Compulsory Integration of Women’s Organizations

The Women’s Aid Society was part of the National Protestant Women’s Aid Society in Potsdam, which in turn was affiliated with the Central Association of the Inner Mission. As of 1933, the Women’s Aid Society was part of the Women’s Bureau of the German Evangelical Church. The Women’s Bureau was able to adopt a neutral position in the church struggle and actually even increasingly tended toward the Confessing Church.

Reich Bishop Müller attempted to counter such tendencies by uniting all of the women’s organizations on the soil of the German Evangelical Church in the Women’s Service of the German Evangelical Church on April 24, 1935. He called upon Protestant women’s organizations to join it since the Women’s Bureau of the German Evangelical Church, including the National Women’s Aid Society, had aligned itself with the Confessing Church. This new Women’s Service, intended to be aligned with the German Christians and the Reich Church, was part of the German Women’s Bureau and thus the National Socialist Women’s League.

The Women’s Bureau of the German Evangelical Church, which had been eliminated from the German Women’s Bureau on November 23, 1935 because it competed with the Women’s Service of the German Evangelical Church, was also part of the German Women’s Bureau. The Reich Church Committee consequently backed the Women’s Bureau of the German Evangelical Church. In some parishes, the Confessing Church’s Women’s Aid Society and the German Christians’ Women’s Service were pitted against one another and vied for the use of church premises.