The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

At Hitler’s insistence the production of civilian goods had been maintained at a surprisingly large figure throughout the war—ostensibly to keep up morale. And he had balked at carrying out the prewar plans to mobilize women for work in the factories. “The sacrifice of our most cherished ideals is too great a price,” he said in March 1943 when Speer wanted to draft women for industry.4 Nazi ideology had taught that the place of the German woman was in the home and not in the factory—and in the home she stayed. In the first four years of the war, when in Great Britain two and a quarter million women had been placed in war production, only 182,000 women were similarly employed in Germany.