POLITICIZING PRONATALISM: EXPLORING THE

NAZI IDEOLOGY OF WOMEN THROUGH THE

LENS OF VISUAL PROPAGANDA, 1933-1939
KATHERINE ROSSY

The mission of woman is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.
This is not at all as rude and unmodern as it sounds. The female bird pretties
herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him. In exchange, the mate takes
care of gathering the food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy.
- Joseph Goebbels 1

Recent works on womens roles in Nazi Germany have fueled a

maelstrom of contentious arguments that challenge notions of
womens accountability, victimization, agency and resistance
during one of the most destructive regimes in modern history. The
epistemological currents of womens roles in the Third Reich
converge at one particular point. The general academic consensus
is that German women belonged to a sexist patriarchal regime
that sought to dramatically increase its population by driving
women into the domestic sphere. This episteme, however, is
dynamic and constantly in flux, and analyzing these currents
generates a conundrum. On one hand, failing to acknowledge the
blatant misogyny of the Third Reich is an egregious historical
omission; on the other hand, historicizing it treads dangerously
close to calling the women of Nazi Germany victims. The
essence of this conundrum is captured by the drawn-out scholarly
rivalry between Nazi womens historians Claudia Koonz and
Gisela Bock, whose opposing arguments about womens roles in
the Third Reich, or lack thereof, establish much of the foundation
on which this historical discourse is based. Koonz deems the Nazi
conscience, a secular ethos whose implications extended only
1

Joseph Goebbels, The Female Bird, in Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural,

and Social Life in the Third Reich, ed. George L. Mosse (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 41 [Originally from Joseph Goebbels
Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblttern (Munich: Zentralverlag
der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1929), 41].

50 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

to racially pure Aryans, responsible for the expulsion and

extermination of German Jews.2 Koonz argues that since German
women actively fulfilled the roles of child bearer, provider and
worker, they, too, were guilty of the Holocaust.3 She observes,
furthermore, that the Nazi conscience was developed through a
process of relativism that vindicated [the Third Reichs]
superiority by means of the widespread anti-Semitic European
climate during the interwar period.4 Koonzs arguments directly
oppose those of Gisela Bock, who posits that National Socialism
did not create equality amongst the sexes in that the gendered
policies of the Third Reich were laced with the same biases and
prejudices as Nazi racial policies.5 From Bocks perspective,
those who believe that National Socialism favored women are
most likely confusing propaganda with actual policies, an
argument that demands further attention.6 Although these two
dominant strands of discourse have generated much scholarship
in the field of gender relations during the Third Reich, their
hypotheses fail to fully consider the driving forces behind
womens marginalization in Nazi Germany. Discussing how
women exercised or were stripped of their agency is certainly no
small feat, but it by no means offers complete insight into the
reasons why the institutionalization of misogyny was successfully
carried out during the Nazi Regime.
The episteme generally acknowledges that Nazi policies
and ideologies about women and childbirth were harbored in a
hyper-masculine environment saturated with misogyny. Yet
scholars have failed to consider the power and persuasiveness of
National Socialist youth and womens visual propaganda. They
have also failed to analyze the crucial role that Nazi visual
propaganda played in politicizing pronatalism. From Bocks point
of view, one ought not to confuse propaganda with National
Socialist policies, even though pronatal visual propaganda served
2

Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003),

passim.
3
Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 6-7.
4
Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 6-7.
5
Gisela Bock, Equality and Difference in National Socialist Racism, in
Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics, and Female
Subjectivity, eds. Gisela Bock and Susan James (London: Routledge, 1992),
82-83.
6
Bock, Equality and Difference, 83.

ROSSY 51

as a powerful vehicle of feminine marginalization during the early

years of the Third Reich. The abundance of visual material in
online archives is testimony to this hypothesis; a search through
the German Propaganda Archive, the Bund Deutscher Mdel
Historical Research Page and Online Archive, and the Hoover
Institution Political Poster Database makes it evident that a great
deal of Nazi visual propaganda was created for a female audience
and was designed with a specific purpose in mind.7 According to
art historian Joan Schwartz, visual media such as photographs
have visual agenda[s] and are thus social constructs capable of
performing ideological work.8 These agendas, Schwartz
continues, thus enforce particular worldviews and serve the
interests [of] the photographers who made them, the patrons who
commissioned them, the entrepreneurs who published them and
the audiences who consumed them.9 Although Schwartz focuses
on photographs, this theoretical framework can be applied to
visual propaganda as well. Much of the archival visual material
relating to women in this context depicts them in the domestic
sphere; in fact, it is very difficult to locate sources that depict
women outside of the home. In addition, an overwhelming
proportion of this visual propaganda depicts certain militaristic,
maternal, and agrarian parallels, a trichotomy that Jill Stephenson
discusses in The Nazi Organization of Women; by selecting the
visual material that best reflects these recurring motifs, one can
expose the myriad ways that pronatalism was propagated and
politicized in Nazi Germany.10 Hence, a critical analysis of Nazi
visual propaganda makes it impossible to ignore that propaganda
was designed to marginalize women.
One might consider using ausschlachten, a German word
that means to exploit or to extract everything from something, as
a methodology for visual analysis in that exploiting an images
potential through thorough visual analysis might yield insight into
7

Although the Bund Deutscher Mdel: A Historical Research Page and Online
Archive is not an academic archive, it is nevertheless a useful resource and
thus forms a solid point of departure from which I have launched my
investigation.
8
Joan Schwartz, The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of
Imaginative Geographies, Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 29, 21.
9
Schwartz, The Geography Lesson, 35.
10
Jill Stephenson, The Nazi Organization of Women (London: Redwood Burn
Limited, 1981), 69.

52 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

the creators objectives and the motives behind its circulation.11

In this regard, I use ausschlachten to demonstrate that misogyny
was generated through a complex process of politicization
whereby the National Socialist ideology of women was expressed
through the convergence of three motifs that dominated pronatal
visual propaganda. The first of these motifs is Lebensraum or
living space for the German people, a crucial theme that reflects
Nazi foreign policy through the depiction of shifting borders. The
second motif that characterizes pronatal propaganda is the soldier,
a theme that will be made especially evident through a
comparative analysis of the covers of Der Pimpf and Das
Deutsche Mdel, the respective Hitler Youth publications for
boys and girls. The third motif is that of mother and child, a
powerful symbol that captures the essence of pronatal propaganda
by acting as the binding agent between the German farmer and
the German soldier. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to explore
the ways in which the tripartite relationship between motherhood,
militarism, and agrarianism is visually portrayed in order to prove
that visual propaganda acted as a powerful driving force behind
the politicization of pronatalism and the institutionalization of
misogyny between 1933 and 1939, that is, from Hitlers seizure
of power to the eve of the Second World War.
Pronatalism: A Prerequisite of Lebensraum
May 1, 1936 marked the beginning of the National
Socialist Registry Offices nation-wide distribution of Mein
Kampf to all newlywed couples for eight Reichsmarks apiece.12
Hitler hoped that his book would promote the National Socialist
Weltanschauung, a nightmarish fusion of anti-Semitism and anti11

The concept of ausschlachten was brought to my attention by Dr. Rosemarie

Schade, my mentor and supervisor, in Hessen, Germany this summer. I would
like to thank Dr. Schade for her endless support, constructive criticism, and
invaluable insight. Special thanks also goes out to Dr. Elena Razlogova, whose
guidance and expertise played a crucial role in the planning and shaping of this
research paper. I would also like to thank Dr. Randall Bytwerk for allowing me
to use material from his archive, the German Propaganda Archive
<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/>. Lastly, thank you to Mr. Nick
Siekierski for kindly granting me permission to reproduce images from the
Hoover Institution Archives <http://www.hoover.org/library-and-archives>.
12
Judith Ryan and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, A New History of German
Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 795.

ROSSY 53

Bolshevism laced with a murderous expansionist policy,

Lebensraum. Amidst countless threats of war and genocide lies
crucial insight into Hitlers ideology of childbirth. He condemned
birth control and said that it generated the obvious desire to
save even the weakest and most sickly at any price.13 Women
were seldom mentioned in his exhaustive, seven hundred page
manifesto. The passage above is one of Hitlers few references to
childbearing. The overall lack of references to women in Mein
Kampf is testimony to Hitlers view of childbirth as a eugenically
motivated biological process instead of as a socio-feminine
phenomenon. His beliefs about women and childbirth reveal
themselves throughout his Second Book as well. In the chapter
War and Peace in the Struggle for Survival, he argued that
peaceful policies would create a racially weakened nation state,
devoid of its Nordic blood, which would inevitably lead to the
collapse of the German nation.14 Decreasing the national
birthrate, he continued, would compromise the essence of
Lebensraum in that a reduction in the birth rate eliminates those
with superior qualities, while emigration destroys the average
quality of the people.15 This passage reflects Hitlers anxiety
about a low birthrate and the consequences he felt would
inevitably follow.
Pronatalism was not an innovation of Nazi Germany,
however. Fear of low birthrates and depopulation saturated the
domestic policies of the Soviet Union and many Western
European nations long before the Nazis rose to power. The 1920s
and 1930s witnessed a great deal of crisis in France, Italy, and the
Soviet Union, where issues about reproduction and gender were
of paramount importance in the body politic. In Mothers in the
Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context,
historian David L. Hoffman argues that the Soviet Union and
many western European nations ardently pursued pronatal
policies during the turbulent interwar period, although Stalinist
policies were radically different from Nazi ones due to the
communist regime from which they emerged. The massive loss of
13

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1999), 131-132.
14
Adolf Hitler, Hitlers Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf,
ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg (New York: Enigma Books, 2006), 13, 20.
15
Hitler, Hitlers Second Book, 13, 20.

54 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

life resulting from the First World War, Hoffman argues, created
a precedent which led European governments to begin
emphasizing maternity and childbearing on large scales:
In an age of industrial labor and mass warfare, a large and
disciplined population was seen as essential for national
power. And in an age when the scientific management of
society seemed not only possible but imperative,
governments increasingly intervened to raise the birthrate and
ensure the healthy upbringing of citizens.16

This was certainly true of post-First World War France, where

painful memories of a bloody war fought on domestic soil fueled
anxieties about depopulation and the possible stirrings of a second
world war east of the soon-to-be-built Maginot Line. However, a
low birthrate was not the only concern of French politicians and
policy-makers; widespread fear manifested itself in collective
memories of what the Great War had cost them. In fact, French
casualties during the First World War were so heavy that half of
all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five had died by
1918.17 Fear of depopulation and Germanophobia were further
intensified by rvanchisme, a national sentiment that had resulted
from Frances crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of
1871 and the consequential succession of the eastern provinces of
Alsace and Lorraine to the German Empire.18 These factors
created a climate that allowed pronatal policies to flourish during
the French Third Republic, which resulted in the introduction of
family allowances, financial compensation for first-born children,
and intensified efforts to criminalize abortion.19 The growth of
pronatal policies culminated in 1920, when contraceptives were
made illegal, and then again in 1923, when a new law stipulated
harsher penalties for abortionists and women who terminated
their pregnancies.20 In this regard, it has been argued that
16

David L. Hoffman, Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its

Pan-European Context, Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2000):
35-36.
17
Hoffman, Mothers in the Motherland, 37.
18
Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and
Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press,
2009), 44.
19
Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 44.
20
Hoffman, Mothers in the Motherland, 39.

ROSSY 55

pronatalism coloured the ideologies of both Left and Right in

1920s France, as Aristide Briand, Edouard Daladier, and Georges
Clemenceau all shared a strong desire to strengthen the French
population demographic regardless of their respective political
loyalties.21
Fascist Italy was also notorious for its pronatal policies or,
as Victoria de Grazia calls them, for its demographic battles.22
Il Duce Benito Mussolinis demographic anxieties are most
clearly reflected in his Ascension Day Speech to parliament on
May 26, 1927. The speech is undeniably militant in character:
Lets be clear: what are forty million Italians against 90
million Germans and 200 million Slavs? Let us look to the
West: what are 40 million Italians against 40 million French
plus 90 millions from the Colonies, or against 46 million
British, plus 450 millions in the Colonies? [] Gentlemen,
Italy, in order to count for something, must face the second
half of this century with a population not inferior to 60
23
million.

The Fascist policies put into place in December 1926 reinforced

this anxiety. People who used contraceptives or who performed or
underwent abortion were penalized, and unmarried Italian men
between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five were subject to a
bachelor tax, a measure Mussolini called a demographic jolt.24
Mussolinis campaign to increase the Italian birthrate had failed
by 1938, when the birthrate began to decrease.25 A possible
explanation for this decline can be found in the work of historian
Paul Ginsborg, who argues that Mussolinis family policies seem
relatively lax in comparison to the high degree of control and

21

Samuel Kalman, The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and
the Croix de Feu (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), 135.
22
Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 41.
23
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in
Mussolinis Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
Ltd., 2000), 158.
24
Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist
Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 73.
25
Lauren E. Forucci, Battle for Births: The Fascist Pronatalist Campaign in
Italy 1925-1938, The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 5.

56 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

terror exercised upon families by Hitler and Stalin.26

The Soviet Unions pronatal pursuits in the 1920s were
radical at best. The Bolsheviks had not initially concerned
themselves with family policy, yet abortion laws were
nevertheless liberalized after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and
were followed by the legalization of abortion and birth control in
1920 and 1923 respectively.27 However, these laws were quickly
changed under the Stalinist Regime in order to facilitate an
increase in the Russian birthrate.28 The pinnacle of these policies
was the Soviet Unions criminalization of abortion in June,
1936.29 The Soviet Decree of 27 June 1936 also included a
pronatal policy that awarded women who had already borne six
children two thousand rubles annually for each additional child;
the sum rose to five thousand rubles for each child after their
tenth child.30 In addition, the Soviet government allotted generous
funding to maternity wards, pediatric hospitals, and nurseries.31
Most important, however, was the Soviet governments
encouragement of reproduction regardless of ethnicity, religion,
or political loyalties, unlike the Nazis who, as I argue,
implemented as many antinatal policies as pronatal policies
between the years of 1933 and 1939.32 Despite a brief increase in
birthrate between 1936 and 1938, the Soviet birthrate then dipped
below its 1935 level due to myriad factors including widespread
poverty, endemic hunger, and slashes in maternity benefit
funding, thus making Stalins demographic campaign as
unsuccessful as Mussolinis.33
It would be an egregious error to assume that because the
Third Reich was rife with misogyny, the Weimar Republic must
have been an extraordinarily liberal place for women. The Nazi
Party is notorious for its total exclusion of women from the
political sphere, while the Weimar Republic witnessed one
26

Paul Ginsborg, The Politics of the Family in Twentieth-Century Europe,

Contemporary European History 9, no. 3 (2000): 420.
27
Ginsborg, The Politics of the Family, 414; Hoffman, Mothers in the
Motherland, 39.
28
Ginsborg, The Politics of the Family, 414.
29
Ginsborg, The Politics of the Family, 427.
30
Hoffman, Mothers in the Motherland, 41.
31
Hoffman, Mothers in the Motherland, 41.
32
Hoffman, Mothers in the Motherland, 41.
33
Ginsborg, The Politics of the Family, 428.

ROSSY 57

hundred and eleven female politicians in the Reichstag from

center and left-leaning parties between 1919 and 1933.34 It is also
true that Weimar Germany was the site of a divided feminist
movement composed of both a bourgeois womens movement,
formed during the late nineteenth century, and a youth movement
that promoted equality and comradeship between the sexes.35
Feminist movements were targeted and persecuted after 1933, as
womens emancipation was seen as a leftist or Marxist pursuit.
Only official Nazi-sponsored girls and womens organizations
were permitted to operate, and the underlying objectives of these
approved organizations were, I argue, to confine women to the
domestic sphere in order to facilitate a higher birth rate. Despite
the seemingly liberal attitude of the New Woman, Weimar
Germany did not condone promiscuity and sexuality, as popular
culture often suggests. Abortion was decriminalized in 1927
solely on the grounds that it could only be performed if pregnancy
posed a threat to the health of a woman.36 During the same year,
Germany passed the Maternity Protection Act, which protected
and consolidated the rights of female workers and, perhaps most
importantly, made cheap contraceptives readily accessible to the
working class.37
These social innovations, however, were short-lived. The
Great Depression and newly-appointed Chancellor Heinrich
Brnings disastrous attempts to counter the effects of the Wall
Street Crash of 29 October 1929 resulted in the near collapse of
the German economy. Simply put, social benefits were neither
feasible nor economically sustainable and were curtailed
accordingly. Maria-Sophia Quine argues that consequential tax
increases, unemployment figures reaching six million, massive
funding cuts, and widespread bankruptcy sparked much public
disenchantment with the Brning administration and set the
groundwork for negative eugenics, where people began to label
34

Matthew Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich (London: Aenold Publishlishers,

2003), 16.
35
Rosemarie Schade, Ein weibliches Utopia: Organisationen und Ideologien
der Mdchen und Frauen in der brgerlichen Jugendbewegung 1905-1933
(Witzenhausen, Archiv der Deutschen Jugendbewegung, 1996), passim.
36
Maria-Sophia Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth Century Europe:
Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies (London: Routledge, 2002),
108.
37
Quine, Population Politics, 108.

58 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

mentally and physically disabled persons as societal burdens.38

She also deems the collapse of the Weimar welfare state an
intensifying agent in race eugenics in that some believed that
racially unfit citizens did not deserve to receive welfare and
state benefits.39 Another consequence of the turbulent early
1930s, however, was the rise of the Communist Kommunistische
Partei Deutschlands (KPD) and the Fascist Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). The latter of these parties, the
Nazi Party, was in many ways a continuation of Russian and
Western European societys long-standing tradition of misogyny.
Its precedents facilitated its emergence as one of the most
monstrous and murderous regimes in history. Certain Nazi
pronatal threads can thus be traced from the Weimar Republic
into the Third Reich, where pronatalism latched onto domestic
policy, intensified, and permeated every element of society.
The National Socialist anxiety about depopulation is
perhaps best reflected in Joseph Goebbels speech at a womens
exhibit opening in Berlin in March 1934. In this speech, the
Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda insisted
that the German population was drastically declining, though he
used this rhetoric to achieve a dramatic and exaggerated effect:
In 1900, two million babies were born in Germany. Now the
number has fallen to one million. This drastic decline is most
evident in the nations capital. In the last fourteen years,
Berlins birthrate has become the lowest of any European
city. By 1955, without emigration, it will have only about
three million inhabitants. The government is determined to
halt this decline of the family and the resulting
impoverishment of our blood. There must be a fundamental
change. The liberal attitude toward the family and the child is
40
responsible for Germanys rapid decline.

The liberal attitude to which Goebbels referred was

unmistakably that of the Weimar periods consolidation of
womens liberties, which directly opposed the Nazi ideology of
38

Quine, Population Politics, 108.

Quine, Population Politics, 109.
40
Joseph Goebbels, German Women, speech delivered at the opening of a
womens exhibition in Berlin, 18 March 1933, in Nazi Propaganda by Joseph
Goebbels, 1933-1945, German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, Grand
Rapids, Michigan <http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb55.htm>.
39

ROSSY 59

women. Goebbels resonating anxieties reinforce my hypothesis

that the Nazi Regime intended to propagate pronatalism through
the creation of separate masculine and feminine spheres.
Although National Socialist rhetoric was a key tool in
promoting pronatalism through speech, repopulation was most
effectively politicized through Hitler Youth propaganda
publications. The three images below are powerful examples of
the ways in which the Nazi Regime fused agrarianism and
Lebensraum in order to encourage a dramatic population increase.
Figure 1, the cover page of the 1 September 1937 issue of Das
Deutsche Mdel, the official party magazine for German girls,
intertwines living space and gender dichotomies to influence the
minds of its young readers. The young girl is depicted as a
Hausfrau, her hair modestly covered. The young boy is portrayed
as a farmer, in breeches, boots, and a sunhat, and symbolizes the
agrarian paradigm of land expansion for the German volk, or
people. In addition, both children are carrying schoolbooks, as if
to symbolize the embedding of the Nazi worldview in the minds
of the German youth. A map of Germanys shifting borders looms
imposingly overhead and eerily foreshadows Anschluss, the
annexation of Austria that would take place a mere five months
later. Most important, however, is that the territories that had been
annexed by the League of Nations and Germanys neighboring
countries after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 have been
reincorporated into the Third Reich, including the then-French
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, the coal and iron-ore rich
Saarland, parts of Belgium, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia. I
consider this images shifting borders a very early expression of
Nazi foreign policy.
Figure 2, the cover page of a February 1939 issue of Die
Kameradschaft, a periodical published in order to dictate the
curricula of Hitler Youth leaders, clearly invokes natal imagery.
Its title states that eighty million Germans live on five-hundred
eighty thousand square kilometers of land, and the illustration
itself incorporates Austria into the Third Reich, even though
Anschluss had yet to be carried out. Farmers, housewives,
children, and farmland are used to symbolize an overpopulated
nation with insufficient living space, a clear attempt to promote
Lebensraum. This cover page can therefore be considered a lens
through which foreign policy is viewed. Figure 3, a 1934 Bund

60 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

deutscher Osten poster, an unofficial Nazi sponsored group aimed

to influence the Hitler Youth, uses similar themes in an attempt to
propagate pronatalism as well. Its inscription, Bund Deutscher
Osten, which means German Alliance East, is a blatant
admission of the Nazi Regimes expansionist policies. The image

Figure 1: Das Deutsche Mdel, September 193741

Figure 2: Die Kameradschaft, February 193942

41

Figure 3: Hitler Youth Poster, 193443

Das Deutsche Mdel, September 1937, Bund Deustcher Mdel: A Historical

Research Page and Online Archive
<http://bdmhistory.fotki.com/primarysources/ddm/september1937/37september01.html>.

ROSSY 61

shows farmers ploughing the soil in Czechoslovakia and Poland,

territories that are shaded green in order to fit the agrarian
paradigm of living space for the German people. It uses political
imagery to encourage the German youth to carry out Nazi foreign
policy. Aggressive expansionist policies were carried out as early
as 1938 with the annexation of the Sudetenland in March 1938
and the invasion of Poland in September of 1939, the latter which
brought Appeasement to an abrupt halt. That this propaganda
targeted the future generation was no mere coincidence. These
three images mark attempts to indoctrinate the notion of
Lebensraum into the German youths worldview. To military
historians, moreover, these images shifting geographical borders
are also unique declarations of Nazi war aims.
Institutionalizing Misogyny in the Third Reich
Between 1933 and 1937, unemployment in Germany was
reduced from six million to five hundred thousand people.44 What
is not widely acknowledged, however, is that inequality between
the sexes played a paramount role in this economic phenomenon.
On 1 July 1933, Hitler passed the Law to Reduce Unemployment,
which included a law on Marriage Loans.45 The Marriage Loans
policy offered an average of one thousand Reichsmarks,
approximately one fifth of a Germans average annual salary, tax
and interest free, to racially pure couples on the condition that
the woman left her job and remained in the home.46 Section 1 of
the Marriage Loans law reveals the extent to which Nazi
officials tried to remove women from the work force:
Marriage Loans, section I

42

Die Kameradschaft, 8 February 1939, German Propaganda Archive

<http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/images/hj/ks39-9.jpg>.
43
GE 1012, 1934, Bund Deutscher Osten, Hoover Institution Political Poster
Database, Stanford University, California.
44
Thomas Emerson Hall and J. David Ferguson, The Great Depression: An
International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1998), 132.
45
Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and
German National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29.
46
Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
(New York: Random House, Inc., 2007), 334; Stibbe, Women in the Third
Reich, 40.

62 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

1.

People of German nationality who marry one

another after this law has come into force can on
application be granted a marriage loan of up to 1000
Reichsmarks [] The conditions which must be
fulfilled before the grant of a marriage loan are as
follows:
[]
(b) [] that the future wife gives up her job at the
latest at the time of the wedding or has already
given it up at the time the application is made.
(c) That the future wife pledges herself not to take
up employment so long as her future husband
47
receives an income.

Despite the fact that the policy blatantly sought to confine women
to the domestic sphere, seven hundred thousand couples took out
the marriage loan between 1933 and 1937.48 Driving women out
of the workforce and into the domestic sphere was a key factor in
the drastic reduction of unemployment between 1933 and 1937.
According to Richard Geary, Hitler did not solely reduce
unemployment through the creation of new jobs; rather, he
removed people from the workforce and did not place them on the
unemployment register.49 In addition, the Marriage Loan
represented a shift from the politicization of sexism to the
institutionalization of misogyny, in that they encouraged women
to leave their jobs while also discouraging them from seeking
employment.50
One month later, on 5 July 1933, the Law for the
Encouragement of Marriage was passed to complement the
Marriage Loans law.51 Driven by financial incentive, the law
granted racially pure newlywed couples loans of one thousand
Reichsmarks; for each child that they had, the couples were
allowed to keep two hundred and fifty Reichsmarks.52 If the
couple had four children, they were no longer required to repay
47

Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Documents on Nazism, 1919-1945

(New York: Viking Press, 1975), 365.
48
Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, 334.
49
Richard Geary, Hitler and Nazism (London: Routledge, 2000), 57.
50
Geary, Hitler and Nazism, 57-58.
51
Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, in Documents on Nazism, 19191945, eds. Noakes and Pridham, 365-366.
52
Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, 365-366.

ROSSY 63

the loan. Another measure that the Nazis used to promote

childbearing was the Honour Cross of the German Mother, the
MutterKreuz, created in 1938. The MutterKreuz used patriotism
and pan-Germanism to glorify women who gave birth to many
children. In other words, it rewarded them for their biological
capacities. A 1938 Christmas Day newspaper clipping from the
Vlkischer Beobachter, the Nazi propaganda newspaper, reveals
the incentive behind the MutterKreuz programme:
The prolific German mother is to be accorded the same place
of honor in the German Volk community as the combat
soldier, since she risks her body and her life for the people
and the Fatherland as much as the combat soldier does in the
roar and thunder of battle. With these words, Reich
Physician Leader Dr. Wagner, head of the Peoples Health
Section in the Reich leadership of the party, at the behest of
the Fuhrer, announced the creation of a Medal of Honor for
prolific German Mothers at the Party Day of Labor. Three
million German mothers, on the German Mothers Day in
1939, for the first time will be solemnly awarded the new
53
badge of honor by the leaders of the party.

As this excerpt demonstrates, the Nazi Regime considered

childbearing the most important patriotic duty of womanhood, a
view that culminated with the MutterKreuz programme. Every
year, on Hitlers mothers birthday, August 12, mothers were
awarded a bronze cross if they had four children, a silver cross if
they had six children, and a gold cross if they had eight children.54
The underlying ideology was that offering national recognition
for childbearing would provide women with incentive to remain
in the home and strengthen the population demographic. In this
regard, the Law to Reduce Unemployment, the Law for the
Encouragement of Marriage, and the Cross of Honour of the
German Mother were all blatant attempts to support pronatalism.
These policies likely played a central role in increasing the
German birthrate, which rose from 971,174 to 1,261,273 between
1933 and 1935 alone.55
53

George Lachmann Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social

Life in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 45-46.
54
Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, 365-366.
55
Richard Bessel, Nazism and War (New York: Random House Inc., 2006),
64.

64 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

Figure 4: NSDAP Recruitment Poster,

date unknown56

Figure 5: NS-Frauen Warte, August 193857

56

Figure 6: Die Madelschaft, July 193758

GE 944, date unknown (c. 1933-1945), Die NSDAP sichert die VolksGemeinschaft, Hoover Institution Political Poster Database.
57
NS-Frauen Warte, August 1938, German Propaganda Archive
<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/images/fw/fw7-04.jpg>.
58
Die Madelschaft, July 1937, German Propaganda Archive
<http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/images/hj/ms37-7.jpg>.

ROSSY 65

A second group of images -- Figures 4, 5, and 6 -demonstrate the ways in which Nazi propaganda portrayed
childbearing as a glorious female duty. Figure 4 depicts a
modestly clothed Hausfrau cradling an infant in her arms. Her
husband, the pater familias, looks on protectively as he drapes his
arm around his sons shoulder. On the far right, a young girl
beams angelically, as if attesting to her familys elation. The
valiant and courageous German eagle spreads its wings
protectively around the young family as it stares, unchallenged,
into the distance, the party name placed symbolically next to its
head. This image, its publication date unknown, most likely
served as a recruiting poster for the NSDAP. It is a prime
example of the NSDAPs attempts to create powerful and
persuasive political imagery; by launching a campaign to increase
the German birthrate for a future war and Lebensraum, it
attempted to control and manipulate the thoughts of the German
people. Figure 5, a cover from the August 1938 issue of NSFrauen Warte, the official womens magazine, incorporates the
themes of Lebensraum and childbirth in order to encourage
repopulation. A couple is depicted in farmers clothing, which fits
Hitlers agrarian vision for the Reichs future acquisition of living
space. Their child, moreover, is a symbol of German womens
patriotic duty to produce children who would secure future
generations of the Third Reich. The cover of the July 1937 issue
of Die Madelschaft (Figure 6) also includes typical elements of
Nazi visual propaganda. In this example, which is the cover of an
instruction manual for the girls branch of the Hitler Youth, the
image implies that a woman will find fulfillment by raising a
family and remaining in the home. Its inscription, so long I live,
so long I laugh, suggests that Hitler Youth leaders were to teach
girls and women to find happiness and strength through their
children. In addition, a common aesthetic thread can be traced
through the three images. Each mother is conservatively clothed
and is not wearing any makeup or jewelry. The Nazi Party
discouraged women from smoking and dieting because of the
negative effect that these activities would have on their ability to
carry children. They also frowned upon cosmetics and wearing
the latest fashions, fearing that these actions would encourage
promiscuity and eroticism amongst German women, the antithesis of a regime that sought to de-eroticize many spheres of

66 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

society.59 In this regard, the images above are classic examples of

the Nazi Regimes attempt to glorify repopulation through
aesthetic and visual means. They also strongly reinforced the
heterosexual family unit.
Antinatal Dissonance
Although the Nazi Regime took drastic measures to
facilitate childbirth among racially pure Aryans, it also
enforced draconian antinatal policies in order to prevent the births
of racially impure children. Goebbels stated that [t]he goal is
not: children at any cost, but: racially worthy, physically and
mentally unaffected children of German families.60 As the
Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment insisted, childbearing
in itself is, from the race viewpoint, far from being a merit.61 In
this regard, an analysis of the laws and policies designed to
prevent the births of non-Aryans yields crucial insight into the
institutionalization of misogyny between 1933 and 1939. Prior to
the Second World War, the German female population was
composed of women from varying religions, ethnicities, and
political affiliations. In an attempt to prevent non-Aryans from
having children, Hitler foreshadowed the Marriage Health Law in
Mein Kampf by stating that defective people must be prevented
from propagating equally defective offspring.62 This ideology is
certainly consistent with Gisela Bocks research findings on the
forced sterilizations as well as forced abortions that were inflicted
upon two million Eastern workers, mostly Russian, Polish and
Ukrainian women.63 These were ruthlessly executed to prevent
German men from impregnating non-German women and
fathering Mischlinge, children of mixed blood.64
On 18 September 1935, the Law for the Protection of the
Hereditary Health of the German People was issued in
conjunction with the Law for the Prevention of Genetically
59

Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 43.

Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, Maternity and Gender Politics: Women and the
Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s- 1950s (London: Routledge, 1994),
240.
61
Bock and Thane, Maternity and Gender Politics, 240.
62
Hitler, Mein Kampf, 255.
63
Jeffrey Burds, Sexual Violence in Europe in World War II, 1939-1945,
Politics & Society 37, no. 1 (2009): 41-42.
64
Burds, 41-42; Hitler, Mein Kampf, 255.
60

ROSSY 67

Diseased Offspring, also known as the Sterilization Law of 14

July 1933.65 Both of these laws prevented physically and
psychologically impaired persons from having children. They
were only permitted to marry if they possessed a certificate from
the Office of Health attesting their racial fitness and were often
sterilized if they failed to produce such a certificate.66 Men and
women were subject to medical examinations and sterilization if
they were seen as racially unhygienic or as a threat to the purity
of the Aryan race. Gisela Bock estimates that between ten and
thirty per cent of women who were deemed racially unfit were
sterilized. According to the head of the partys Race Policy
Office, only ten to thirty percent of women living in Germany
were actually worthy of procreation.67 The Marriage Health
Law, therefore, can be seen as a precedent to the Nuremberg
Laws of 15 September 1935.68
The Nuremberg Laws, which among other things forbade
marriage and sexual relations between Jewish-Germans and nonJewish Germans, exposed and reinforced the racist intent of the
marriage loans and of the MutterKreuz programme.69 They acted
as stark counter-policies to the Marriage Loans Law, the Law for
the Encouragement of Marriage, and the MutterKreuz. In other
words, they revealed a much darker side of Nazi eugenics
whereby childbearing was made impossible for those who were
deemed racially impure.
It is important to note that pronatalism was not necessarily
equated with pronuptualism, as was the case in Fascist Italy.
While most of the Nazi policies seem to either encourage or
discourage marriage, a step that traditionally preceded
childbearing, the regime made divorce more easily accessible to
couples who had no children in July 1938 so that each party could
remarry and have children.70 Thus, the Nazi Regime denounced
marriage and even encouraged giving birth out of wedlock in
65

Roderick Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (London:

Routledge, 2007), 303.
66
Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany, 283.
67
Bock and Thane, Maternity and Gender Politics, 240.
68
Stackelberg and Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, 186.
69
The Nuremberg Laws and Jewish Policy, 1935-37, Documents on Nazism,
1919-1945, 463; Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, Documents on
Nazism, 1919-1945, 365-366.
70
Ginsborg, The Politics of the Family, 427.

68 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

Figure 7: Mutter und Kind Relief71

Organization of the NS- Volkswohlfahrt

Figure 8: Cover of NS- Frauen Warte,

1937/193872

order to increase the population of racially pure Germans. Lisa

Pine observes a commonly held view of the time: The National
Socialist state no longer sees in the single mother the
degenerate It places the single mother who has given a child a
life higher than the lady, who has avoided having children in her
marriage on egotistical grounds.73 By analyzing this ideology
alongside the twenty-first clause of the NSDAPs 25-Points
Program of 1920, which pledged to raise the standard of health
in the nation by protecting mothers and infants, it becomes
alarmingly apparent that childrearing was deemed acceptable in
any context as long as the mothers were racially pure and
hereditarily healthy.74 The Nazi Regime, therefore, seldom
differentiated between children born into families and children
born to single mothers.75 In addition, the Nazi public welfare
organization, the NS-Volkswohlfahrt, provided many types of
relief for single mothers. Among these were adoption services,
71

GE 3869, date unknown (1938-1945), Hilfswerk Mutter und Kind, Hoover

Institution Political Poster Database.
72
NS-Frauen Warte, 1937/1938, German Propaganda Archive
<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/images/fw/fw6-20.jpg>.
73
Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 39.
74
Stackelberg and Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, 64; Pine, Nazi
Family Policy, 26.
75
Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 26, 39.

ROSSY 69

foster care, and services to facilitate marriage to the childs father

in order to guarantee the childs continued welfare.76 On 28
February 1934, the NS-Volkswohlfahrt created a sub-organization
called the Hilfswerk Mutter und Kind, which means relief
organization for mother and child.77 The organization provided
yet another convenient medium through which Goebbels
propagated pronatalism.
Figures 7 and 8 offer insight into womens roles in the
Reich. In these images, women are portrayed as mothers who
remained within the domestic sphere. Figure 7, a Hilkswerk
Mutter und Kind poster, asks for donations to support single
mothers. The seemingly sanctified mother nurses her child, and
the golden aura that surrounds her implies that the Nazi Regime
did not discourage or condemn illegitimate children. Since
Goebbels openly stated that [m]other and child are the pledge for
the immortality of the nation, the purpose of the Mutter und
Kind organization was clear: the National Socialist state was
willing to take extreme measures to drastically increase the
population, even if these measures went against the grain of
traditional Christian ideology.78
The cover of the 1937/1938 issue of NS- Frauen Warte
(Figure 8) also portrays a single, spouseless mother. The mother
holds her baby as a soldier stands behind her, literally shielding
her and her child from harm. Figure 7 and Figure 8 both depict
farmers ploughing the soil in the background. Both of these
images symbolize fertility: the mother and child represent the
phenomenon of childbirth while the farmer tends to his fertile
land. Hence, nature and nurture are cleverly depicted alongside
one another. Both of these visual elements form integral
components of Lebensraum, the concept of acquiring living space
for the growing German population. As Jill Stephenson argues,
the depiction of a mother, a soldier and a farmer reveals the ideal
trichotomy of Nazi society.79 A future generation, a world war,
and living space were the Reichs ultimate objectives;
superimposing these elements on top of one another expresses the
National Socialist worldview and makes this cover of NS-Frauen
76

Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 26.

Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 26.
78
Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 26.
79
Stephenson, The Nazi Organization of Women, 69.
77

70 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

Warte a powerful example of visual propaganda. Although the

extent to which NS-Frauen Warte propaganda affected practice is
difficult to determine, this image nevertheless reveals some of the
ways that misogyny was politicized.
The convergence of maternalism, militarism and
agrarianism in Figures 7 and 8 also reflects Hitlers intensely antiSemitic and misogynist worldview. This worldview is reflected in
his speech to the National Socialists Womens League of 8
September 1934, in which he calls the emancipation of women
an advent of Jewish intellectuals and uses his hatred of Jews to
politicize pronatalism:
What the man gives in courage on the battlefield, the woman
gives in eternal self-sacrifice, in eternal pain and suffering.
Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, a
battle waged for the existence of her people. And both must
therefore mutually value and respect each other when they
see that each performs the task that Nature and Providence
have ordained. And this mutual respect will necessarily result
from this separation of the functions of each. It is not true, as
Jewish intellectuals assert, that respect depends on the
overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes; this
respect demands that neither sex should try to do that which
80
belongs to the sphere of the other.

In typical Hitlerian rhetoric, Hitler juxtaposed masculine

militarism with maternalism, and deemed Jewish Marxism the
underlying driving force behind the Third Reichs depopulation.
It is evident that this dichotomous worldview was of paramount
importance in visual propaganda, where women were relegated to
a separate feminine sphere.
The extreme measures taken to counter depopulation are
perhaps epitomized by the implementation of the SS Lebensborn
programme in 1940, a breeding programme established by the SS
Race and Resettlement Office.81 In an attempt to increase the
population at any cost, Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer of the
SS, set up buildings around Germany where racially pure
80

Adolf Hitler, Speech to the National Socialists Womens League, 8

September 1934 in Nazism, 1919-1945, Vol. 2: State, Economy and Society
1933-1939, eds. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (Exeter: University of
Exeter Press, 2000), 255-56.
81
Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 156.

ROSSY 71

married and unmarried women could arrange to give birth to their

children anonymously.82 Himmler had completely disregarded the
traditional social order by creating the Lebensborn programme,
and endorsed the births of racially pure babies at any cost:
I have made it known privately that any young woman who is
alone and longs for a child can turn to Lebensborn with
perfect confidence. I would sponsor the child and provide for
its education. I know this is a revolutionary step, because
according to the existing middle-class code an unmarried
woman has no right to yearn for a child [] I have therefore
created the possibility for such women to have the child they
crave. As you can imagine, we recommend only racially
83
faultless men as conception assistants.

Lebensborn, which literally means source of life, illustrates that

the Nazi ideology of women was latent with misogyny. Although
Lebensborn is an extreme and isolated historical event, it
nevertheless reveals an even darker side of Nazi eugenics and
racial policies. The other laws and policies that were passed, such
as the Marriage Health Laws and the Nuremberg Laws, acted
as controlling mechanisms that prevented the births of nonAryan children. In this regard, these policies were attacks against
Jews, Jehovahs Witnesses, members of left-leaning political
organizations, women who were deemed physically and
psychologically impaired, and women who were labeled racially
unfit. These marginalized people were not depicted in pronatal
visual propaganda. Rather, they were regarded as the antitheses of
the Aryan race and were treated thus.
Nazi Youth Propaganda Publications:
A Dichotomous Gender Order
The extent to which the Nazi Regime successfully created
a new dichotomous gender order can be determined through a
comparative visual analysis of the girls and boys official Nazi
propaganda publications. The Hitler Youth movement was a
powerful propagandist organization that attempted to indoctrinate
the Nazi worldview into the minds of the future generation. Girls
aged ten to fourteen joined the Jungmdelschaft (JM) and young
82
83

Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 156.

Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 156.

72 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

women aged fourteen to eighteen joined the League of German

maidens, the Bund deutscher Mdel (BDM), which was formed in
1930.84 Boys aged fourteen to eighteen joined the Hitler Youth
movement, the Hitlerjugend (HJ), which was established as early
as 1926.85 The Hitler Youth law of 1936 made female
membership in the BDM compulsory, which resulted in a sixfold
increase in membership.86 In December 1933, there were 243,750
members in the BDM; at the beginning of 1939, their number had
increased to 1,502,571.87 Members of the Jungmadelschaft were
taken on an annual ten-day camping trip to the seaside, where the
indoctrination with National Socialist ideology could be
undertaken without any parental influence or intervention.88 The
girls organizations of the Hitler Youth were thus designed to
instill the National Socialist ethos in the minds of young women,
who were extensively trained in subjects concerning the home
and motherhood. The division between masculine and feminine
social realms saturated countless aspects of Nazi youth
organizations, including elementary school textbooks such as
Meine Fibel:

Figure 9: Meine Fibel, Excerpt from a Nazi Youth Reading Primer89

The Hitler Youth marches.

Otto is with them.
He has his new boots on.
They are the best of all.
84

Dienstvorschrift der Hitler Jugend: Die weltanschauliche Schulung im

Winterhalbjahr 1938/39, German Propaganda Archive
<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/hjworldview.htm>.
85
Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 113.
86
Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich, 113-114.
87
Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919-1945, 227.
88
Dienstvorschrift der Hitler Jugend, German Propaganda Archive.
89
Meine Fibel, date unknown, German Propaganda Archive
<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/textbook04.htm>.

ROSSY 73

Figure 10: Meine Fibel, Excerpt from a Nazi Youth Reading Primer90

And the girls in the BDM

Also take wonderful trips,
And there is always a lot of fun
In their hostels.

These excerpts reveal an impermeable divide between the girls

and boys branches of the Hitler Youth. Militarism resonates
throughout the boys stanza and illustration, while the girls
Bunddeutscher Mdel illustration is quite domestic in nature.
The dichotomous worldview depicted in Meine Fibel is
demonstrated in Jutta Rdigers article in the November 1937
issue of the German Girls magazine, Das Deutsche Mdel. Her
article, The Tasks of the BDM in the Year 1938, propagated the
division of social spheres to German parents and reminded them
that boys are trained to be political soldiers, girls to be strong
and brave women who will be the comrades of these political
soldiers, and who will later, as wives and mothers, live out and
form our National Socialist worldview in their families. They will
then raise a new and proud generation.91 In this regard,
household schools were established in 1936 in order to
familiarize young women with domestic activities and to facilitate
their ability to nurture and mother.92 Nazi officials had hoped, as
Rdiger insisted, to produce girls who believe[d] absolutely in
Germany and in the Fuhrer and who would pass on this faith to
the hearts of their children so that National Socialism and

90

Meine Fibel, date unknown, German Propaganda Archive

<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/textbook04.htm>.
91
Jutta Rdiger, Die Aufgaben des BDM im Arbeitsjahr 1938, German
Propaganda Archive <http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/dm1-38a.htm>.
92
Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 130.

74 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

Germany would endure forever.93

The National Socialist ideological training of girls, as
Lisa Pine calls it, was centered on instinct rather than
intellect.94 The respective boys and girls Hitler Youth
propaganda magazines, Der Pimpf and Das Deutsche Mdel,
attempted to engrain and reinforce the Nazi Weltanschauung in
the minds of future German mothers and soldiers. In this regard, a
comparative visual analysis of select cover illustrations of Das
Deutsche Mdel and Der Pimpf reveals crucial propaganda
elements that were used to dichotomize social spheres in the
Third Reich. Figures 11 through 14 set the precedent for a
powerful visual analysis. Upon first inspection of these magazine
covers (Das Deutsche Mdel is on the left and Der Pimpf on the
right), one is immediately struck by drastic differences in tone
and atmosphere. The atmosphere and mood used in the respective
boys and girls magazines are unmistakably contrasting when
analyzed on a comparative basis. Each cover of Das Deutsche
Mdel contains soft, docile colours, is dominated by natural
imagery, and depicts girls who are engaged in less radical, more
passive activities and pursuits. Each cover of Der Pimpf starkly
contrasts those of Das Deutsche Mdel in that Der Pimpf depicts
a hyper-masculine, military-charged atmosphere, and the use of
its colours are more industrial, aggressive, and command a sense
of urgency. These images reflect the Nazi Regimes desire to
breed soldiers and fighters by means of violent visual
propaganda.
Both sets of cover illustrations share similar
characteristics, however they are depicted in radically different
manners. Figures 11 and 12 both portray a procession of uniformclad German girls and boys who are carrying Hitler Youth flags
while marching in straight formation. However, the girls are
depicted on a beach in a relaxed, natural setting whereas the boys
are portrayed as soldiers in training, their expressions and
mannerisms like those of true fighters. Figures 13 and 14 depict
radically different nautical themes. The girls are cast in a passive
light as they huddle together on a dock and gaze at a wooden
ship, a symbol of archaic traditionalism. In Figure 14, a marine
makes his way towards a German submarine on the ocean floor;
93
94

Rdiger, Die Aufgaben des BDM. im Arbeitsjahr 1938.

Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 56.

ROSSY 75

this propagates active militarism and is rendered aesthetically

accessible to the magazines young readers. A comparative visual
analysis of the cover pages of these girls and boys Hitler Youth
propaganda publications thus provides scholars with crucial
insight into the process by which separate feminine and masculine
spheres became more rigid in German society. Placing covers of
Das Deutsche Mdel and Der Pimpf alongside one another
reveals some of the particular propaganda elements that attempted
to influence men and womens societal roles. The boys
illustrations are saturated with militarism whereas the girls
images are peaceful. The latter are depicted as carrying out
passive roles whilst the former carry out active, militant activities.
In this regard, although the Nazi view of women is inherently
reflected in speeches and policies between 1933 and 1939, the
Nazi ideology of women is further exposed through a comparison
of boys and girls youth propaganda. This comparative visual
analysis transcends the argument about womens roles in the

Figure 11: Das Deutsche Mdel,

April 193696

95

Figure 12: Der Pimpf, April 193895

Der Pimpf, April 1938, German Propaganda Archive

<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/images/pimpf/dp4-38.jpg>.
96
Das Deutsche Mdel, April 1936, Deustcher Mdel: A Historical Research
Page and Online Archive
<http://bdmhistory.fotki.com/primarysources/ddm/april-1936/36april01.html>.

76 GRADUATE HISTORY REVIEW

Figure 13: Das Deutsche Mdel, May 193697 Figure 14: Der Pimpf, February 193898

Third Reich in ways that textual analysis cannot. Visual analysis

makes it undoubtedly evident that the domestic and natural
settings in which girls are placed are mimetic of their stateassigned roles as child bearers. Only with this visual analysis does
it become overwhelmingly clear that women were placed at the
juncture of the soldier and the farmer. Only then is it made clear
that girls and women were driven from the public sphere during
the early peacetime years.
A New Discourse
In an interview that took place fifty years after the
collapse of the Third Reich and the Allied and Soviet occupations
of Germany, a German woman named Frau Grunhert recalled
what it was like to be one of the fifteen million German citizens
who were expelled from the eastern provinces of East Prussia and
Upper Silesia during the immediate postwar period. She recalls
expressing indifference towards the death of Hitler and towards
the collapse of a regime in which women had no rights, were

97

Das Deutsche Mdel, May 1936, Bund Deustcher Mdel: A Historical

Research Page and Online Archive
<http://bdmhistory.fotki.com/primarysources/ddm/may-1936/36may01.html>.
98
Der Pimpf, February 1938, German Propaganda Archive
<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/images/pimpf/dp38-2.jpg>.

ROSSY 77

treated like cattle.99 This research paper has woven together a

collection of carefully selected visual propaganda from various
National Socialist propaganda publications, such as NS-Frauen
Warte, Der Pimpf, Das Deutsche Mdel, and the Hoover
Institution Poster Archives, in order to expose the misogynist
climate of the Third Reich between the years of 1933 and 1939.
By incorporating National Socialist speeches, laws, and policies
into my visual analyses, I have demonstrated that visual
propaganda politicized pronatalism through a threefold process
that used the motifs of maternalism, militarism, and agrarianism
to create a new dichotomous gender order in Nazi society. These
elements converged to form a powerful driving force behind
Hitlers attempts to repopulate the Aryan race, a prerequisite of
a future world war and a ruthless expansionist policy,
Lebensraum. Frau Burcherts bitter indifference toward National
Socialism is certainly testimony to the effectiveness of the
pronatal and antinatal laws and policies that were implemented
during the Third Reich, whose misogynist and racist intent were
politicized through Nazi visual propaganda, a powerful vehicle of
feminine marginalization.

99

Alison Owings, Frau Irene Burchert: Learning How Communism Works, in

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, ed. Alison Owings (Chapel Hill:
Rutgers University Press, 2005), 148, 150.