Lallie Fraser
Explain the reasons for Nazi policies on women (8 marks)
When the Nazis came into power, they imposed a number of policies on women. Hitler was firm believer that it was the man’s job in the family to be the breadwinner (to go out and work and bring in the money); and it was the women’s job to stay ay home to cook, clean and look after the children. Although these views may be seen as chauvinistic now, these views were just the way things were and therefore accepted.
One reason for Nazi policies on women was to increase pure German births. There were many policies which encouraged this. A major factor of trying to get women to have more children was financial incentives. For example, they were given marriage loans and birth grants which mean that money should never be the issue when having children, especially when they benefited even more from repayment loans – the more children they had, the less they had to pay back! After having one child, the repayment loan was cut by a quarter, after two it was cut by half and then after four children, they owed nothing. It was a truly incentive plan to increase the childbirth rate, even more so when from 1933-39 certain penalties were imposed for certain circumstances. For example, higher taxes on childless couples, tighter penalties on abortion – this meant fines on a woman if she did choose to have an abortion until it was eventually made illegal. Also there were restrictions on contraception info and compulsory sterilization of ‘undesirables’- undesirables being those people who were blind, deaf or handicapped in anyway. Another law that coincided with this was the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring,” which ordered that women unfit to be mothers should be sterilized; a completely degrading experience for any of the women that had to experience this. Not only this but in October 1935, the Blood Protection Law was enforced which said that marriage to Jews, black people and gypsies was forbidden – this was to make sure that only pure German births would be born within a marriage. Staying on the line of marriage, in 1938 marriage laws extended the grounds of divorce which meant that people were less likely to stay in unhappy, assumingly sexless marriages, so would marry again and go on to have children – pure German children obviously.
