In the 1950s, West German and U.S. society reacted to the ambiguity of gender roles during the Second World War and the immediate postwar period by returning to patriarchal modes of behavior and enforcing rigid, traditional gender roles. While National Socialism had promoted a model of “comradeship” between women and men, a special problem arose at the end of the war. As Lutz Niethammer put it, “As . . . the male comrades returned, the substantial 'normalization' project that in retrospect seems rather embarrassing posed this problem: How could Kameradschaft be reconciled with traditional gender roles?” Women's temporary “emancipation” in the United States had resulted from the exigencies of the war, but it had no place in the “American way of life” of the 1950s. Opposition to this emancipation began immediately at war's end, when it was denounced as both morally suspect and socially deviant. The Cold War between the superpowers found a parallel on the homefront, with domestic containment corresponding to inter-national containment. Security and order became high priorities at home in a world made insecure by the threat of nuclear war and the formation of two adversarial blocs. In West Germany, the cult of domesticity promoted integration of the men returning home from war into society and the economy, and created distance from the “forced emancipation” of women in the other half of Germany.