My research has focused on a group of German women (from the ‘Altreich’, from Austria, in addition to ‘ethnic German’ women recruited from Poland itself) working in occupied Poland as political organizers, settlement advisers and teachers in schools and kindergartens, above all in the Reichsgau Wartheland and in the General Government. They were not direct participants in the extermination process. However, as members of the civilian population resident in the territories in which crimes against the occupation were committed, they were witnesses of Poles being evacuated from their homes and of Jews being deported.  Moreover, as employees of organizations involved in the ‘Germanization’ of the conquered territories they took an active part in the processes of population restructuring, expropriation and exploitation undertaken by the Nazi occupation authorities and particularly by the RKF apparatus. This paper will review the evidence of female involvement in the destruction of Polish and Jewish homes, resources and livelihoods, and set it in the context of other recent literature on German women’s involvement in Nazi occupation policies in occupied eastern Europe. It will consider the women’s attitudes to their own work and that of others, exploring how the division of labour within the Germanization process was gendered, and how the labour and property of the non-German population was harnessed to the process of ‘creating homes for Germans’ in the occupied East.

Elizabeth Harvey, Prof. Ph.D., is Professor of History at the University of Nottingham.  She has previously taught at the Universities of Liverpool, Salford and Dundee; in 2004 she held the Käthe-Leichter-Gastprofessur für Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte at the University of Vienna, based in the Institute for Contemporary History. She has published on the history of youth, social policy, women and nationalism, and Germanization policies in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Her research interests are on women’s and gender history with a focus on twentieth-century Germany. Her most recent research has focused on the history of photography.

Publications (Selection)

- Gender Relations in German History. London,1996 (co-editor  Lynn Abrams)
- Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization, New Haven, 2003
- Zwischen Kriegen: Nationen, Nationalismen und Geschlechterverhältnisse in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1918-1939. Osnabrück, 2004 (co-editors Johanna Gehmacher and Sophia Kemlein)