The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Finally, illegitimacy, a persistent stigma in socially and morally conservative circles, was wholly irrelevant to the Nazi view of childbirth. If the infant was racially pure and healthy, it did not matter at all whether its parents were legally married. The logical consequences of prioritizing breeding in this morally neutral way were carried to an extreme by Heinrich Himmler, who founded a series of maternity homes from 1936 under an SS-run association called the ‘Well of Life’ (Lebensborn). These were intended for racially approved unmarried mothers, who otherwise might not receive the facilities he thought they deserved: infant mortality rates amongst illegitimate children were notoriously far higher than the national average. But Himmler’s bizarre attempt to encourage his elite to breed a future master-race was not very successful: the homes were quickly used by prominent married couples in the SS and later in the Nazi Party more generally, because of their low charges, good facilities and (especially during the war) favourable rural locations. In peacetime, under half the mothers in the homes were unmarried, though this in itself was enough to attract criticism from Catholics and conservatives. Altogether, some 8,000 children were born in the homes, hardly sufficient to inaugurate a new master-race. Nor did he have much more luck with SS officers who actually were married. An investigation carried out in 1939 showed that the 115,690 married SS men had an average of only 1.1 children each.35

  Beyond all this, the Nazis also went to considerable lengths to propagate and indeed enforce an image of women that expressed their intended function of becoming mothers for the Reich. Rejecting French fashions became a patriotic duty; eschewing make-up and lipstick, widely marketed by big American firms, advertised commitment to the Germanic race; giving up smoking became a badge of femininity, as well as improving the health of the potential mother and unborn child - a result of which Nazi medical experts were already convinced in the 1930s. Parents were encouraged to present their female offspring in pigtails and dirndls, especially if they were blonde. The German Fashion Institute put on shows of new German haute couture, fighting the international dominance of Paris fashion. All this was more than mere propaganda. The district leadership of the Party in Breslau, for instance, banned women from attending Party meetings if they ‘painted’ themselves with make-up. Notices were put up in cafés requesting women customers to refrain from smoking, while the police chief in Erfurt admonished citizens ‘to remind women they meet smoking on the streets of their duty as German wives and mothers’. There were reports of stormtroopers snatching cigarettes from the lips of women whom they saw smoking in public, or giving a dressing-down to women with plucked eyebrows and strongly coloured lipstick. Newspapers and journals polemicized on the one hand against the androgynous ‘new woman’ of the Weimar years, with her cropped hair and mannish clothing, and against the sexually seductive ‘vamp’ on the other, with her fashionable allure and permanently waved hair. Physical exercise was touted as the best way for women to achieve the healthy, glowing look that the future of the German race required.36

  Yet here too the Nazis ultimately failed to get their way. It proved impossible to curb the cosmetics industry, which soon found new ways of making profits. Magazines were soon full of advice to German women on how to achieve a natural look by artificial means. Shampoo companies quickly marketed new products enabling women to achieve a much-desired head of blonde hair. German-Jewish clothing firms were Aryanized, and supposedly cosmopolitan Jewish fashion designers were excluded from the trade, but international fashion was too strong to resist. Women’s magazines continued to feature the look of Hollywood stars and to explain how they achieved it. Prominent women in Nazi high society scorned the attack on fashion: Magda Goebbels often appeared in public smoking through a cigarette-holder, Winifred Wagner went to opera galas dressed in Parisian silk, and even Hitler’s partner Eva Braun smoked when he was not around and made regular use of Elizabeth Arden cosmetics. The German Fashion Institute lacked the energy to make much of an impact, and the regime’s attempt to help the autarkic economy and boost national pride by encouraging women to wear home-spun clothes ran into increasing difficulty because of the cheapness of mass-produced, off-the-peg dresses made out of artificial fibres - another product of the drive to autarky. Anxious to counter the widespread perception abroad that German women were frumpish and dowdy, women’s magazines, under instructions from the Propaganda Ministry, tried to persuade them to be elegant in appearance, especially when foreign visitors were around. The dirndl did indeed make something of a comeback during the later 1930s, but often in forms so heavily modified in the direction of international fashion styles that it was hardly recognizable any more. German women could in the end no more be persuaded to present themselves merely as actual or potential mothers than they could be persuaded to behave as such.37 This was scarcely surprising, given the extent to which the Nazis undermined traditional distinctions between public and private, the home and the wider world. While government policy penetrated and politicized the domestic sphere, Party organizations took women and children out of the home and socialized them in camps, expeditions, and meetings. The result was a blurring of distinctions that made it impossible for women to conform to the domestic and maternal roles for which Nazi propaganda was attempting to fit them. In few areas, indeed, were the contradictions and irrationalities of the Third Reich more crass than this.38

  How different was all this from the situation elsewhere in Europe? Almost all major European countries adopted policies to try and boost their birth-rate in the 1930s, since almost all governments were concerned about the potential effects of the declining birth-rate on future military effectiveness. Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Russia both imposed restrictions on child limitation and offered rewards to fecund mothers, and pronatalist propaganda in France, where the decline in the birth-rate had been particularly severe over a very long time, almost reached fever-pitch in the interwar years. Fascist Italy also saw an attack on women’s work and an attempt to reduce women to the status of childbearers and childrearers, and in Soviet Russia the relatively liberal sexual atmosphere of the 1920s gave way under Stalin to a much more prudish and repressive regime. Everywhere, autonomous feminist movements declined, lost support or were crushed by authoritarian governments. Yet at the same time there were differences too. The power of the Catholic Church in Italy meant that Mussolini could not include the kind of amoral racial engineering that was the cornerstone of population policy in Nazi Germany. In Russia, while there may have been racist undertones to Moscow’s policies towards other nationalities in the Soviet empire, racism was not a central part of the regime’s ideology and there was no equivalent to the Nazi sterilization, marriage or race legislation. Moreover, while Soviet Russia frowned on make-up and high fashion, it was largely because these were ‘bourgeois’ and detracted from women’s role as workers, which - unlike in Nazi Germany - was assiduously propagated through posters featuring female tractor-drivers and steel-workers. Aside from all this, too, in Nazi Germany, marriage and population policy, like almost every other social policy, had a negative as well as a positive impact and further disadvantaged those racial and other minorities who did not conform to the Third Reich’s image of the new Aryan human being.39 And there were many of these.

  IV

  One particular group which the Third Reich considered a danger on racial grounds were the so-called Gypsies, of whom some 26,000 were living in Germany in the early 1930s.40 These consisted of extended family groups that assigned themselves to one or other of a variety of larger tribes - the Romanies, the Sinti, the Lalleri - and lived a nomadic lifestyle. They had arrived in Central Europe in the late fifteenth century, some thought via Egypt (hence the English word ‘Gypsy’); in fact they originally hailed from India. Dark-skinned, speaking a different language, living largely apart from the rest of German society and relying on itinerant trades of one sort and another, they had attracted social stigma and harsh repressive legislation as territorial states emerged in the period of s
ocial and political consolidation following the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Early nineteenth-century Romantics had idealized them as both primitive and exotic, the repository of occult knowledge such as fortune-telling. But with the emergence of criminal biology towards the end of the century, legislators and administrators had begun to assign them once more to the criminal classes. Gypsies were increasingly subjected to petty police harassment because of their refusal to conform to the modern ideal of the citizen - attending school, paying taxes, registering a domicile - and their disregard for conventional notions of private property, work, regularity, sanitation and the like. Contraventions of the increasingly close net of regulations that bound society in these and other areas meant that the majority of Gypsies had criminal records, which simply confirmed law enforcement agencies in their view that they were hereditarily disposed to criminality. In 1926, the Bavarian government passed a particularly severe law against Gypsies, coupling them with travellers and the work-shy, and founded a Central Office to collect information on them systematically. Ten years later it had compiled an index of nearly 20,000 files.41

  The coming of the Third Reich did not at first mean major changes for German Gypsies, except insofar as they fell into other categories of people targeted by the regime, such as criminal, asocial or work-shy. A number of regional and local authorities stepped up their harassment of itinerants, raiding their camps, moving them on from their resting-places and arresting those thought to be engaged in activities such as begging. On 6 June 1936 these efforts were co-ordinated in a decree issued by the Reich Interior Ministry, and a number of cities began to set up special camps for Gypsies, on the lines of one started in Frankfurt am Main. These were not exactly concentration camps, since the Gypsies were at least nominally entitled to come and go as they wished, and there was no attempt to impose discipline or inflict punishments. However, conditions were often very poor: the camp in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn, which held 600 Gypsies who were forcibly removed from the city in July 1936, had only two latrines, three sources of water, no electricity and too few barracks for those who did not have caravans. Disease was rife, and in March 1939 some 40 per cent of the inmates were said to have scabies. Brutal guards set their dogs on inmates who refused to obey orders. By this time there were well over 800 inmates, and the camp had its own school. Nevertheless, the majority of Gypsies continued to live in society, particularly since there was a high intermarriage rate with Germans, and many of them rented their own rooms or apartments rather than pursuing their traditionally nomadic lifestyle.42

  As part of the intensified crime prevention measures he undertook in 1938, Himmler moved the Bavarian Central Office for Gypsy Affairs to Berlin and turned it into a Reich authority. His police round-ups of the supposedly work-shy netted a substantial number of Gypsies, but they were still not specifically targeted on racial grounds. It was only on 8 December 1938 that Himmler issued a decree on the Gypsies as such, although it had been in preparation for several months. The decree consolidated existing measures and centralized them under the control of the Criminal Police in Berlin. It ordered all Gypsies and itinerants to be registered and to undergo racial-biological examination. The resulting identity card would state whether the holder was a Gypsy, a mixed-race Gypsy, or a non-Gypsy itinerant; only on presentation of the card could the holder obtain a job, a driving licence, benefits and so on. The registration was carried out on the basis of police records and with the assistance of a special research institute set up in the Reich Health Office in 1936 under the leadership of Dr Robert Ritter, a young physician who quickly became the government’s favoured special adviser on the Gypsies. Born in 1901, Ritter was a criminal biologist who organized a team of researchers to visit Gypsy camps, measure and register the inhabitants, and take blood tests: those who refused to co-operate were threatened with consignment to a concentration camp. Ritter and his team combed parish records, assimilated the files of the Munich Central Office for Gypsy Affairs and compiled an index of over 20,000 people. Soon, Ritter boasted, he would have complete records on every Gypsy or part-Gypsy in Germany.43

  Ritter argued that Gypsies were a primitive, inferior race who were constitutionally unable to pursue a normal lifestyle. Pure Gypsies posed no threat to society, therefore, and should be allowed to make their living in their traditionally nomadic way. There were, however, he warned, very few of them left. The vast majority of so-called Gypsies had intermarried with Germans living in the slums where they had found a home, and so had created a dangerous substratum of criminals and layabouts. Thus he arbitrarily reversed the Nazi dogma of antisemitism, according to which pure Jews were more of a threat to Germany than part-Jews. Such theories provided a pseudo-scientific justification for the police measures now undertaken by Himmler. They enjoyed widespread support amongst social workers, criminologists, police authorities, municipalities and ordinary German citizens. The decree of 8 December 1938 banned Gypsies from travelling in ‘hordes’ (groups of several families), ordered the expulsion of foreign Gypsies and gave the police power to arrest itinerants classified as asocial. It applied already existing racial legislation to Gypsies, who now had to provide a certificate of suitability before being allowed to marry. This was unlikely to be granted. In March 1939 Himmler ordered that racial mixing between Gypsies and Germans was to be prevented in future. Every regional office of the Criminal Police was to set up a special office dealing with Gypsies. It was to ensure that once Gypsies had undergone racial examination, they were to be issued with special identity cards, coloured brown for pure Gypsies, brown with a blue strip for mixed-race Gypsies and grey for non-Gypsy itinerants. By the time the war broke out, Himmler had gone a long way down the road to preparing what he called in his decree of 8 December 1938 ‘the final solution of the Gypsy question’.44

  V

  While the regime approached the ‘Gypsy question’ gradually, and initially at least on the basis of existing police practices that were only partially racist in character, and not much different to those enforced in other European countries, the same could not be said of its dealings with another, much smaller minority in German society, the so-called ‘Rhineland bastards’. The term itself was a polemical piece of nationalist terminology, referring to black or mixed-race Germans who, it was almost universally believed, were the result of the rape of German women by French African colonial troops during the occupation of the Rhineland after 1919 and above all the Ruhr in 1923. There had in fact been very few rapes; most of the children were the offspring of consensual unions, and there were, according to a later census, no more than five or six hundred of them; other African-Germans, though often regarded as the product of the French occupation, were the children of German settlers and African women in the colonial period before 1918 or in the years afterwards, when many Germans returned from the former colonies such as Cameroon or Tanganyika (the mainland part of present-day Tanzania). Such had been the nationwide publicity given to the allegations of rape, however, that they remained in the public eye throughout the 1920s. African-Germans were regarded by nationalists as the living embodiment of Germany’s shame.45

  Already in 1927, proposals were circulating in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior for their forcible sterilization, lest African characteristics should enter the German bloodstream, and these were revived almost as soon as the Nazis came to power, when Goring ordered the collection of information on the children, many of whom were now in their teens. Investigations of some of them by racial experts had reported, predictably enough, that they were inferior in every respect. But the legal basis for dealing with them on the grounds provided for in the sterilization law of 1933 was still extremely dubious, so after lengthy deliberations within the bureaucracy, it was decided in 1937, almost certainly with Hitler’s explicit backing, that the children should be sterilized on the basis of the Leader’s authority alone. A special commission was set up within the Gestapo, staffed with racial hygienists and anthropologists; branches were op
ened in the Rhineland; the young people in question were located and examined; and the sterilization programme, organized in secret by Ernst Rüdin, Fritz Lenz and Walter Gross, among others, went ahead.46

  How it impinged on the individuals most directly affected can be seen in the case of what the Gestapo filed as ‘number 357’, a boy born in 1920 to a consensual union between a German mother and a French colonial soldier from Madagascar, who willingly acknowledged his paternity, confirmed by the mother. A medical-anthropological examination conducted in 1935 concluded that the boy’s facial features were un-German and probably negroid. By the time the sterilization policy had been decided on, he had begun work on a Rhine barge; the Gestapo tracked him down and he was arrested at midnight on 29 June 1937. Purely on the basis of the earlier confirmation of his paternity by the mother, and the medical examination of 1935, the branch commission in Cologne ordered that he should be sterilized; his mother, who had in the meantime married a German, gave her approval, as did her husband, and the boy was subjected to a vasectomy in the Evangelical Hospital in Cologne on 30 June, the day after his arrest. He was discharged on 12 July and went back to his job. Legally German, he was given no opportunity to protest or appeal against the decision because he was a minor, and it is more than likely that his parents had given their consent only under considerable pressure from the Gestapo. Many of those sterilized were younger. Girls as young as twelve were forced to undergo tubal ligation. It is questionable whether many of them really knew what they were being subjected to, or why, or what the eventual consequences for their lives would be. The actual number of those treated in this way is not known but was probably in the region of 500. After this, however, nothing much more happened to them, unless they fell foul of the regime for some other reason. A substantial number of African-Germans, indeed, managed to make a living for themselves in circuses and fairgrounds, or as extras in German movies set in the African colonies. The effects of their sterilization, physical and psychological, would remain with them for the rest of their lives.47