and will not ignore our request. The duties of women are huge. This is not to say that only those included in the law can work. All are welcome. The more who join the war effort, the more we free up soldiers for the front." "For years, millions of German women have worked with brio in war production and they patiently wait to be joined and assisted by other women." "Especially for you women, do you want the government to do everything in its power to encourage German women to put all their strength into supporting the war effort, and to let me leave for the front when possible, helping the men at the front?" "The great upheavals and crises of national life show us who the real men and women are. We no longer have the right to speak of the weaker sex, since both sexes show the same determination and the same spiritual force." The mobilisation of women in the war economy always remained limited: the number of women practising a professional activity in 1944 was virtually unchanged from 1939, being about 15 million women, in contrast to Great Britain, so that the use of women did not progress and only 1,200,000 of them worked in the arms industry in 1943, in working conditions that were difficult and often poorly treated by their bosses, who deplored their lack of qualification. In the army (Wehrmacht) In 1945, there numbered 500,000 women auxiliaries in the Wehrmacht (Wehrmachtshelferinnen), who were at the heart of the Heer, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. About half of them were volunteers, the others performing obligatory service connected to the war effort (Kriegshilfsdienst). They took part, under the same authority as prisoners of war (Hiwis), as auxiliary personnel of the army (Behelfspersonal) and they were assigned to duties not only within the heart of the Reich, but also to the occupied territories, for example in the General government of occupied Poland, in France, and later in Yugoslavia, in Greece and in Romania. They essentially participated : as telephone, telegraph and transmission operators, as administrative clerks typists and messengers, in anti-aircraft defense, as operators of listening equipment, operating projectors for anti-aircraft defense, employees within meteorology services, and auxiliary civil defense personnel in military health service, as volunteer nurses with the German Red Cross or other voluntary organizations In the SS The SS-Gefolge was the women's wing of