Most of the time there were no female Fascists who participated directly in combat. After all, the Fascist (and protofascist) slogan for women was ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (‘children, kitchen, church’): these were supposed to be the only priorities for the ideal woman under Fascism. The reality, however, was not—and could not be—always in step with the ideal.

The situation became more complicated near the war’s end in 1945, when (as seen in the motion picture Downfall) the Greater German Reich was so desperate for survival that pretty much anybody who could fire a gun was allowed a combative rôle.

For example, quoting D’Ann Campbell’s Women in Combat: The World War II Experience in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union:

In November 1944, [the Chancellery] issued an official order that no woman was to be trained in the use of weapons. The only exception was for women in the remote areas of the Reich which could be easily overrun by the Soviets. In one such area, a twenty‐two‐year‐old Pomeranian woman, “Erna,” was awarded the Iron Cross (second class) when she, together with a male sergeant and private destroyed three tanks with bazookas. Indeed, [Axis] propaganda suggested that the bazooka was the most feminine of weapons.

The Freikorps Adolf Hitler was formed in 1945 and trained in the use of bazookas, hand grenades, and automatic rifles. Lore Ley, daughter of a leading [Fascist], once knocked out a Soviet armored scout car and took from its commander military documents and money. In all, thirty‐nine [Axis] women received the Iron Cross (second class) for their duty near the front. The majority of these women, however, were nurses.

Perry Biddiscombe’s Into the Maelstrom: German Women in Combat, 1944–45 gives a more complete picture:

[The Chancellor] had already shown interest in the battlefield performance of Polish women fighting in the Warsaw Revolt — he personally questioned the SS counter‐insurgency chief, Erich von dem Bach‐Zelewski, on this matter — and in February 1945, prodded by Bormann, he conceded that all available human resources now had to be mobilized, ‘even women’.

‘That’s all the same to me’, he shrugged. ‘So many women who want to shoot are volunteering now, that I am of the opinion that we ought to take them immediately. They are braver anyway’. Several days later, the Führer observed that ‘innumerable women are volunteering for the front’, and he suggested that such recruits would ‘undoubtedly fight fanatically’.