Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney

Abstract

CARNEY, Amy – Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. 309. In August 1939, three weeks before Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the Second World War, the official SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps (the black corps) published a generously illustrated two-page story about fatherhood titled “Is this unmanly?” In Nazi Germany, SS men embodied ultimate martial masculinity, and the article did not miss confirming conventional ideas about male and female roles. And yet it urged SS men to not shy away from assisting their wives with domestic duties, assuring its male readers that such undertakings would by no means call into question their manliness. Most importantly, the SS father-man should not worry about his manliness when it came to providing for his children, whether in private or in public. One of the several photographs accompanying the article showed a father bottle-feeding his baby. Another photo showed a uniformed SS officer pushing a baby carriage. Doing so was usually deemed unmanly. But the caption in this SS magazine advised the reader: “Uniform and baby carriage, both rescue the soldier” (pp. 55-56). As Amy Carney shows in her book Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS, this rather unconventional tutorial on manliness was part of Heinrich Himmler’s energetic efforts to secure the SS’s status as not only the social, political, martial, and racial aristocracy of Nazi Germany but also the spearhead of Nazi family policy. In Germany, just as in most other European countries, birth rates had declined, causing massive anxieties, especially in militaristic and chauvinistic states. German statisticians calculated that this development would lead to the complete extinction of its people within a few centuries. In Nazi Germany, the conjunction of the eugenics movement and scientific racism propelled an intense discourse on halting and reversing this decline. The members of the SS were chosen to model the return to the four-child family and thus secure the appropriate reproduction of the entire Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, the Nazis’ concept for a racially purified nation. The racially pure Volksgemeinschaft would eliminate Germany’s allegedly racially alien, especially Jewish, elements and at the same time boost a growing Aryan population, the reservoir for the warriors the Nazi empire needed to rule over Europe, the Lebensraum or living space in the East, and possibly other parts of the world. Carney analyzes the SS policies that served this goal, the implementation of these policies, and their eventual failure. Himmler’s “Engagement and Marriage Command” from 1931 laid the groundwork, ordering “every SS man who intends to marry … to obtain the marriage authorization of the Reichsführer SS,” that is, Himmler. Although the resulting complicated and thorough vetting processes required an increasingly inflated bureaucracy, Himmler still monitored it often himself. The marriage command served to control the racial purity of SS offspring. Beginning in 1933, a plethora of incentives served to increase it. These measures included significant monetary allowances for families (some $500 and more per month in today’s currency), a flood of ideological indoctrination and symbolic stimuli, such as wedding and birth ceremonies, and not least the not always open and yet not entirely clandestine encouragement of extramarital relationships. His own illegitimate children were testament to Himmler’s commitment. The SS Lebensborn project (literally “fountain of life”), the institution that supported unmarried mothers and illegitimate (but racially acceptable) children of SS men, however, was the most deliberate piece of the SS’s effort to neutralize traditional moral obstacles to the desired Aryan reproduction. The vetting process that the marriage command instigated left an especially rich archival trail, to the benefit of today’s historians. It includes SS orders and internal reports, petitions and letters of SS men, and related exhibits. In conjunction with a close reading of SS and NS periodicals such as Das Schwarze Korps, these materials enable Carney to draw a detailed picture of SS family policies as well as of the responses and coping strategies of individual SS members and their wives or mistresses. Results of the SS family policy were mixed, as Carney shows. On the one hand, conflicts with Himmler’s obsessively upheld racial standards...