Fight against the empty cradle: Nazi pronatal policies and the SS-Führerkorps

Abstract

During the early decades of the twentieth century, Germany, like most western European nations, faced fertility levels at which its population was unable to replace itself. Upon assuming power in 1933 the National Socialist regime began almost immediately to implement pronatalist measures in an effort to halt and reverse this trend. At the forefront of the battle against the declining birthrate stood Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, who attempted to make his officer corps into an example of fecundity worthy of emulation by the entire German nation. But neither material incen tives, coercion, a barrage of indoctrination and propa ganda, nor special pronatal institutional devices such as the Lebensborn succeeeded in stimulating fertility. In the final analysis even within the SS, the vanguard of National Socialism, it proved impossible to increase the number of births significantly Germans and SS F?hrer alike continued to prefer samll families. Thus the secular decline in German fertility, which had began during the latter part of the nineteenth century, was not checked during the National Socialist era, pronata list measures notwithstanding. The increasing industrialization and urbanization of Western European nations during the latter part of the nineteenth century was accompanied by concomi tant demographic transformations, which were characterized by a shift from high birth and death rates to substantially lower ones. This demographic transition,(i) as it is often labeled, took anywhere from fifty years to more than a century, and varied with the rate of social and economic develop ment of individual countries. The resultant secular decline in overall fertility progressed to the extent that some nations felt genuinely threa tened by their future demographic prospsects.U) By the 1930s, fertility levels in much of Europe had reached the mark at which populations were unable to replace themselves, nothwithstanding considerably decreased mor tality levels.(3) On a national level, between unification in 1871 and the early 1930's, overall fertility in Germany had declined by some sixty per cent, making it, with the sole exception of Austria, the lowest in Eu rope.U) The public discussion of the population decline^) was still being pursued when the Nazis assumed power and began, almost immediately, to implement new policies or amplify existing ones designed to increase Germany's birth rate.(6) Without a hint of irony or self-doubt, the leaders of the Third Reich lamented that Germany was at once a 'sterbendes Volk' as well as a 'Volk ohne Raum'(7) in need of 'Lebensraum'. This rather apparent contradic tion did not discourage the drive for more people. A case in point was the (*) Address a?? communications to: Herbert F. Ziegler, Department of History, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, Hawai 96822. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.170 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 04:06:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms