All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

by Rebecca Donner

It was at a beer hall in Munich, the Hofbräuhaus, where Hitler, age thirty, delivered one of his first significant speeches.

Finally, after so much undignified stumbling and struggling, after ignominious defeat in the First World War—known then as the Great War—Germans will get on their feet. Germany will be strong again.

The People’s Radio was designed with a limited range to ensure that only German stations could be heard. Turning the dial to a station broadcasting from London was an exercise in frustration, the whistling static a reminder that the Nazi government didn’t want its citizens to hear news from other countries.

Six days ago, Hitler gutted the Weimar Constitution. He did it legally, right under everyone’s nose, without bullets or blood. Germans have lost nearly all their rights—all but one. They still have the right to vote.

It’s essentially impossible to find a condom in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany. Contraception was readily available in major cities by the end of the Weimar Republic. Vending machines dispensed condoms in men’s public restrooms. Clinics provided free condoms. Now they’re illegal.

Over nineteen thousand women in leadership positions at the ministries and in regional and local government offices are immediately fired. Women lawyers are dismissed from firms. Women physicians are ousted from clinics. Restaurant owners are threatened by police if they don’t sack their waitresses and replace them with men.

There were over eighteen thousand female university students in Germany before Hitler took power, a number that soon plummets to 5,447.

Hitler establishes his mother’s birthday, August 12, as the new Mother’s Day and declares it a national holiday.

“German men want real German women again,” asserts a 1933 Nazi handbook. The farmer’s wife is celebrated as the feminine ideal: healthy and strong, unsullied by perfume or paint.

Goebbels’s wife, Magda, to serve as honorary president. Blond-haired, blue-eyed Magda Goebbels seems perfect for the job, a model of Aryan beauty and fertility who recently gave birth to a daughter, Helga.

German women are urged to have as many children as possible. A bronze medallion etched with the words Ehrenzeichen der Deutschen Mutter—the Cross of Honor of the German Mother—is awarded to a woman on the birth of her fourth child. For her sixth child, the medallion is silver; for her eighth, gold.

Parents of six children pay no income tax at all.

Gynecologists may receive the death penalty if they are found guilty of terminating an unwanted pregnancy, but only if the woman is Aryan, “racially pure.” There is no penalty for terminating the pregnancy of a woman who is “racially inferior.”

on July 20, 1933. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli—who will become Pope Pius XII in 1939—acts as Pope Pius XI’s representative. With the stroke of a pen, the Vatican grants moral legitimacy to Hitler.