Cruel World (11 page)

Parallel to the Nazis’ obsession with purification of the population was their determination to increase its numbers. The loss of millions of young men in World War I and the economic disasters and depression of the 1920s and 1930s had led to a precipitous drop in the German birthrate. The Weimar government had been perfectly aware of this problem, which was common to all of Europe, and had instituted public programs to promote child health and welfare. All sorts of groups campaigned for a renewal of the large family of the nineteenth century. There was the eternal concern that the “best” people were having the fewest children and that the nation was threatened by the supposedly higher birthrate of the Slavic peoples and the godless example of the Communists, who were not fussy about free love or divorce. But the need for lower-class mothers to work in order to support the children they already had, plus the dawn of women’s liberation, kept families small. In addition, very large families had become associated in the public mind with the poor and uneducated trash deplored by the eugenicists.
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The Nazis were not interested in the traditional moral aspects of producing children. They were only interested in purity and numbers. A large reservoir of racially pure individuals was vital to support their expansionist plans. To this end they issued a series of decrees, welfare directives, and propaganda statements that appeared to promote the return to the large, cozy, old-fashioned family, but in fact aimed to transform it into a hatchery for future Nazi cadres. Their program was doomed from the beginning, for it not only violated every human need and desire and flew in the face of the civil and religious traditions of centuries, but was also economically impossible.

German families of “alien” or “mixed” race were, naturally, excluded from the new programs. Marriage between those of alien race and Aryans had been forbidden by the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor one month before the Marriage Health Law was passed in 1935. Those who tried to compromise with the Nazi authorities in order to follow their hearts, even when helped along by sympathetic local officials, rarely succeeded, as the case of Liselotte W., twenty-one, daughter of a
completely assimilated family with some forgotten Gypsy ancestors, demonstrates. This technically ideal family, consisting as it did of five boys and one girl, was not informed of its unacceptable genealogy until 1942. The father was a decorated World War I veteran, and one of the sons had by then been killed in the invasion of France. The four other sons belonged to the Hitler Youth. Despite recommendations by the local police that the family be considered “German,” the father and sons were threatened with loss of their jobs and sterilization. Liselotte, five months pregnant by an Aryan soldier, went so far as to volunteer for sterilization if she could be allowed to marry her beloved. This request was ignored and the girl was instead jailed for being “asocial.” Due to her condition, the prison doctor declared her unfit for work or incarceration in a concentration camp, “as she was within a few months of delivering a child.” This opinion, no doubt well meant, was instead a death sentence. Liselotte was deported to Auschwitz, where she died of dysentery shortly before her child would have been born. Her death had one positive effect: her father and brothers were only sterilized and not deported or killed.
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Drastic anti-Gypsy measures were one thing, but even membership in the highest social classes of the Reich was no protection from the marriage laws. Wehrmacht Captain Melchior Kuno von Schlippenbach, a graduate of the prestigious Salem boarding school, wanted to marry Ilonka Dudkova, a Czech national. In order to get permission, the young man had to undergo an intense racial examination himself and submit scores of documents, which included “four photos of [his] bride in the nude, one view each side … perfectly nude for racial examination.” After a “vivid complaint” on his part, the girl was allowed to wear a two-piece bathing suit in the photographs. She was then declared “racially suitable,” and in 1942 the couple was duly married and soon had a daughter. While Melchior was off at the wars, Ilonka, again pregnant, moved in with her parents. This violated a special regulation of the Führer forbidding Germans to live with Czechs and was reported to the SS. Ilonka, forced to leave her family home, unwisely moved into the house of the Czech widow of a full-blooded Jew, who also had two children. This, of course, was much worse in the eyes of the racial authorities, who advised Captain von Schlippenbach by letter that they assumed that he himself would disapprove of “your child being reared in the same household with half-Jewish children,” and demanded that he move his family elsewhere. The captain rushed to Prague to deal with the situation and was told by the racial authorities that if his wife did not move to Germany and he was killed in action, his children would be taken away from their mother, be given new
names, and be put up for adoption by a childless married couple in Germany, as there was otherwise no guarantee that they “would be brought up in the German sense.” When von Schlippenbach objected to these remarks, the Nazi official said that he “should have thought these things over before marrying a foreigner; after all, there were enough nice and decent German girls.”
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The population promotion programs for acceptable couples began innocuously enough in 1933 with a Marriage Loan Plan, which provided low-cost loans to help newlyweds set up housekeeping. For each child the debt was reduced by 25 percent, and was eliminated after the fourth child was born. The drawback was that the mother could not work if she accepted the loan. This was fine with the Nazis, who saw the program not only as useful for promoting childbirth, but also as a solution for the high male unemployment of the time. Because of the no-work rule, use of the loans, especially in rural areas where women traditionally took part in farmwork, was at first slow. By the late 1930s as both the German armed forces and war industries burgeoned, unemployment had turned into a labor shortage and the no-work rule had to be relaxed. By 1939, 42 percent of newly married families were taking advantage of the loans, despite which they continued to average only one child per family.
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The loans were only the beginning. Every possible avenue was used to promote having children. Birth control clinics, viewed as Communist strongholds, were closed and penalties for abortion were toughened. Abortions could only be performed to protect the hereditary health of the race, in which case they were mandatory. After 1935, doctors were required to notify race authorities of every suspicious miscarriage, which was then investigated by the police.
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By 1941 only those of “alien” race could have an abortion with impunity and indeed were encouraged to do so. Enforcement of these laws would become ever more draconian: by 1941 all sales of contraceptives were banned for the pure German. The grounds for divorce were also expanded in favor of reproduction.
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Infertility, reluctance to have children, or “irretrievable collapse of a marriage” became valid grounds for “no blame” divorces, the idea being that those locked into unhappy marriages were less likely to produce offspring. Child support requirements were made less stringent so that divorced men could better support a new family. These measures led to a divorce boom in 1939, but once again produced no appreciable increase in births.
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Everyone felt the pressure. When Albert Speer, then Hitler’s favorite architect, first introduced his wife of six years to Hitler in 1934, the Führer, not knowing she was five months pregnant, said, “Six years married
and no children? Why?” Speer later recalled that he would have liked “the floor to open so that I could disappear.”
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He did not further disappoint his Führer: by 1943 the Speers would have six children. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s closest assistant, outdid them with nine. Goebbels also had six, and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, four. But Göring and Himmler, the great promoters of the Nordic race, only had one legitimate child apiece, while Hitler, of course, had none.

The state gave every possible sort of help to acceptable mothers. Poorer women were provided with everything from layettes to baby cereal. Existing welfare organizations were hugely increased and consolidated under the banner of the National Socialist Welfare Organization (NSV). By 1941, a special division called Aid to Mother and Child had set up some 29,000 counseling centers for pregnant mothers and dispatched droves of midwives, home aides, and visiting nurses to help them. Thousands of pregnant women were sent off to special spalike maternity homes for month-long stays to have their babies and recuperate.
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In addition the National Socialist Womanhood, aided by a myriad of subagencies, sponsored practical courses in mothering and home economics and also urged its six million members to have large families.
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None of this was altruistic. At the counseling centers the women and children were carefully observed for flaws and educated in Nazi family policy. In the maternity homes, often installed in villas confiscated from Jews, indoctrination classes filled a good part of the day. Before meals grace was said to the Führer. With hands raised in the Nazi salute, the mothers thanked him for their food and intoned, “To thee we devote all our powers, to thee we dedicate our lives and those of our children.”

After meals there were folksy songfests and dramatic performances punctuated by warlike singing (“Hurrah, Hurrah to the battle front march we, with weapons, with tents, with helmets and lance, to kill the enemy”). Further procreation was encouraged by lectures on sex, and a volume of “stimulating” literature was given to the girls when they left the homes.
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NSV follow-up of the children was extremely careful. As one matron told an American observer, “We keep the children safe for Hitler until the schools take them over at the age of six.” Platoons of uniformed nurses made regular visits to the homes of small children, whom they expected to give the Nazi salute and encouraged to play war games so that they could grow up to be “fighters for the Führer.” Mothers who discouraged this were reprimanded, and all were under constant pressure to have more children.
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Special preschool day-care centers were set up across the country for working mothers. These facilities were manned by teachers
specially trained by the NSV. The 1936 guidelines published for the centers listed not only obvious activities for the children, but required that they be educated “in National Socialism and service to the
Volksgemeinschaft
.”
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The premises were, accordingly, festooned with Nazi flags and pictures of Hitler. Furnishings and architecture, whenever possible, were strictly Germanic in style, and uniforms were provided even for six-month-old babies. Here too the children were taught warlike songs with much emphasis on dying for the Führer, whom they must obey in all things. Girls were encouraged to play with dolls and engage in other maternal activities. The tiny boys in one such center in the country near Nuremberg, when asked what they wanted to do for Hitler, declared that they “would eat a lot” and “get strong” so that they could become soldiers and “shoot Frenchmen.”
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The health of the children was carefully monitored as well. Teeth were brushed daily, medical exams were frequent, and both food and exercise were plentiful.

Despite such strenuous efforts, the birthrate rose far too slowly for Hitler’s liking and the abortion rate did not decline. To boost the family the Party initiated a series of promotions, some sillier than others. At the 1935 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally Hitler proclaimed that the effort to increase the population was “the woman’s battlefield.” “Child-rich” families in some localities were given rent reductions and free movie passes. Honor Cards, showing a mother surrounded with small children and emblazoned with the motto “The most beautiful name in the world is Mother,” were handed out to all mothers with three or more children under ten. These documents were supposed to get them preferential treatment by certain agencies and discounts at shops. This seems to have been a flop, as neither the local bureaucrats nor shopkeepers seemed to think having a lot of children was a good reason for the unfunded perks suggested by the Nazi leadership. After 1936 various types of bonuses were handed out by the central government. Mother’s Day became a national holiday, and in 1938 the Honor Cross of the German Mother was instituted for those who had produced at least four children. Presentation ceremonies for the three million crosses were elaborate, and all members of the Hitler Youth were henceforth required to salute those wearing the medal. By 1940, probably because of the economy and not because of the Honor Cross, the abysmal birthrate of 1933 had nearly doubled, but it still was far below the mythic numbers of the late nineteenth century so passionately desired by the Nazis.
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While help for married mothers, no matter how much ideology was included, was generally well accepted, Nazi efforts to protect and encourage
single mothers and remove the stigma of illegitimate birth were less successful. The NSV homes did not discriminate against hereditarily correct unwed mothers or their so-called state children, and ran an adoption and foster home service for them. But they did suggest that a single mother should be sterilized after her second child. Hitler, Himmler, and a number of other Nazi theorists privately regarded monogamy and marriage as unnecessary restraints imposed on the increase of population by hypocritical bourgeois morality. This view was, however, not shared by all the Party faithful, most of whom clung to their traditional religious roots. The Nazi theories themselves were confusing. Unwed mothers did not fit in very well with the concept of the
Kinderreich
family nurtured by its Honor Cross mother. Everyone was also aware that the archenemy Communists had sanctioned illegitimacy. Loyalty to the Führer was all very well and good, but changing the ancient view of the unwed mother as immoral or “asocial” and therefore unworthy of being a “German” was another matter. Even respected Nazi race specialists were opposed to illegitimacy on the logical grounds that one could not be sure of a child’s purity if its father was unknown. Such children were also popularly thought to be less healthy as well as mentally unstable. Mainstream agencies, for the time being, did little more than give single mothers the polite title of “Frau,” tax relief, and equal access to welfare. Still more discouraging was the fact that fathering an illegitimate child remained a court-martial offense in the regular German Army. Even hard-core Nazi formations, especially those limited to women (such as the National Socialist Womanhood, whose leader, Gertrud Schotz-Klinck, patriotically produced eleven children), continued to fire unwed pregnant employees. It was within the secretive bosom of the SS that a more radical experiment would be instituted.
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