Beginning of the Nazi Era:
Between Invisibility and Solidarity

Anna Veronica Pobbe

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 443-458 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.443

In a 1934 publication of the International Red Aid (MOPR), it can be read that Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo between 1933 and 1934, described communist women as “the most stubborn enemies of the state because they did not become informers despite being tortured.” Despite their absence in higher positions of the RHD (Rote Hilfe Deutschland, German Red Aid), women played a major role in the activities of the RHD: “It was women [in fact] who drove the bailiffs out of their homes and the provocative Nazis out of the welfare office. […] In the Ruhr region, proletarian housewives put together a delegation and demanded a pay rise for their husbands in the factories. Women prevented arrests and demanded the release of their husbands. This was the case in Berlin and Breslau, where women snatched an arrested apprentice and market trader from the police. In Berlin, the police were unable to arrest a communist in one factory because the workers threatened to go on strike. In the Rhineland, 40 women went to the district administration office and demanded the release of their husbands. In another place, 60 women and their children forced the release of 40 prisoners through a demonstration. In Freiburg, women achieved the release of a communist woman.”2 Taking this attestation as our starting point, the current paper aims to shed a light, at first, on the communist women activism during the Nazi Era. This activism is also reported by some members, like Rosa Lindemann, who was also the leader of a mostly women resistance group based in the Tiergarten district of Berlin: “Some of our women helped the men whose wives had been arrested in the household and looked after the children. We had contacted over thirty families and were able to alleviate some of the suffering. It was a particular joy for us to hear how happy our comrades in the prisons and penitentiaries were that we were looking after their relatives and caring for them.”3 Secondly, the paper aims to address the peculiar strategies that were used by the women, like it has been reported in the Berlin Moabit case, where there was a circle of women, that organized relief campaigns and met weekly, disguised as coffee parties or meetings in garden sheds; these women collected money for relatives of the prisoners and helped resistance fighters who had gone into hiding.4 Last, but not the least, the paper aims to address some key-role women in the Red Aid scenario: like Ottilie Pohl, who died in Theresienstadt.

Keywords: communist women, political activism, solidarity, Third Reich, resistance

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Adrift on the Periphery: The Alternative Development of Hungarian Women’s Organizations in Interwar Transylvania

Zsuzsa Bokor

Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities

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 Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 402-442 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.402

This study explores the interwar history of Hungarian women’s organizations in Transylvania, focusing on the complex interplay between gender, ethnicity, and politics in the aftermath of the Treaty of Trianon. It examines the foundation and evolution of the Central Secretariat of the Hungarian Minority Women of Romania (RMKNKT) and its affiliated religious and social associations, analyzing how Transylvanian Hungarian women developed alternative, hybrid models of emancipation that blended traditional gender roles with modern political activism.

Through discussion of archival sources from transnational perspectives, the essay traces how Hungarian women in Romania adapted to exclusion from national and international women’s organizations by reconfiguring their activism along ethno-religious lines. It devotes particular attention to so-called “railway mission” programs designed to protect women, who were compelled to move among various locations in the country to pursue work, illustrating how these initiatives became vehicles for ethnic self-defense and identity construction.

The study reveals that Hungarian women’s activism in interwar Romania cannot simply be categorized as conservative or progressive. Instead, it operated in a liminal space shaped by the constraints of minority status, the failures of multicultural inclusion, and opportunistic engagement with both international and religious networks. This essay contributes to the redefinition of minority women’s political subjectivity and highlights how social work and community care were understood in ethnic frameworks.

Keywords: Transylvanian Hungarian women’s organizations, interwar, railway mission

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Phantom Borders and Nostalgia: German Women’s Associations in the Second Polish Republic after 1918

Paula Lange

University of Vienna, Department of History

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 Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 373-401  DOI 10.38145/2025.3.373

Transformations associated with the end of World War I had an immense impact on the population of the former Prussian partition area, most of which became, in the wake of the war, the Second Polish Republic. Members of the German women’s associations, which had existed before 1918, found themselves in a new situation. As members of a national minority in the newly established Polish state, they were confronted with a reversed balance of power. Meanwhile, women’s suffrage had been introduced, opening up new political spaces of action for women. This article examines gender-related spaces of action for German women in this region after 1918 and explores the strategies and points of reference used by these women. The two examples on which it focuses, the Vaterländischer Frauenverein in Graudenz/Grudziądz and the work of feminist activist Martha Schnee in Bromberg/Bydgoszcz, are examined using the concepts of phantom borders and nostalgia.

Keywords: Second Polish Republic, German women’s associations, phantom borders, nostalgia, interwar period

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Austro-Hungarian Women’s Activism from the Southern “Periphery” Across Ethnic Lines

Agatha Schwartz

University of Ottawa

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 351-372 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.351

Through the examples of Adél Nemessányi, Milica Tomić, Jelica Belović-Bernadžikovska, and Nafija Sarajlić, four women activists, public workers, and writers from the southern “peripheries” of Austria-Hungary who belonged to different ethnic groups, this paper examines the complex local, regional, and trans-regional aspects of women’s awakening and organizing in the Dual Monarchy. While none of these four women belonged to any associations that demanded political rights for women, their public work and activism, which took multiple forms, greatly contributed to the improvement of women’s public image, education, and social status in their own time, leaving an imprint on future generations. Through both the personal and professional lives of these remarkable women, we can discern connections that transgress ethnic, regional, and national boundaries and also reflect international developments in the fight for women’s rights. This ethnically varied sample of exceptionally educated women pioneers from parts of the Dual Monarchy that would later become Yugoslavia demonstrates what women were able to accomplish despite an overall conservative social environment.

Keywords: women’s rights, regional and trans-regional developments, feminism from the “periphery”

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Women’s History in Greece through The Ladies’ Journal of Kallirhoe Siganou-Parren:
Class, National Identity, and Reformist Activism
in the Formation of Women’s Associations (1887–1917)

Marina Bantiou

University of Peloponnese

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 317-350 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.317

This paper investigates how The Ladies’ Journal (Efimeris ton Kyrion), edited by Kallirhoe Siganou-Parren between 1887 and 1917, constructed a gendered historical consciousness and mobilized national history as a vehicle for women’s civic inclusion in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greece. Through a qualitative content and discourse analysis of selected articles from the journal’s complete digitized archive, the study examines how Parren strategically invoked historical female figures, from classical Antiquity to the Greek War of Independence and the Byzantine era, to legitimize women’s public roles within a framework of patriotic maternalism and bourgeois respectability. These representations restored women to history and actively recast historical memory as a tool for moral instruction, civic pedagogy, and reformist activism. While rooted in nationalist ideology, the journal’s narratives also reflected transnational influences through Parren’s engagement with international feminist networks and suffrage congresses. The article argues that this hybrid mode of popular historiography simultaneously enabled middle-class women’s symbolic integration into the nation and reinforced prevailing class and gender hierarchies. Ultimately, it situates The Ladies’ Journal as a formative site for the articulation of women’s associative practices and reformist discourse, while also critically assessing its role in shaping the terms and limits of female civic identity.

Keywords: women’s history in Greece, Kallirhoe Parren, Ephimeris ton Kyrion, feminist historiography, Greek women’s associations, maternalism, Greek feminist movement

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Oskan Erewanc‘i as a Translator from and into Latin

Alessandro Orengo

Università di Pisa

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 274-291  DOI 10.38145/2025.2.274

Oskan vardapet Erewanc‘i (1614–1674) was a prominent Armenian printer, best known for producing the first printed edition of the Armenian Bible (Amsterdam, 1666–1668). He was also active as a translator both from and into Latin. Erewanc‘i translated and subsequently abridged a grammatical treatise originally composed in Latin by the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). While the full translation survives in a few manuscripts, the abridged version was printed in 1666 by the same Amsterdam-based press that issued the Bible. In addition, Oskan contributed to a Latin translation of the shorter version of Koriwn’s Life of Maštoc‘. Although the original Life was composed in the fifth century, it also exists in a later abridged form, which served as the basis for Oskan’s translation. This paper examines Oskan’s role as a translator between Latin and Armenian, focusing on his objectives and methods.

Keywords: Oskan Erewanc‘i, Tommaso Campanella, Koriwn, Armenian language, Latin language, translations

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