THE ACTIVITIES OF THE COMINTERN INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S SECRETARIAT IN NAZI GERMANY IN 1933–1939

The study attempts to analyze the activities of the hitherto unexplored subdivision of the Communist International – the International Women's Secretariat (IWS) as a special organization engaged almost exclusively in solving the women's issue in different countries of the world through the prism of communist ideology. On the basis of archival materials from the Fund 507 of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the author gives a full characterization of the main stages of the Comintern IWS work on solving the women's issue in Nazi Germany, the state of German women under the Nazi dictatorship, the forms of interaction between the Communist Party of Germany and the IWS during this period. The article concludes that the promoting awareness, activism and propaganda work were the main IWS’s activities in Germany after the establishment of the Nazi regime. They helped to increase the level of support for the Communist Party of Germany, the IWS and the Comintern by women and allowed creating conditions for the transition from the struggle for women's rights to opposing the Nazis. Many of the facts found in this article are presented for the first time in the academic literature. The author also introduces into scholarly discourse previously unused historical documents. The article sheds light on one of the insufficiently studied pages of the history of the entire Communist International as a special international organization of the 20th century