Women of the Third Reich

From camp guards to combatants and typists to telephone operators, Tim Heath shines a light on the experience and activities of women embroiled in the Third Reich.

The women of the Third Reich were a vital part in a complex and vilified system. What was their role within its administration, the concentration camps, and the Luftwaffe and militia units and how did it evolve in the way it did?

We hear from women who issued typewritten dictates from above through to those who operated telephones, radar systems, fought fires as the cities burned around them, drove concentration camp inmates to their deaths like cattle, fired Anti-Aircraft guns at Allied aircraft and entered the militias when faced with the impending destruction of what should have been a one thousand-year Reich.

Every testimony is unique, each person a victim of circumstance entwined within the thorns of an ideological obligation. In an interview with Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary, she remembers: ‘There was so much hatred within it’s hard to understand how the state functioned…I am convinced all this infighting and competition from the males in Hitler’s circle was highly detrimental to its downfall’.

Women of the Third Reich provides an intriguing, humorous, brutal, shocking and unrelenting narrative journey into the half lights of the hell of human consciousness – sometimes at its worst.