miss

miss

From their earliest years, girls were taught in their schools that all good German women married at a young age to a proper German and that the wife’s task was to keep a decent home for her working husband and to have children.
As Germany grew she would need more soldiers and mothers; hence a booming population was needed with young boys being groomed into being soldiers and young girls being groomed into being young mothers. If "lebensraum" was to be carried out, Hitler needed the population to fill the spaces gained in the Eastern Europe. This attitude of deliberately boosting your nation's population was finding favor in Western Europe and not just in Nazi Germany. France, in particular, feared that its population was falling too quickly and banned abortions and contraception.
Such was the desire to increase the German population that in 1943, a law was discussed among Nazi leaders that all women - married or single- should have 4 children and that the fathers of these children had to be "racially pure". Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was particularly keen on this idea. If a family already had four children, the father from that family had to be released to father more children outside of his marriage. This law never came into being as even the Nazi leaders realized that this law would create social anarchy.
Women were not expected to work in Nazi Germany. In Weimar Germany there had been 100,000 female teachers, 3000 female doctors and 13,000 female musicians. Within months of Hitler coming to power, many female doctors and civil servants were sacked. This was followed by female teachers and lawyers. By the start of the Second World War, very few German women were in fulltime work. However, such was the skills shortage in Germany that in 1937 a law was passed in 1937 which meant women had to do a "Duty Year". This meant that they could work 'patriotically' in a factory etc. to help the Nazi's "Economic Miracle". The marriage loan was also abolished in...

Similar Essays