The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Local officials met on 12 October 1937 and agreed that the growing shortage of labour made it advisable to integrate the physically handicapped into the economy. Otto Perl, the founder in 1919 of the League for the Advancement of Self-Help for the Physically Handicapped, successfully lobbied for the pejorative official designation of ‘cripple’ (Krüppel) to be replaced in official documents by the more neutral ‘physically handicapped’ (Körperbehinderte), as indeed it increasingly was from 1934 onwards. Many of those he represented were of course war-wounded; but his campaigns had implications for younger handicapped people too. The result was that the proportion of the forcibly sterilized who suffered from exclusively physical disabilities remained throughout the Nazi period below 1 per cent. In 1934 Perl’s organization was officially recognized, incorporated into the National Socialist People’s Welfare under the name of the Reich League of the Physically Handicapped (Reichsbund der Körperbehinderten) and charged with the task of integrating its members into the productive economy. Those with disabilities such as haemophilia, severe progressive rheumatoid arthritis, serious spasmodic muscular contractions or chronic deformities of the hands or the spine were consigned to institutions with the instruction that they had to be given a miminal level of care. But even here, the idea of compulsory sterilization was dropped; in a land where many thousands of severely physically handicapped war veterans could be seen on the streets every day, it would have been difficult to justify such a policy to the general public.15 Still, this change of heart had its limits. The physically handicapped might be useful to the regime, but they were in no way to be full or equal members of the racial community. The emphasis placed on physical health and vitality by the Nazis already discriminated against them at school, where from 17 March 1935 onwards they were banned from progressing to secondary education, along with students who had showed ‘persistent failure in physical training’ and ‘young people who exhibit a persistent unwillingness to look after their bodies’. The way to preferment at school, university, the Hitler Youth and virtually all the other institutions of the Third Reich was not least through the demonstration of fitness to fight. Those who were not in a position to show it remained second-class citizens.16

  Some doctors outside Germany also held the view that many social ills were the result of the hereditary degeneracy of certain sections of the population. Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany, twenty-eight states in the USA had passed sterilization laws resulting in the compulsory sterilization of some 15,000 people; the total had more than doubled by 1939. German racial hygienists such as Gerhard Boeters pointed to the American example in justifying their own stance; others also incidentally pointed to anti-miscegenation laws in the southern states of the USA as another example that could usefully be followed in Germany. The American eugenicist Harry Laughlin, who in 1931 put forward a programme to sterilize some 15 million Americans of inferior racial stock over the next half-century, received an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg in 1936. US eugenicists admired the German Laws in turn; and Laughlin himself proudly claimed that his own ideas had in part inspired it.17 Sterilization laws of one kind and another were passed by Switzerland in 1928, by Denmark in 1929, by Norway in 1934 and by a variety of other European countries, both democratic and authoritarian in their political structures. Six thousand Danes were sterilized, and no fewer than 40,000 Norwegians. Even more remarkably, nearly 63,000 sterilizations were performed in Sweden between 1935 and 1975. It has been argued that the Swedish sterilizations were carried out to remove non-productive people from the chain of heredity and targeted the socially rather than the racially deviant; and certainly, the welfare state constructed by Swedish Social Democracy in these decades was not racially based in the way that the Nazi state was. Still, the Swedish National Institute for Racial Biology did establish physical characteristics among the criteria for forced sterilization, and Gypsies were targeted as a supposedly racially inferior group. Moreover, in the first six years of the Third Reich, sterilization, although carried out on a scale far greater than anywhere else, was not primarily racial in character, in the sense of being based on the identification of inferior races: the people who were being sterilized were overwhelmingly ‘Aryan’ Germans, and they were being sterilized for reasons not very different from those given by the Swedish authorities and eugenicists elsewhere at around the same time.18 The real difference was to emerge only later, when the war began, as the Nazi regime turned from sterilizing social deviants to murdering them.

  II

  Applying the principles of racial hygiene to society meant sweeping away traditional Christian morality and replacing it with a system of ethics that derived good and bad solely from the imagined collective interests of the German race. This did not stop some Protestant welfare officials from agreeing with this policy, but when the Catholic Church objected to measures such as forcible sterilization, Nazi ideologues like the doctors’ leader Gerhard Wagner portrayed this as another episode in the long struggle between religious obscurantism and scientific enlightenment, a struggle which science was bound to win.19 In few areas, indeed, were the differences between conservative traditionalism and Nazi modernism more apparent than in the regime’s attitude to women, marriage and the family, all of which appeared to Nazi ideologues in the light not of conventional Christian morality but of the scientific principles of racial policy. Any overlap there might have appeared to be between conservative and National Socialist views of women’s place in society was purely superficial. Alarmed by the long-term decline in Germany’s birth-rate that had set in around the turn of the century, conservative nationalists and Nazis alike preached women’s return to the home; but while conservatives saw the key to the decline’s reversal in the revival of traditional marriage patterns, the Nazis were willing to take up even the most radical ideas in the pursuit of more children for the Reich, adding on to this the insistence that such children had to be racially pure and hereditarily untainted, principles that traditional conservatives abhorred. Abortion, deeply repugnant to Catholic morality, provided a case in point. The Third Reich tightened up and enforced more rigorously the existing laws banning abortion except on medical grounds, thereby reducing the number of officially sanctioned abortions from nearly 35,000 a year in the early 1930s to fewer than 2,000 a year by the end of the decade. But it also allowed abortion on eugenic grounds from 1935 onwards and in November 1938 a Lüneburg court created a significant precedent when it legalized abortion for Jewish women.20 At the same time, contraceptives, another bugbear of the Catholic Church, continued to be available throughout the 1930s, although birth-control clinics were closed down because of the association of the birth-control movement with left-wing, libertarian politics.21

  Given their Darwinian view of world politics, the Nazis considered a high birth-rate essential for a nation’s health. A declining birth-rate meant an ageing population, and fewer recruits for the armed forces in the longer term. A rising birth-rate meant a young, vigorous population and the promise of ever-expanding military manpower in the future. Racial hygienists had pointed with alarm to the decline in Germany’s birth-rate, from thirty-six live births per 1,000 population in 1900 to a mere fifteen per 1,000 population in 1932. As early as 1914, Fritz Lenz had opined that women’s emancipation was to blame and advocated putting a ban on women going into higher education. He was critical of other racial hygienists who argued modestly that a healthy woman should give birth to eight or nine children during her life. A woman, he thought, could continue to give birth over a period of thirty years; with one birth possible at least every other year, this meant, he declared, a minimum of fifteen. Anything else was due to ‘unnatural or pathological causes’.22 The Nazis could not have agreed more. As soon as they came to power, they moved into action to eliminate what they thought of as the causes of the declining birth-rate and to provide incentives to women to have more children. Their first target was Germany’s large and active feminist movement, which was swiftly closed down and
its constituent associations dissolved or incorporated into the Party’s national women’s organization, National Socialist Womanhood (NS-Frauenschaft). The leading radical feminists, including Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann, pioneers of the campaign for women’s suffrage, and Helene Stöcker, advocate of sexual liberation for women, went into exile; apart from anything else, their pacifist convictions put them at the risk of arrest and imprisonment in the new regime. The more conservative feminists, like Gertrud Bäumer, who had dominated the movement in the 1920s, retreated into self-imposed ‘inner exile’, leaving the field open to women of openly Nazi convictions.23

  The National Socialist Womanhood was led, after a fierce internal power-struggle that lasted until the beginning of 1934, by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, a proud mother (eventually) of eleven children; her devotion to the idea of the family was unquestionable. The Womanhood was intended to provide the active leadership for a comprehensive mass organization of German women, called the German Women’s Bureau (Deutsches Frauenwerk), which would convert the entire female sex in Germany to the Nazi way of thinking.24 Once appointed to head these two organizations, as Reich Women’s Leader, in February 1934, Scholtz-Klink sprang into action, setting up a range of schemes to persuade women to have more children and to take better care of those they already had. One of the most ambitious was the Reich Mothers’ Service. This drew on the experience of old-established women’s welfare groups. It ran courses on childcare, cooking, sewing and of course racial hygiene; they had reached more than 1.7 million women by March 1939 and were funded by the sale of badges on Mother’s Day, supplemented by a small fee for taking part. Mother’s Day itself became a major propaganda event, and was made into a national holiday in 1934. Goebbels ordered all brownshirts, Hitler Youth and other Nazi Party organizations to give their members the day off so that they could be with their families; theatres were to stage relevant plays on the day and give out free tickets to mothers and families; priests and pastors were to preach sermons on motherhood. On Mother’s Day in May 1939, three million women who had given birth to four or more children each were invested with the title of ‘Mother of the Reich’ in special ceremonies held all over Germany. Their new status was signalled by the award of specially minted Mother’s Honour Crosses - bronze for four children, silver for six and gold for eight or more, an achievement considered sufficiently noteworthy for the crosses to be pinned on by Hitler himself. Wearers were allowed to jump queues in food stores, and Hitler Youth members were instructed to salute them in the street. Mothers whose performance exceeded even this, and who gave birth to ten children, were given the additional honour of having Hitler as godfather of the tenth child, which in the case of boys meant naming the infant ‘Adolf’, something which Catholic families who resented Hitler’s persecution of their Church must have found somewhat distressing.25

  The involvement of Goebbels in this propaganda exercise pointed to the fact that Scholtz-Klink’s women’s organizations by no means had a monopoly over policy and its implementation in this area. As a mere woman, Scholtz-Klink enjoyed a low status in the Nazi hierarchy and was therefore no match even for relatively unsuccessful male Nazi leaders in the turf wars that were such a constant feature of the regime’s internal politics. Soon the Labour Front, the Reich Food Estate and the National Socialist Welfare organization had all taken over major areas of women’s welfare, while the Labour Front and its ancillary organizations also ran a wide range of women’s leisure activities. At the same time, the limited resources available to Scholtz-Klink meant that her women’s organizations failed to achieve the ambitious aims she had set them: they did not reach far beyond the middle-class women who had provided the main constituency for the old women’s movement of the Weimar years, and housewives were resistant to being mobilized in the service of the nation in the ways that Scholtz-Klink intended. Husbands and children were spending increasing amounts of their time outside the home in Party-related activities, in camps, or at evening training sessions. German women, as one contributor to a remarkably critical collection of addresses from women to Hitler published in 1934 complained, were falling into a ‘shadow of loneliness’ as a result.26

  Moreover, government pronatalism meant in itself interference by the regime in the family, sexuality and childbirth, as pressures of all kinds were exerted on women to get married and have lots of children. The Nazi regime propagated the interests of large families by taking over the already-extant Reich League of Child-Rich Families, an organization that also became an instrument of racial engineering, since many socially disadvantaged large families were excluded from it, and the privileges it conferred, on the grounds that they were asocial or degenerate. For those that made the grade, with four or more children under the age of sixteen, there were many advantages, including priority in training, work for the father and better housing for the family as a whole, and single child supplements introduced in October 1935 and averaging 390 Reichsmarks per family. By July 1937 400,000 such families had received them. 240,000 families also received ongoing family support, and one-off grants to the maximum of 1,000 Reichsmarks per child were made for the parents to buy household goods, bed-linen and so on. From April 1936 the government added a supplementary grant of 10 Reichsmarks a month for the fifth and each subsequent child in every family. In 1938 these benefits were extended from children aged sixteen and under to those under the age of twenty-one. Tax reforms introduced improved allowances for large families on a national basis, while local governments took their own steps by reducing gas, water and electricity charges, providing free Hitler Youth uniforms, subsidizing the costs of schooling, supplementing the wages of municipal employees with four or more children, or (as in Leipzig) publishing monthly ‘honour tables’ of large families. The costs of all these measures were borne by single people and childless couples and constituted a clear incentive to have more children, especially for the worse off: a poor family with three young offspring could improve its position dramatically by having a fourth. Yet there were limits, especially in housing, where the priority that was supposed to be given to large families counted for little in the face of a continued housing shortage. Landlords still preferred to let to single people or childless couples because they used less gas, water and electricity in a situation where there was a freeze on rents. State investment in new housing actually fell from one and a third billion marks in 1928 to a quarter of a billion in 1938.27

  Such problems were reflected in the fact that the decline in the percentage of marriages with four or more children continued unabated. Nearly half of all couples married in 1900-1904 had four or more children, but for those married in 1926-30 the proportion was only 20 per cent; in 1931-5 it fell further to 18 per cent, and in 1936-40 again to 13 per cent.28 The regime’s efforts counted for little in the face of a secular decline in family size that had begun decades before and was to continue long afterwards. The economic, social and cultural costs of having more than one or two children were simply too great for the Third Reich to counteract.29 Superficially, at least, it seemed to enjoy more success in reversing the associated long-term decline in the birth-rate that so concerned racial hygienists. From a low of 14.7 live births per thousand inhabitants in 1933 the birth-rate increased to 18.0 in 1934 and 18.9 in 1935. It then levelled off at 19.0 in 1936 and 18.8 in 1937 before rising slightly again to 19.6 in 1938 and 20.4 in 1939.30 By the beginning of the 1940s a commentator could claim that an extra three million Germans had been born as a direct result of policies introduced by the Third Reich.31 Yet the leap in the number of marriages, by nearly a quarter between 1932 and 1938, was mainly due to the economic recovery. People had been postponing getting married and having children because of the Depression: with well over a third of the working population unemployed, this was understandable enough. Even without the marriage loan scheme, therefore, a majority of the marriages and births that happened from 1934 onwards would have happened anyway. Other additional births reflected the greater difficulty women
had in obtaining abortions after 1933; only relatively few could be ascribed directly to policies introduced by the Third Reich.32

  III

  Those policies impinged ever more closely on marriage and the family as time went on. In 1938, a new Marriage Law made it possible for a fertile husband or wife to file for divorce on grounds of ‘premature infertility’ or the refusal of the other partner to procreate. Three years’ separation and the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage were also introduced as grounds for divorce. In this way, completely disregarding the traditional Christian view of marriage as a divinely sanctified partnership for life, the Third Reich hoped to make it easier for people to marry for the purposes of having children. By 1941 nearly 28,000 people had filed for divorce on the basis of breakdown and separation, while 3,838 divorces had been granted because of premature infertility and 1,771 because of refusal to procreate. These were not very impressive figures, and made only a small impact on the birth-rate, if they made any at all. Still, in a society where divorce was still something rather unusual and generally frowned-on, they made up a good fifth of all divorces. The Vatican duly registered its disapproval with the German Ambassador. It was disregarded.33 Potentially far more intrusive was the Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People, promulgated on 18 October 1935. This provided for the banning of a marriage where one of the engaged couple suffered from an inherited disease, or from a mental illness. As a consequence, anyone who wanted to get married would have to provide written proof that they qualified according to the Law. Local Health Offices would have been overwhelmed with requests for medical examinations had there been any question of implementing these requirements comprehensively. So in practice it was up to registry offices to demand an examination if they had any doubts about the fitness of the prospective marriage partners. Indeed some had already done so even before the Law had been passed. The demand for written proof was postponed indefinitely, and in the following years the Law was watered down by a series of amendments. None the less, it made it markedly more difficult for people to get married if they were classified as asocial or morally feeble-minded - diagnoses which had already disqualified them for the marriage loan scheme; in practice, those who fell foul of it were also likely to fall foul of the sterilization programme as well.34