Wehrmachthelferin

Wehrmachthelferin was the name for girls and young women who served during the Second World War with the German Wehrmacht.[1][2]

Wehrmachthelferinnen in occupied Paris, 1940.

History

In the beginning, women in Nazi Germany were not involved in the Wehrmacht, as Hitler ideologically opposed conscription for women,[3] stating that Germany would "not form any section of women grenade throwers or any corps of women elite snipers."[4] However, with many men going to the front, women were placed in auxiliary positions within the Wehrmacht, called Wehrmachtshelferinnen (transl. Female Wehrmacht helpers),[5] participating in tasks such as:

  • telephone, telegraph and transmission operators,
  • administrative clerks, typists and messengers,
  • operators of listening equipment, in anti-aircraft defense, operating projectors for anti-aircraft defense, employees within meteorology services, and auxiliary civil defense personnel
  • volunteer nurses in military health service, as the German Red Cross or other voluntary organizations.

They were placed under the same authority as Hiwis, auxiliary personnel of the army (German: Behelfspersonal) and they were assigned to duties within the Reich, and to a lesser extent, in the occupied territories, for example in the general government of occupied Poland, in France, and later in Yugoslavia, in Greece and in Romania.[6]

By 1945, 500,000 women were serving as Wehrmachtshelferinnen, half of whom were volunteers, while the other half performed obligatory services connected to the war effort (German: Kriegshilfsdienst).[5]

In the media
gollark: Rust.
gollark: My font is now the IBM 3270 one, because font configuration on Linux is evil.
gollark: _ponders the necessity of folders other than `~/Programming` and `~/.factorio`_
gollark: Plus the important stuff, like factorio saves.
gollark: I want to copy my `~/Programming` folder off the disk before formatting it, obviously.

See also
  • Ranks and insignia of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services

References
  1. Gordon Williamson, World War II German Women's Auxiliary Services (2003).
  2. Hagemann, Karen (2011). "Mobilizing Women for War: The History, Historiography, and Memory of German Women's War Service in the Two World Wars". Journal of Military History. 75 (4): 1055–1094.
  3. Greenwald 1981, p. 125.
  4. Sigmund 2004, p. 184.
  5. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum n.d.
  6. Kompisch 2008, p. 219.
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