Nazi's polices towards women

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Nazi’s polices towards women

The Nazis had a number of different policies towards women, which were each tackled by different measures that varied in success.

The first policy Nazis had was to tackle to falling of birth rate in Germany. Hitler had an aggressive and firm population policy because he wanted to encourage 'racially pure' women to bear as many 'Aryan' children as possible, therefore increasing population growth.

The first step towards Nazi population growth was encouraging marriage. If the couple could prove that they were of pure German descent, then they were allowed to marry, and had great benefits. Young married couples received loans of up to 1,000 Reich marks, interest free, as long as the female agreed to quit her job. For each child that the couples had, their loan debt would be cut by a quarter, so if a couple had four children the debt would be completely liquidated, and the loan free. This was a very attractive policy, especially for newly weds who did not have much money.

Once married, women left there job, or were forced, and pressurized into giving it up. There new role was to stay at home and give birth. To encourage his policy he offered rewards to women, such as the marriage loan that I described above, tax allowances, health services and medals-August 12th had been the birthday of Hitler's mother. On this day each year, the motherhood Cross was awarded to women who had given birth to the largest number of children. The gold cross (from Hitler personally!) went to women who had produced 8 children; silver was for 6 children and bronze was for 4 children. From their earliest years, girls were taught in school that all German women married at a young age to a pure German man, and that the wifes task was to keep a decent home for her working husband, and to have children.c

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He even publicly praised women for their "services to the state, and race." As a result they were more willing to co-operate with his policy. He thought that it was their duty to assure the future of the human race. They failed to oppose him, and let him control their minds and accept their traditional house-wife role. The policy came to its most extreme when the Nazi’s built Lebensborns (spring of life) clinics, which were buildings where selected unmarried women with ideal Nazi characteristics could go and become pregnant by a "racially pure" SS man. They provided shelter for the ...

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