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.
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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 matrimony 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.
Wives, Mothers, and Workers
The National Socialist Women's Union and German Women's Agency used Nazi propaganda to encourage women to focus on their roles as wives and mothers. Besides increasing the population, the regime also sought to enhance its "racial purity" through "species upgrading," notably by promulgating laws prohibiting marriage between "Aryans" and "non-Aryans" while preventing those with handicaps and certain diseases from marrying at all.