A War of Flowers (2014) by Jane Thynne Page A

shrine to the place of women as housewives
and mothers – the headquarters of the National Socialist Women’s League, the NS Frauenschaft. Whose leader, installed within close barking distance in the office next to Rosa’s,
was Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, universally known as the Führerin, the most important woman in the entire Reich.
    With six children of her own and ten million German women at her polish-free fingertips, the female Führer was described by Hitler as ‘the perfect Nazi woman’. She wore her hair
snaked round her head in braids, a field-grey uniform shirt buttoned to the neck and an expression like thunder, exacerbated by the fact that she was currently going through a divorce, because she
deemed her country doctor husband insufficiently Nazified. Rosa sometimes wondered if Hitler himself was frightened of the Führerin, given that everyone else was. Rosa had met the Führer
once. He had paid a visit to the office and talked about his mother and the importance of women to the future of the Fatherland. He was much less intimidating than the Führerin herself. He had
a pudgy, pale face and strangely penetrating eyes that looked at you as though they were looking through you. He was so different from the shrieking figure on the platform she had seen on the
newsreel, rattling away like a machine gun, that she could almost understand those women who were said to turn up at the Reich Chancellery offering to carry his baby. But not quite.
    The only person who was certainly not scared of the Führerin was the SS-Reichsführer Himmler, who had responsibility for coordinating the activities of the Woman’s Bureau at
ministerial level because no women were allowed in Hitler’s cabinet. Rosa had picked up the telephone once to Himmler and the sound of his soft, menacing rasp almost caused her to drop the
receiver. The idea that he too might pop in for a courtesy visit was frankly terrifying. She couldn’t help imagining Himmler with his moon face and receding chin standing over the desk,
peering at her like an owl eyeing its prey, interrogating her about why she, Rosa Winter, was risking treason and actively weakening her nation by refusing to become kinderreich.
    What Rosa did want, and had always wanted, was to become a journalist. She had no intention of following her elder sister Susi into marriage and downtrodden motherhood, especially not to a
thuggish civil servant who was not averse to the occasional bout of wife-beating. After leaving school Rosa had taken a typing course in preparation, quickly became a skilled and fluent typist, and
readied herself for an exciting career. Growing up in Berlin there had been a hundred newspapers – it was a city that loved journalism and Germany, her father often reminded her, had more
newspapers than Britain, France and Italy put together. But after Hitler came to power in 1933, closing opposition papers and dragging the journalists off to concentration camps, the press grew
cautious. The number of newspapers halved, and government directives on saving meat or mending socks had far more chance of getting into the news pages than murders or burglaries. To Rosa’s
dismay, getting a break as a journalist turned out to be next to impossible. She traipsed around the newspaper district for months but whenever she applied for jobs, the editor, either apologetic
or dismissive, would explain that male employees must now take priority. Each time she returned disheartened to the apartment she still shared with her parents, her mother would say,
‘
Never mind. No one in our family has ever been a journalist . . .
’ But it didn’t mean Rosa’s typing skills need go to waste. There were always secretarial positions
to be filled. Journalism could wait.
But I don’t want to be a secretary!
Rosa screamed inside. Yet sure enough, eight years after leaving school, here she was in front of a typewriter,
with a stack of letters on one side and a dictation pad on the