Witten Women's Protest

After being evacuated from the city of Witten due to the dangers of Allied bombing raids, women and children were moved to the countryside in Baden, away from their husbands and homes.

[2] Relatively new evacuation rules established the previous spring discontinued the practice of Freizügigkeit, in which civilians were able to pay their own way and evacuate anywhere they chose to- with the end of this practice, a flood of evacuees began to pour into similar government assigned areas, causing problems for cities as civilians with different dialects, customs, and religions moved into one shared space.

[4] In a November 1943 report on current events and their effect on women's mood, the Nazi secret police (security service, SD) made a detailed report to the Third Reich's highest authorities, stating that on 11 October 1943 about 300 women had demonstrated in front of city hall in Witten in order to take a public position against official measures.

They refused to get involved however since the demands of the women were fair and there was no legal basis for not handing out food ration cards to German people who had returned [home].

The publication in the newspaper as well as at the distribution center on October 12, 1943 that food ration cards would not only be denied to those who had returned but also to all children required to attend school, even if they had not yet been evacuated, led to a firsthand rebellion among the women, who had been capable of anything, without exercise of the least restraint or caution about consequences.

By 1943, as British and American bombing raids continued to increase in intensity, Hitler wished to evacuate all civilians from targeted cities not essential to the war production industries by most means necessary.

In Witten the women protested the regional party leader's decision to deny ration cards to evacuees who returned to their homes in cities subject to bombing raids.

At the same time, he insisted that civilians must volunteer for evacuations rather than being forced into them- within four months of the protests in Witten, Hitler responded with policy that allowed more women and children to both return to their homes and received ration cards.

Propaganda Minister and Hitler confidant Joseph Goebbels mused in his diary on November 2, 1943, that repeated concessions to protesters could cost the regime authority in the eyes of the German people.

"The regime gave in to the women's protests," because it feared that "open resistance might have become very difficult to suppress without alienating not only the general populace but also the soldiers at the front.

Yet no explanation of any feature of German social history— least of all the rise of Hitler— that leaves out of consideration the larger part of the population can be considered adequate; and there are now [1976], at last signs that the realization of this fact is starting to make an impact at least on historians in Britain and the United States, though it has still to find widespread acceptance in Germany.

"[9] However, in his 2008 work, he ignored the scholarship that backed up his 1976 conclusion, stating that "...the threat of arrest, prosecution and incarceration in increasingly brutal and violent conditions loomed over every one in the Third Reich.