Nazi Germany: Reproductive Laws and Policies

Frida Fogdemark
HTS – 2101
Professor Flamming and Winders
December 10, 2011
Nazi Germany: Reproductive laws and policies.
When the National Socialists rose to power in Germany in 1933 they reversed the gains that the women of Germany had previously made with respect to work, voting rights and overall equality. Previously, under the Constitution of the Weimar Republic that was adopted in 1919, women were guaranteed “equality before the law and full political rights for women, as well as labor protection”. When Adolf Hitler was sworn into office on January 30th 1933, he immediately pushed forth policies that reflected the views of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSGWP) that a woman’s place was in the home and as the bearers of the next generation of the Aryan race. The Nazis wanted to control the reproduction of the German population so they established laws against abortion and introduced compulsory sterilizations. Women no longer had any fundamental rights over their own bodies and reproductive lives and they were only seen as mothers or as potential mothers. “If we say the world of the man is the state, the world of the man is his commitment, his struggle on behalf of the community, we could then perhaps say that the world of the woman is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. But where would the big world be if no one wanted to look after the small world? How could the big world continue to exist if there was no one to make the task of caring for the small world the center of their lives? No, the big world rests upon this small world! The big world cannot survive if the small world is not secure.” Adolf Hitler, speech to The National Socialist Women’s Organization, Nuremberg Party Rally, 7th September 1934. The Weimar Republic, a parliamentary democracy established in Germany after World War I, came to an end when the Nazi Socialists rose to power. Soon after Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, the Nazi state (also known as the Third Reich) became a regime where no Germans were guaranteed basic rights. The Nazis controlled the economy, education, culture and the law. Something that Hitler and the Nazis really wanted to control was the German woman. As Hitler clarified in the speech quoted earlier, he believed that women were inferior to men, referring to men as the “big world” and that, “…the world of a woman is a smaller world”. In the same speech he pointed out the importance that women had, and how the big world could not survive without the small world. According to Hitler, women play an important role in the society by taking care of the men and the household and, most importantly, by reproducing. The main goal for the National Socialists was to increase the German population and make sure that it became as pure as possible. To reach that goal, they had to find a way for Aryan women to produce more children and the Jewish and the ‘inferior’ women to produce as few children as possible.
According to the Nazi perspective, compulsory sterilization was necessary to make sure that the German population became racially pure. The Nazis called the eugenic sterilization ‘Hitlerschnitt’ which when translated means ‘Hitler’s cut’. It was declared that Germany was in danger of Volkstod (death of the race) and that severe and extensive measures were required. Most of the victims of this kind of sterilizations were Jewish, but among the stipulated categories of the “hereditarily sick” were persons suffering from schizophrenia, congenital mental retardation, epilepsy, hereditary blindness, manic-depressive insanity Huntington’s chorea, hereditary deafness, severe alcoholism and grave bodily malformation. During just a few years, more than 500,000 people were sterilized according to German statistics. Out of those people, about 30,000 died soon after the sterilization due different complications from it. “We must have the courage again to grade our people according to its genetic values” was the statement that the Minister of the interior Wilhelm Frick made, which clearly shows how the Nazi government believed that some people were more valuable than others.

Mother’s Cross (Mutterskreuz)
By performing compulsory sterilizations on people the Nazis thought were inferior, the Nazis could control who were able to reproduce and who were not, but that was just halfway to reaching their goal. To make up for the loss of men in the war and to make sure that the Aryan race stayed strong, they took particular measures to increase the birthrate of the Aryan race. To encourage women to have more children, they gave out different medals, called the Mother’s Cross, and other privileges such as tax concessions for mothers. On May 26, there was a large anti-abortion campaign was begun in Nazi Germany. This was the most effective and also the most sexist way of controlling reproduction. The Nazis introduced two new strict laws that made abortion facilities and services illegal. Paragraph 219 of the German Penal Code stated that “anyone who for the purpose of abortion, advertises or recommends certain articles of procedures, or exhibits them to the general public” could be sentences up to two years in prison. Paragraph 220 declared that “anyone who publicly offers his services or the services of a third person for the purpose of an abortion” would be punished with either a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years. Penalties for women who had abortion procedures performed were also introduced, contraceptives were forbidden and birth control clinics were forced to shut down.
Being a woman in Germany during the time that the National Socialists were in power must have been hard. Women had very little and up to sometimes no control over their own bodies. If just being a woman was not hard enough, being a Jewish woman was even harder. When it came to reproduction, the government strictly controlled both the Aryan and the Jewish women. They were both controlled for the same purpose, but in totally different ways. The main goal for the National Socialists was to increase the German population and make sure that it became as pure as possible. To reach that goal, they had to find a way for Aryan women to produce more children and the Jewish and the ‘inferior’ women to produce as few children as possible. Hitler and his National Socialists had a vision of a future Germany with a pure Aryan population; and they did everything they could to accomplish that. What they did to people was awful and something that the majority of today’s people would call unacceptable; but the Nazis had the power over the people and there was not a lot you could do than to obey their rules if you wanted to survive.

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[ 1 ]. Mason, Tim. Women in Germany, 1925-1940: Family, Welfare and Work. Part I. Oxford Journal. History Workshop, No. 1 (Spring, 1976) 74.
[ 2 ]. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "A Forgotten Suitcase: The Mantello Rescue Mission" Online Exhibitions. http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/mantello/. Accessed on {November 28, 2011}.
[ 3 ]. Henry P. David, Jochen Fleischhacker, Charlotte Hohn. Abortion and Eugenics in Nazi Germany. Population and Development Review, Vol. 14. No. 1 (Mar.,1988) 91.
[ 4 ]. David, et al. 91.
[ 5 ]. Gupta, 41.
[ 6 ]. Ibid., 41.
[ 7 ]. Mother's Cross (Mutterskreuz), A Christian cross given to German mothers.
[ 8 ]. Gupta, 41.
[ 9 ]. Ibid., 41.
[ 10 ]. David, et al. 90.
[ 11 ]. Ibid., 90.
[ 12 ]. Gupta, 41.