"Die Alte Garde" - Women who joined the NSDAP before 1933: an interview with Randy Smookler, Ph.D. candidate

I started my college career as a political science major, and I focused on studying political ideologies and theory. My specific interest was in how extremist political organizations emerge and develop. I started reading about both Communism and Nazism. From there, I began to work on the Holocaust, because both sides of my family were decimated during the Final Solution. That in turn drove my studies of Nazi ideology. My broad research question is: how did a nation that was famous for its contributions to Western culture get attracted to Nazism? How could that happen? And for years now, I have been asking ‘why’ – and the more I asked, the more I read, and the more I asked.

Initially, I had planned to look at men in the German Wehrmacht. Specifically, to evaluate the secret transcripts of German soldiers who were POWs of the Allies and the U.S. These tapes had only recently come to light in both the UK National Archives and the Library of Congress. They provide candid snapshots of German soldiers’ perspectives on war, atrocities, the Final Solution, Nazi ideology and more. However, someone beat me to this topic, and their book was published just before I had my prospective defense. I had to pivot rapidly to a new research project, and I decided to focus on women instead.

In my dissertation, I am looking at German women who joined the Nazi party between 1919 and 1933, long before Hitler came to power. They were called the old guard, die alte Garde. I am looking at their motivations to join the NSDAP and how they remembered their service to the party. While the historiography on women’s involvement in National Socialism has shifted from seeing them as passive victims to active participants, the group of women I am studying has been labeled the lunatic fringe and considered as acting irrationally. However, the early female joiners had distinct reasons for doing so, and their reasons were often the same as those of men.

All the women were nationalists. Most of them came from lower middle- and middle-class backgrounds and were raised in nationalist households. Germany was sacred to them; it was something worth dying for. They were scarred by World War I. They had lost fathers, brothers, husbands, sons. They deplored how the soldiers returning from the war were treated. They were receptive to how National Socialism valorized the soldiers’ experience in the Great War. They could not accept that the sacrifices they made, the losses they experienced were considered meaningless. They resented the socialist Weimar governments, they feared Communism.

One misconception is that these early female joiners were under the spell of Hitler, that they were his fan girls. According to my research, these women joined before they heard or saw Hitler. They joined as political actors in their own right. Indeed, in many households, it was the women who drew the men into the party. The women were active members who helped the party survive during its rocky first years. They sold flags to fundraise, they provided meals to party activists, they nursed those who had been injured in street fighting. Some embraced the use of violence. Many of them lost their jobs because of their party affiliation. They were attacked in the street and sometimes ostracized by their families. But what sustained them was faith in the national socialist community they were establishing, which was in this early period almost a community of suffering.

I am mainly relying on two sets of primary sources. One is a collection of memoirs of old fighters, women and men, from the Hesse area in Germany. This collection was compiled by Adalbert Gimbel in 1936 and later captured and brought to the U.S. to help with denazification. I consulted them in the Library of Congress.

The other source is the Theodore Abel papers. Abel was a sociology professor who in 1934 traveled to Germany on behalf of Columbia University to find out why ordinary Germans had joined the NSDAP. He issued a call for autobiographies from party members about why they had joined. Abel received hundreds of essays, which enabled him to write on the appeal of Nazism in Germany. In his work though, he did not use the essays submitted by women. I extracted those that originated in Hesse and combined them with the Gimbel memoirs.

The two primary sources gave me a set of 27 lives to work with. While this is not a lot, it is all we have got. The women were anything from 15 to 70 years old when they joined the party. All of them had received some schooling, and many also vocational or professional training. Most of them were married, a lot were Catholic. Belonging to the party gave them something to strive for that was bigger than themselves. It empowered them to transcend purely female roles. Instead of cooking dinner, they saw themselves saving their country.

I translated all my sources from German into English. That forced me to really engage with the mental landscape of the women. To translate their stories as they had narrated them, to be true to their meaning, I had to get inside their minds. This also meant that when I started writing, I had their voices in my head. I knew my questions, and I had translated their answers and made notes of quotes I could use. With this tight group of sources, writing the dissertation was not too difficult. I enjoyed letting the women speak, connecting their personal experiences with broader historical developments.