ABSTRACT
Since the 1930s, there has been particular interest in Nazi reproductive policies. Contemporary commentators agreed that Nazi policy towards women derived from the belief that women's place was in the home, with a family of several children, and that the public sphere should be reserved for men. Observers emphasized the revocation and denial of the kind of rights which advanced western countries (including Weimar Germany) had extended to women, and the Nazi use of encouragement or even compulsion to remove women from the public sphere and confine them to the private, domestic sphere. When, from the 1960s, historians surveyed Nazi society, they contested these ideas, arguing that, while the pronatalist motive was dominant in Nazi policy towards women, strenuous efforts did not persuade Germans to revert to high pre-1914 levels of fecundity (Table 2.1). The influence of the Cold War shaped the differing views of Marxist and non-Marxist historians. Marxists saw working-class German women as the particular victims of the regime and its capitalist-friendly policies. Non-Marxists identified a mismatch between propaganda and reality, seeing the development of a war economy as crucial in determining Nazi policies towards women. They all accepted the Holocaust as historical fact, and that racial prejudice was inherent in National Socialism. But non-Marxists overwhelmingly considered the majority of ‘Aryan’, ‘politically reliable’ and socially-conformist German women, while most Marxists saw Nazism as an integral part of transnational fascism, bent on suppressing the working class, its organizations and its alleged champion, the USSR. Marriages and live and illegitimate births, 1900, 1905, 1910 and 1913–41 https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Per 1,000 of the population
Live births per 1,000 women of childbearing age
Illegitimate births per 1,000 births
Year
Marriages
Live births
1900
8.5
35.6
*
8.7
1905
8.1
32.9
*
8.5
1910
7.7
29.8
128.0 †
9.1
1913
7.7
27.5
*
9.7
1914
6.8
26.8
*
9.8
1915
4.1
20.4
*
11.2
1916
4.1
15.2
*
11.1
1917
4.7
13.9
*
11.5
1918
5.4
14.3
*
13.1
1919
13.4
20.0
*
11.2
1920
14.5
25.9
*
11.4
1921
11.9
25.3
*
10.7
1922
11.2
23.0
90.0
10.7
1923
9.4
21.2
82.3
10.4
1924
7.1
20.6
79.8
10.5
1925
7.7
20.8
80.2
11.9
1926
7.7
19.6
75.4
12.5
1927
8.5
18.4
70.6
12.3
1928
9.2
18.6
71.3
12.3
1929
9.2
18.0
68.7
12.1
1930
8.8
17.6
67.3
12.0
1931
8.0
16.0
62.0
11.8
1932
7.9
15.1
59.5
11.6
1933
9.7
14.7
58.9
10.7
1934
11.1
18.0
73.3
8.6
1935
9.7
18.9
77.2
7.8
1936
9.1
19.0
77.6
7.8
1937
9.1
18.8
77.1
7.7
1938
9.4
19.6
80.9
7.7
1939
11.2
20.4
84.8
7.8
1940
8.8
20.0
84.2
*
1941
7.2
18.6
*
*
1942
7.4
14.9
*
*
1943
7.3
16.0
*
*
not recorded
for 1910/11
(Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches: 1938: 47; 1941/42: 77; 1952: 36)