The nature of "Hitler Youth" was to prepare young boys for service in the military, it allowed them to learn skills such as: marching, bayonet drill, grenade throwing, trench digging, map reading, gas defence, use of dugouts, how to get under barbed wire and pistol shooting. Another purpose was to keep track of what the peers of young children thought of this new Governments policies and Nazis would persuade the members of the group to tell them whether their parents spoke highly of Hitler or not, if not their parents would be arrested and sent away for "re-education". Movements were set up also to raise money for Nazi charity, young boys or girls would be sent to collect money from the public for the military’s needs. Joining the Hitler Youth movement gave youngsters opportunities to go away on holidays to harden their character by having their physical and mental strength disciplined and improved in order for them to obey the Nazi government in a brainwashing sense. The main purpose of the Hitler Youth was to indoctrinate the young into becoming Nazis. The Hitler youth was a way of fulfilling Hitler’s desire for Germany to have a master race.
b. Explain the reasons for Nazi policies towards women.
One of the policies the Nazis had for women was the law for the hereditarily diseased offspring this would have all women that were either mentally ill or not physically perfect fertilized, the reason for this is because Hitler believed that the Germans were a master race this meant that there was no place for imperfect people. If these women had babies there children have a chance of being imperfect, so Hitler believed that these women should not have babies. By 1937 almost 100,000 women had been sterilised.
In Germany the birth rate was going down, and this wasn’t good for Hitler because the young were a big part in making Germany strong, they were the and he needed a bigger population to provide the army with more soldiers, so as a answer he increased the birth rate by giving couples marriage loans, people of German nationality who marry can be granted a loan of up 1,000 reichsmarks, the conditions are as followed: That the future wife has spent at least six months in employment, That the future wife gives up her job, That the future wife promises not to take up employment so long as her future husband earns more than 125 reichmarks a month. But to increase the birth rate couples had to have children, Hitler encouraged people to have children by cutting the loan by a quarter for having a baby after the loan, if they had another second child it would be cut by half, and after four children they would owe nothing, this was a clever way of getting people to have more children.
