Making Women Work: Privilege and Powerlessness in Nazi Germany

Lecture by Elizabeth Harvey, University of Nottingham

This lecture will examine women’s work in the Nazi economy as a contested source of privilege and a site of exploitation and oppression, asking which categories of women were ‘made to work’ and where, and what degree of agency they had, if any. If in 1933 the regime regarded German married women’s employment outside the home as a problem, by the later years of the Second World War it was now their non-employment outside the home that the labour administration regarded as a challenge. By that stage foreign women had become increasingly drawn on by the labour administration and employers for work in Germany and in the occupied territories, but subjected to very unequal degrees of coercion and exploitation depending on their nationality and "race."

Elizabeth Harvey is Professor of History at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization(2003) and has co-edited Hitler: New Research (2018) and Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany (2019). She is a member of the Independent Historians’ Commission on the History of the Reich Labour Ministry under National Socialism appointed by the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, and a member of the international advisory board for the document edition The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933-1945. She is currently researching aspects of gender and forced labour in wartime Europe with the support of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Kinsler Endowment for Holocaust Studies at UVM

Annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture

Alfred Rosenberg: Hitler's Chief Ideologist and the Murder of the Jews

Jürgen Matthäus, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

If the name Alfred Rosenberg evokes any association at all, it is usually one dominated by his role as chief ideologue of Nazism. This perception, undisputed during the Nazi era and disturbingly visible on ultra-right websites to this day, of a tireless, unrepentant propagandist of Nazi ideology tends to underrate Rosenberg’s political influence on the shaping of the “final solution of the Jewish question.” As this lecture will demonstrate, based on newly contextualized sources, at no time during the Third Reich was Rosenberg’s political influence more crucial than in the fateful transition period from persecution to genocide. From the spring of 1941 until early 1942, Rosenberg played a lead role among Hitler’s lieutenants in devising ways to implement their vision of a Europe "free of Jews." In his capacity as “Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories,” Rosenberg oversaw a massive radicalization of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies as the mass murder of Jewish men, women, and children became standard practice in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Building on Raul Hilberg’s insight into the complex nexus of perpetration, the lecture will critically reflect on the interactions among key agents at a critical juncture in Holocaust history.

Jürgen Matthäus received his Ph.D. in history in 1992 from the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum, Germany. Since 2005 he has been serving as Director for Applied Research at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Recent book publications include: (ed. with Th. Pegelow Kaplan and Mark Hornburg) Beyond “Ordinary Men”: Christopher Browning and Holocaust Historiography (2019); Predicting the Holocaust: Jewish Organizations Report from Geneva on the Emergence of the “Final Solution,” 1939-1942 (2018); (edited with E. Kerenji) Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933-1946 (2017), and (edited with Frank Bajohr) The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust (2015).

The opinions voiced in this lecture are those of the presenter; they do not represent the opinions of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture is supported by Jerold D. Jacobson, Esquire, of New York City, UVM Class of 1962, and his wife Gertraude Holle-Suppa.

UVM College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture

Trapped Between Nazism and Fascism: German Jews in Italy, 1933-45 (title tentative)

Susanna Schrafstetter, University of Vermont

Details TBA

Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture

Why? Explaining the Holocaust

Peter Hayes, Northwestern University

Details TBA

Supported by the Richard Ader/Paul Konigsberg Endowment for the UVM Center for Holocaust Studies