Women were central to Adolf Hitler's plan to create an ideal “Aryan” community (Volksgemeinschaft). Praising German women as “our most loyal, fanatical fellow-combatants,” Hitler valued women for both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological power as generators of the race.
In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would enhance Germany's military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered territory in eastern Europe. The Third Reich's aggressive population policy encouraged “racially pure” women to bear as many children as possible.
Nazi population policy took a radical turn in 1936 when SS leaders created the state-directed program known as Lebensborn (Fount of Life). In an extension of the SS Marriage Order of 1932, the 1936 Lebensborn ordinance prescribed that every SS member should father four children, in or out of wedlock. Lebensborn homes sheltered single mothers with their children, provided birth documents and financial support, and recruited adoptive parents for the children.
In the end, however, the Lebensborn program was never promoted aggressively. Instead, Nazi population policy concentrated on the family and marriage. The state encouraged marriage through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child, publicly honored "child-rich" families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion.
Girls were taught to embrace the role of mother and obedient wife in school and through compulsory membership in the Nazi League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel; BDM), which started at the age of ten years old. However, rearmament followed by total war forced the Nazis to abandon the domestic ideal for women. The need for labor prompted the state to produce women into the workforce (for example, through the Duty Year, the compulsory-service plan for all women) and even into the military itself (the number of female auxiliaries in the German armed forces approached 500,000 by 1945).
Gearing up for the war and waging it obliged Nazi leaders to mobilize female workers. Young women provided free labor in annual summer camps, and in 1939 all single women had to report for compulsory labor service in war-related industries. By war's end, the number of female auxiliaries in the German armed forces approached 500,000, including some 3,700 women who served as guards in the Nazi camp system.
Equally numerous to the female auxiliaries were the many women who were secretaries in the Nazi machinery of destruction, supportive wives of SS officers, and nurses in the Euthanasia Program.