE: Always with uniforms, always with honour guards,

and with dignitaries from the...

from the local Nazi party there to-to help them on their way.

They were encouraged to say, "This is my role,

I will get married." Giving birth to children

that was the key, that was the element

that they wanted to push. So, marriage was a means to an end.

NARRATOR: And those women who had hoped to marry

a member of Heinrich Himmler's SS were held to a higher standard.

Himmler believed his men were the racial elite of Nazi Germany...

..so he was keen for his men to spread their seed...

..but the women who wanted to bear their children

had to prove their pedigree.

- Himmler was the most thoroughgoing racist that is...

of all of them.

And for his SS men he demanded...

..absolutely Aryan wives.

- So, every SS man that wanted to get married had to have

his marriage personally approved by Heinrich Himmler.

And it involved reams of paperwork.

You had to send in on both sides your birth certificates,

your parents' birth certificates,

your grandparents' birth certificates,

you had to send in documents to show you had to clean bill of health.

NARRATOR: After that, they were expected to sign up for training

at one of the elite Reich bridal schools that Himmler

and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink had founded together.

KOONZ: Himmler was very much in favour of elite schooling

for SS wives or mistresses,

and they had to go to special schools called Lebensborn.

And these schools were in the Alps,

they were in beautiful chalets; they were super luxe.

NARRATOR: And being Nazi Germany, no educational programme

would be complete without lessons in racial theory and eugenics.

Fairy tales were tweaked so they communicated

the right messages to impressionable baby Nazis.

Before graduating with the certificate they needed

to walk down the aisle with their SS groom,

the wannabe Nazi brides had to pledge

their undying loyalty to Hitler.

They even had to memorise a bedtime prayer to teach their children.

"My Fuhrer, I know you well and I love you

like my father and mother."

They were taught they had no agency over their own bodies,

that they belonged to the Reich, and it was their responsibility

to keep fit so they were ready to perform

their ultimate duty, to bear children.

- This was seen the fact of, um...

particularly of a young woman's body becoming property of the state,

uh, and the Fuhrer, this was seen actually as a...

as a great honour to many of them.

It wasn't seen as something dirty.

This was this was a real honour to be considered as such.

But certainly, the younger ones they're extremely patriotic,

extremely excited about this 1,000-year Reich,

now Germany's going to be wonderful again.

- (speaking in German)

CARRADICE: Get them young, keep them old.

That was Hitler's dictum.

You know, you get them at a young age,

and they'll stay with you right to the end.

They were very clear, we get them very, very young, we...

and we make it... We don't make it voluntary,

we make it compulsory.

So, every girl in Germany has to belong to this.

Just like every boy has to belong to the Hitler youth.

And it created soldiers for the Reich, for the Wehrmacht,

and it created wives for the men who would then propagate children,

and that's more soldiers for-for-for the Wehrmacht.

NARRATOR: Adolf Hitler saw Germany's mothers as his secret weapon.

They were his advance troops, readying the ground

for a Nazi campaign of shock and awe that would engulf the world.

NARRATOR: In Nazi Germany there were two roles for women:

care for the household, and making Aryan babies.

To incentivise both, the Nazi propaganda machine

went to work celebrating mothers

as the crowning glory of the Third Reich.

The ultimate reward for Nazi mums was the Mother's Honour Cross,

a pin to be worn in public

that would help boost their pension, score the best seats on the bus,

and park in pole position at Nazi events.

- The German Mutterkreuz, or the German Mother's Cross,

was a German award created specifically for the German mother,

and it was graded in bronze, silver and gold.

Bronze was for a woman who had four children,

silver was for a woman who had six,

and gold was given to a woman with eight children.

NARRATOR: Predictably, the first woman to be awarded

the gold Mother's Honour Cross was Magda Goebbels,

the first lady of the Reich,

and mother to a swarm of Nazi children.

Nazi women were being asked to breed like rabbits

because Germany, like its European neighbours,

was in the midst of a population crisis.

One in 20 Germans had died in the First World War,

many of them young men in their prime.

More concerning was the fact that during the conflict,

birth rates halved.

As Heinrich Himmler put it,

too few children meant a one-way ticket to the grave.

Without a wave of baby Nazis, the Thousand-Year Reich

would remain little more than a pipe dream.

CARRADICE: Contraception was outlawed, abortion was outlawed.

Hitler, and Gerring, and Goebbels, they realised they needed numbers,

pure numbers if they're going to push for Lebensraum.

NARRATOR: The 'spring of life', or Lebensborn programme

was a Nazis way of incentivising childbirth under any circumstance.

It offered Aryan women financial assistance

and adoption services in a series of private maternity homes.

These even included single young women who had fallen

for the charms of SS storm troopers.

WENDY LOWER: So, Himmler set up homes

for these single women who were impregnated by SS men.

The Lebensborn programme is part of that.

It's about trying to support the German women

who are having these babies, um,

and provide them these subsidies and provide all this, um,

kind of, healthcare and to promote that.

NARRATOR: In most European countries,

unwed mothers were vilified, but not in Nazi Germany.

Here, the contents of their wombs were precious.

Mothers in the programme were supported

if they decided to keep their babies.

If not, they could foster them to an family.

- (cheering)

NARRATOR: Whether it was in their women's leagues

or the green countryside of the Lebensborn programme,

Nazism was a cradle-to-grave proposition

for the future wives and mothers of the master race.

After receiving their first lessons in Nazi indoctrination

at their mothers' knees,

young German girls moved into the classroom.

Nazi officials had purged all Jewish or politically dubious teachers

from the school system, and, of course,

all "anti-Nazi" material and books by Jewish authors

were consigned to the flames.

And the training didn't stop

when the school bell rang at the end of the day.

HEATH: Bund Deutscher Madel,

which was the League of German Girls,

that was basically a Hitler Youth organisation for the girls.

Now you had two... It was basically a two tiered,

um, Hitler Youth organisation.

You had the Jungmadelbund, which was the Young Girls' League.

Now, this catered for girls from 10 to 14 years of age,

and the teachings or the political ethos of the party, etc.,

would be taught to them, then when they came to the age of 14

they would transfer into the Bund Deutscher Madel,

which was the League of German Maidens,

and from 14 to 18.

NARRATOR: The most influential leader of the BDM, Jutta Rudiger,

took it over in 1937, and stayed at the helm

until Nazi Germany was crushed by the Allies in 1945.

It didn't matter to Rudiger that in accordance with Nazi policy,

she would always be subordinate

to the male leader of the Hitler Youth.

- (all chanting "Heil")

NARRATOR: As a paediatric psychologist,

Rudiger had the inside-track on shaping impressionable young minds.

She declared her intention to create what she called

the "new German woman", who would be the bearer of German culture

and moral standards for the nation.

- Part of the Nazi machinery

was to put people in positions of power

in ways that could be very useful.

For example, Jutta Rudiger, who was a paediatric psychologist,

would be extremely useful in terms of, uh,

indoctrinating young girls in the, uh, BDM.

- First of all, it was a problem because she had a doctorate,

and they didn't like the idea of women with doctorates.

But she pointed out that her doctorate was in gymnastics.

So, they said OK. She was really good.

She was a terrific bureaucratic fighter.

NARRATOR: While membership of the BDM

eventually became compulsory, so powerful was the indoctrination

that girls were willingly signing up in droves.

- Even before 33, a lot of those young women joined secretly

because they loved joining the Girls'... Nazi Girls League.

And they went off marching, and they went to the party rallies.

and the party rallies were mixed, unlike the schools,

which were gender separated.

- (all chanting "Heil")

NARRATOR: At weekly meetings, regular excursions,

and annual summer camps, girls were indoctrinated with Nazi ideology.

They were taught how so-called 'defective'

Jewish genes had weakened German stock.

They were told that Jews were dangerous and lecherous

and that they should expect their men to protect them

from the Jewish menace.

Like every other aspect of life for women in Nazi Germany,

this was all geared towards turning out compliant wives and mothers

who would pass on their skills and attitudes to their Aryan children.

- There was a great deal of emphasis on home economics.

And so, they learned sewing, and they-they also had

very, very good education on maternal care

and how to make sure that their health was protected,

and those were very practical kinds of courses.

CENTURY: It's about mixing with other people that were of

the same desirable level, so other German Aryans.

Some of it was a bit educational.

So, in the case of the Bund Deutscher Madel,

learning how to be a good German woman,

a good German wife and mother, and some of it was more practical.

So, they would do camping, things like that,

so that they had more practical skills.

NARRATOR: Their destiny was mapped out for them.

As Rudiger explained it, German girls were responsible

for keeping the nation's blood pure.

She was careful, however, to obscure the political purpose of the BDM

because, like all good cults, its real appeal

to its female membership was that it offered them

a strong sense of comradeship and belonging.

- Now, the sweeteners were the camps they would go on

because this enabled them a sense of equality.

They were going out into the hills, the forest in Germany,

learning how to build fires, set snares to trap animals,

and, of course, sleeping in tents of a nighttime.

Just the things that the boys did, the Hitler Youth boys did.

So, they were gaining some sense of equality.

NARRATOR: But when war broke out in 1939,

attitudes toward women underwent a dramatic change.

When the air-raid sirens began to sound,

it turned out that the ideal woman in Germany was not a mother,

she was a warrior.

It was no longer about rearing the Aryan race.

Instead, German women were expected to sacrifice for the fatherland.

In keeping with the change of policy,

Gertrud Scholtz Klink and the NSF urged women to get out

of the kitchen and get back to work.

It was, she said, a "higher obligation".

Women were expected to put their shoulders to the wheel

as industry geared up for rearmament,

and men rushed to join the armed forces.

- Millions of men had been called up to fight, to be on the front line,

and women were needed to replace them in vital roles.

The German Army couldn't function without these women to support them.

And so, it was a contradiction from the Nazi party's earlier campaigns

that women should stay at home and be good German mothers

and good German wives.

So, the various organisations that women could join

in the build-up to the war, such as the NS Frauenschaft

or the Bund Deutscher Madel, once the war broke out,

this was a really good opportunity of an untapped resource.

NARRATOR: With a female workforce of millions under her control

Jutta Rudiger dispatched her BDM girls

wherever they were needed on the home front.

They were put to work in munitions factories and farms.

Well-to-do girls from families with connections

were pressed into office work.

Getting women back into the workforce

wasn't going to be enough though.

Soon, Hitler would have to turn to female conscription.

But he was concerned that conscripting German women

had the potential to damage troop morale.

He knew it didn't sit well with the soldiers at the front.

They'd been sold the story that they were fighting to protect

the women who were keeping the home fires burning.

But with the failure of operation Barbarossa

and Hitler's plan to create Lebensraum in the east

by conquering the Soviet Union,

the drain on manpower forced his hand...

..and the campaign to enlist women in the war effort accelerated.

HEATH: Germany, it was in a... in a dire situation,

and even women were-were called to fight for the Fuhrer.

Like, Hitler did say to one of the women,

well, why shouldn't a woman have the right to-to-to fight

for the Fuhrer? Why should it be a man?

If that woman can fight, let her do so, let them come.

And this was the generally accepted position at that time.

Then the young girls of the Hitler Youth,

they were given a Panzerfaust or a pistol, anything that could cause

a casualty to the enemy was seen as, yeah, this is what we have to do.

Especially as the Russians were nearing Berlin.

- (gunfire)

NARRATOR: As the tides of war turned against Germany,

all the promises the Nazi Party made to women would be broken.

Ultimately, as the German war effort faltered,

the Nazi women's leagues and girls' groups

would be called to the front lines.

But there was one more insult Hitler had in store for them.

- (tense music)

NARRATOR: in the dying days of the war, Hitler and the Nazi Party,

once staunch proponents of the women's place in the home,

would call them to the front lines.

But even in defeat, they hadn't abandoned their dream of creating

an Aryan race to advance the aims of the future German Reich.

- (cheering)

NARRATOR: The Nazi hierarchy had done the maths

and concluded that Germany would have four million fertile women

in surplus after the war to fewer than a million men.

Hitler wanted all remaining physically and mentally fit

German men to impregnate as many women as possible

before the end of the war.

Himmler was all for the idea,

and soon bigamy was even floated as an option.

LOWER: Himmler told his men, when you go home on furlough,

you come home from the Eastern Front,

make sure you procreate as much as possible.

And the wives had to just accept that their husbands

had mistresses and multiple girlfriends.

- And again, that's a little bit of a contradiction

because it was showing that marriage wasn't important,

despite the fact that women earlier had been given loans to get married.

and support to get married. and were encouraged to get married.

But now these high-ranking SS men were encouraged to take

a second wife so that she could produce more German children.

- (crowd chanting "Heil")

NARRATOR: Luckily for Hitler, the indoctrination of the Nazi Youth

had worked, and any resentment of the older population

felt at the shifting goalposts was not shared by their Nazi children.

Their daughters had been taught that Hitler came first.

In the closing days of the war, this would have deadly consequences

for hundreds of thousands of young Germans.

in February 1945, it was proposed that the BDM members should form

a woman's battalion in a desperate bid to defend the Reich.

- (speaking in German)

NARRATOR: Several young BDM girls volunteered

for the Volkssturm or "people's storm",

the civilian militia manned by old men,

young boys and girls as the Nazi fatherland's last line of defence.

- They were taught how to-to create explosive devices,

improvised explosive devices,

how to set them up, where to position them.

They were trained on, first of all, small, like, air rifle type weapons,

but then as they became more competent, they were using

full boar army rifles, and, in fact,

they were trained how to use a hand grenade.

NARRATOR: One girl, aged just 15, recalled the moment Allied troops

were marching towards her home in Aachen.

When she asked for help from one of the many SS soldiers,

he warned her that when the Russian soldiers

arrived in the city, first, they'd rape her, then they'd shoot her.

Despite all Hitler's big talk,

this was how Germany fell in the end,

with teenage boys and girls laying down their lives

for his psychotic ambition and craven ideology.

During the last four months of the war,

700 Germans died every hour.

Hitler's deluded refusal to admit defeat at the bitter end

caused the death of an additional 1.2 million Germans,

many of them the women and girls he'd sworn to protect.

While the pride of Germany was being slaughtered in the streets,

Hitler and his acolytes were cowering

almost 30 feet below ground,

beneath a ten-foot-thick concrete slab.

Hiding in his bunker, Hitler had left

his womenfolk to do the fighting for him.

As the Reich fell, as many as two million German women

were raped by Allied soldiers, most of them Russian.

- This is perhaps the single most hardest part

because with Hitler's girls...

um, sheer number of women who had suffered serious sexual assault

from the Russians, mostly being beaten up and raped.

NARRATOR: The ghastly truth behind Nazi Germany's

attitude to women found its expression

in the horrific final chapter of Magda Goebbels' life.

It became apparent that the depth of her much-celebrated

familial devotion was paper-thin.

Having done nothing to save her Jewish stepfather,

a man who raised her and gave her his name,

she resorted at the last to an act of even greater cruelty and evil.

As Allied troops closed in on Berlin,

the Goebbels family was sheltering with the Fuhrer in his bunker.

As it became clear that the war was lost,

the first lady of the Reich made a fateful decision.

She wrote to her eldest son, Harald,

who was in a POW camp in North Africa,

that a world without Hitler wasn't a world worth living in.

KOONZ: Magda was the symbol of motherhood with seven children.

Although I should say that in the very last days of the Reich,

Magda and her husband poisoned all of those children

and they died in the bunker with Hitler.

One escaped because he happened to be somewhere else.

NARRATOR: Women in Nazi Germany were portrayed

as the heart of the family, and the foundations upon which

the Thousand-Year Reich was to be built.

In fact, at the same time Hitler was championing mothers

and wives as the most important people in Germany,

his policies were aimed at eroding the very freedoms

and rights that made them strong.

The female Fuhrers who worked with him to realise his dream

of an Aryan nation helped bring Germany's women to their knees.

But as the post-war dust settled on a nation

that had been torn to pieces,

it would be the widows, the mourning mothers

and the girl soldiers who would put Germany back together again.

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