t "destroyed ethical vision, debased human traditions and rendered decent people helpless" (p. 17, et passim). Controversy surrounds Koonz's research, however. Rosenhaft's review of her book (1989) suggests that the greatest debasement of women's ethical sense occurred in the higher classes and did not necessarily pervade the whole of German society. She suggests that Koonz handles exclusively with the effect of Nazism on professional, upper middle class women, and does not offer a broad enough class-based analysis of women's position in that period.
Koonz's rejoinder (1989) is backed up by an examination (Bridenthal & Koonz, 1976) of Hitler's anti-feminist ideology, promulgated in the years of the Weimar Republic, which lasted from 1919 to 1933. These were the years in which, after World War I, Germany first encountered a republican form of government. Implicit in that society was an increase in women's rights and options. In this regard, Koonz (1976a) notes that before the establishment of the Weimar Republic, women were legally barred from participation in German politics. Thus they entered the entire democratic-political process with a wholly different set of values and goals than their male counterparts. There was some activity among women legislators on behalf of women's rights, but women did not as a group participate effectively in debates on issues of national and international policy, such as on the economy. This left them outside the "loop" of insider politics. Thus, when depression and hyperinflation struck Germany in the 1920s and the whole of society was disintegrating, women had no institutional basis on which to continue their power. According to Koonz, the women's need for security overcame any tenuous commitment to their own emancipation. This explains in part why those females who were involved in the political process were relegated to traditional familial roles.
Bridenthal and Koonz (1976) also p...