Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and

the State

Gisela Bock

Signs, Vol. 8, No. 3, Women and Violence. (Spring, 1983), pp. 400-421.

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Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany:

Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization,

and the State

Gisela Bock

"Alien Races" and the "Other Sex"

By presenting some largely unexplored features of' women's lives under
National Socialism in Germany, this essay considers larger questions
about the complex connections between racism and sexism. It does not
presume to exhaust the issue o r even touch upon all its aspects. Instead,
it approaches the issue through the perspective of one part of ivotnen's
lives affected by state policy: reproduction or, as I prefer to call it, the re-
productive aspect of women's unwaged house11.ork. It can be no rnore
than a contribution for tivo reasons. First, dealing ~vithracism in Ger-
many during this period involves assessing an unparalleled mass murder
of millions of ivolnen and men, an undertaking beyond the scope of any
single essay. Second, this analysis is a first approach, filr neither race nor
gender, racism nor sexism-and even less their connection-has been a
central theme in German social historiography.' When historians deal
with women in modern Germany, they generally d o not consider racis~n
I'his article is ;I preliminax Y jumrnary ot ongoing I-eseal-cli.Space limitations d o not
permit Ine to deal with impor-t;urt aspects of tlre issues i n \ o l \ e d , h11-example, the tcrili/:~-
tion ~x~ocetlur-e, the reactions of'thc \ictinis of'sterili~;~tion
and their resistance to it, a n d the
I-acist a n d sexist n5e of state sul~ventionsfor niarriage a ~ r dchildren. T h e ) \\.ill be dealt \\.ith
in 111). &)I-thcorningbook on "7~\~;11lgrste1.ilis:11iori urrd \lrtttersch,~l't itn K;~tion;~lsorialis-
11111~:'
I. T h e rnore 111-ogx-es\i\etien gcner;~tionof soti;il hisrol-ians in (;erm,lnv since the
;IS .I mere ideolog!, its applic;~tiona\ nlox-e 01 less
l<)(iOsh , ~ ste~rdetlto present ~-,~cisnr

as ;III ;~ppend;lgeto Inore important de\elopmerlts, "political" o r "ccononiic," See, e.g.,

Peter. \I. Kaiser, " \ l o n o ~ ~ o l l ~ r . ourltl f i ~ Rl:~\senmord irn F';~scliismus: % u r tikonomisclien
Funktion tlel- Konzentrationsl;~gel in1 f;~schistischerr Ileutsc hl;rnd." Rliitti'rfiir rii,ittsi.lri, old
~ I I ~ ~ , I I I ~ I ~ ! O I I'olilik
I(I/~, .7 (l<)7.5):5,5?-77.
Signs Spring 1983 401

o r racial discrimination against women,' while the literature dealing with

anti-Jewish racism and the Holocaust generally does not consider either
women's specific situation o r the added factor of sexism.
T h e extent to which the racist tradition was concerned with those
activities which then and now are considered "women's sphereu-that is,
bearing and rearing children-has also not been recognized. Perhaps we
might argue even further that a large part of this racist tradition re-
mained invisible precisely because the history of women and of their
work in the family was not an issue for (mostly male) historians and
theoreticians."
T o make the issue of motherhood and compulsory sterilization the
center of discussion places the focus not so much on anti-Jewish racism,
on which we have a n extended literature, as on another form of racism:
eugenics, or, as it was called before and during the Nazi regime and
sometimes also in Anglo-Saxon literature, race hygiene."t comprises a
vast field of more o r less popular, more o r less scientific, traditions,
~vhichbecame the core of population policies throughout the Nazi re-
gime.
Beyond the plain, yet unexplored, fact that at least half of those
persecuted on racial grounds were women, there are more subtle rea-
sons for women's historians interest in the "scientific" o r eugenic form of
racism. T h e race hygiene discourse since the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury deals with women much more than d o most other social o r political
theories, since \vomen have been hailed as "mothers of the race," or, in
stark contrast, vilified, as the ones guilty of "I-acial degeneration." T h e n ,
too, definitions of race hygiene made at the time show some conscious
links between this field and women's history, describing it, for instance,
as FortpJlanzzrngsl~jgit1~2e
("procreation hygiene"):? I n fact, we might con-

2. A rare exception is hlarion A . Kaplan, The /r~~)i.\h Fcrrzinist ,\lo~~f~tnrnt

it1 Gcrmanf: Tlic
Cnm/,c~igr~.\of tho 'flirli.\clzc,r Frrlurn/m,zd," 1904-1 938 (\.Vestport, Conn.: Green\vood Press,
1979).
9. Ho\\-e\.er..three conferences of' \Yomen historians on \\-omen's history have taken
place: "U'otnen in the M'eirnar Kepublic and under National Socialism," Berlin, 1979;
"bIuttersein untl klutterideologie in der biir-gel-lichen (;esellschaf't," Bremen, 1980; and
"E'rauengeschichte," Bielef Id, 1981. Sonie of'the ~\,orkshops of the latter are tlocumented
in Rritriige zur f~~rnini\ti,sch~n ?'hporip I L Pr(lxi<, ~ vo1. 5 (April 1981). Thus, \\.omen's history
has been exploring this ant1 similar themes in recent years, but much work still needs to be
done, ant1 Inany questions cannot yet be ansrver-rd in a consistent way.
4. A gooci over\ie\v o11 the American and international eugenics movement is .illan
Chase, T I I PI . P ~ ( ~of,\falthu\:
(J The S ( J C ~ O'(j\t~
( I / of th(, . ~ 0 7 1 ' S(~(,ntrfi(.
R(ICISIII(New York: Alfred
A. Knopf', Inc., 1977). .ilthough there has been, at the beginning ofttiis century, 21 debate
among experts o n distinctions between "eugenics" ant1 "race hygiene," I use these terms
intercti;lngeably, as does Chase, filr I believe the issue dealt rvith in this article requit-es my
tloing so. O n thih debate see (;eorg Lilienthal, "Kassenhygiene irn h i t t e n Keich: Krise ~ ~ n d
LVende," ~llrdizir~/rz.\ton~\r/tr.c J o u r ~ l u / 14 ( 1979): 114-34.
5. See Alhecl Grotjahn, (;e/n~rte,i-Riitkgrirz,qrind C;~hnrt~rz-Rrg(~1ung im Llc/ttr der ln-
zcrrd clr.r \ozicrlrn H j g i m ~ r(Berlin: cob lent^. 1911; 2d eed., 1921), p. 153 (hereafter
clzz~idrtr~llrn
402 Bock Raczsm and Sexism in L\luzi Germany

sider that most of the scientific and pseudoscientific superstructure of

eugenic racism, especially its mythology of hereditary character traits, is
concerned with the supposedly "natural" o r "biological" domains in
which women a r e prominent-body, sexuality, procreation,
education-the heretofore "private" ~ p h e r e . ~
For a third reason, eugenics and racism in general are significant to
women's history. After a long hiatus, the result in part of Nazism, inter-
est in the history of women in Germany has seen a revival during the
past half-decade or more. Ho~vever,this interest has focused afinost
exclusively on the historical reconstruction and critique of those norms
and traditions that underlined women's "natural" destiny as unwaged
rvikes, mothers, and homemakers. Those with this perspectike
.
see Na- -

tional Socialism as either a culmination of, or a reactionary return to,

belief in women's "traditional" role as mothers and houservives; mother-
hood and housework become essential factors in a backward, pre-
modern, or precapitalist "role" assigned to women.'
Thus most historians seem to agree - that under the Nazi regime -
Fvornen counted merely as mothers who should bear and rear as Inany
children as possible, and that Nazi antifeminism tended to promote,
protect, and eken finance Tvomen as childbearers, house\vir~es,and
mothers. It seems necessary to challenge various aspects of this widely
held opinion, but particularly its neglect of r a c i ~ r nPrinted
.~ and archival

cited as (;elntrtrn-Kiickgnr~g),and the chapter on "Birth Regulation Seriing Eugenics anti

Race Hygiene"; and Agnes Bluhrn, Dir rcl\sc.nh~q'rniscl~t,ri ,414g/zbr111dt,,! u~rlhl~rhrn Arzttjr:
Scllriflrn zur Erbltjhrt, und Ru\\t,nhpgzfjr~c.(Berlin: Met:ner, l936), esp. the chapter o n "\Vom-
an's Role in the Racial Process in Its L.al-gest Sense."
6. Good examples are the classic and influential books by Grotjahn, C;rhurtrn-Kiickglcrzg
and Dir Hjprlic. dc.r mcntchlicl~c~n F o r l f $ n n a i ~ ~ g(Bel-lin and i'ienna: Urban 8c Sch~tarren-
bui-g, 1926); Erlvin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fri,/ l.enz, (;rlrndrrp (11,~-I I I C I ~ J ~ ~ ~ I C I I P I Z
Erblithkr'itslrhrr cinrl R n s t r n h j g i r ~ ~ r\ol.
, 2, .\lrrz.cc.hlichc Au,tlr\r ztntl Rn\tr~nh~git,ncj(hl~uiich:
Lehrnann, 1921). These volutnes had many itlterestingly divergent editions. I h a \ e useti
vol. 1 (1936) anti iol. 2 (1931). For a scientific critique of'the pseudoscientific theory of
character traits see, e.g., Chase, chap. 8.
7. For a preli~ninarycritique of'this bielt-, analyzing house~vorkas rio less modern and
no less capitalist than emplovment outside the house, see Gisela Bock and Barbara Duden,
"Arl~eita us Liehe-Liehe als Art~eit:Zur Entstehung d e r Hausal-beit im Kapitalismus," in
Frcrlirn ~rntlIl'istrr~.scl~n/f:R r ~ f r h g ozlir- H~rlirlcr-Sornmrruniilrrritiif f i r Frourn, ,111li 1 9 7 6 , ed.
Gruppe Berliner Dorentirlnen (Berlin: Churage l'erlag, 1Y77), pp. 1 18-91). Parts of it have
heen translated ;is "I.ahot. of Love-Lo\e as L i ~ l ~ o rin, "Frorn Frrn~nisnrto L.ibrt-ritior~,ed. Edith
Hoshino Altbach, 2tl ed. ((:;imljridge. klass.: Schenk~nan Pul~lishing((:o.. 1!)80), pp.
I.?)?-92.
8. Diii-te \Vinkler, Frrlucnrtrhril Im "llrrttcn Rrtch" (Hatnburg: Hotfinan 8c Cainpe,
1977), esp. pp. 42-65, revised this picture by shotving that under Nazism err1plo)rnent ot
lover- and middle-class women \\as not I-educed.This is confirmed by various authors in
the ;inthology edited by Frauengi-uppe Faschisniusti)rschung, . \ l ~ i f t ~ r k r ~zold ~ r iA r h ~ i t ~ l m c / i :
Zur Grtch~cl~tr drr-I;rnuc~nin dc.r Il'i,irnnrrr R~ptihlikI L I I ~lrn .\.hfior~rrl~o:tnli~n~ut (PI-ankfurta.XI.:
Fischer, 198 1). L.eila J . Rupp, .Zfohilrz~ngII'OIIZPIL for Tl'nr: (;c~rmctnrind ,4111rr-ic.rtnP~orf~~~gcinrlr~,
1939-1945 (Princeton. N . J . : Princeton Uriiversity Press, 1978), esp. pp. I I-.>(). revisetl h e
Signs Spring 1 983 403

sources on Nazi policies, passages from Hitler's writings, other often-

quoted sources like the Minister of Agriculture Walter Darrk's breeding
concepts, and documents from the lower echelons of the state and party
hierarchys show quite clearly that the Nazis were by no means simply
interested in raising the number of childbearing women. They were just
as bent u p o n excluding many women from bearing and rearing
children-and men from begetting them-with sterilization as their
principal deterrent.
It is true that the available literature does not altogether lose sight of
these latter women. However, they are at best briefly hinted at, between
quotation marks and parentheses, as mere negations of the "aryan," the
"racially and hereditarily pure"; the general conclusions on "women in
Nazi society" usually neglect them further.1°
Although the desirability of a new perspective seems clear, the rela-
tive historical singularity of the Nazi Holocaust and the need for more
research before "models" can be constructed qualify the extent to which
we may compare the interaction of racism and sexism under Nazism and
under other historical conditions." Yet specific comparative approaches
seem possible and necessary: first, to compare the eugenics mokements
internationally in the first half of this century both with international
population policy today and with the new sociobiological "biocrats";12

current tieit. of the Nazi image of rvomen. It was more diversified than usually assumed
and did not simply stress home and housework, but any "woman's sacrifice" for the state
and "the race," including employment. See also Leila J. Rupp, "Mothers of the Volk: T h e
Image of Women in Nazi Ideology," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3, no. 2
(Winter 1977): 362-79. In relation to racism, I have tried to revise the picture in "Frauen
und ihre Arbeit irn Nationalsozialismus," in Frauen in der Geichichte, ed. Annette Kuhn and
Gerhard Schneider (Diisseldorf: Schivann Verlag, 1979), pp. 1 1 3 4 9 ; and "'Zum Wohle
des Volkskiirpers': Abtreibung und Sterilisation unterm Nationalsozialismus," Journal f u r
Gerchichte 2 (November 1980): 58-65.
9. Clifford R. Lovin, "Blut urzd Boden: T h e Ideological Basis of the Nazi Agricultural
Program,"Journal of the H i c t o ~of Idem 28 (1967): 279-88, esp. 286.
10. Compare Hans Peter Bleuel, D m ~aubereReich: Theorie und Praxts des sittlzchen
Let1en.i im Drittrr~ Rrich (Bern-Munich-Vienna: Scherz, 1972), p. 273; Jill Stephenson,
Women i n Nazi Societ?; (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 64, 69, 197.
11. Obviously, approaches exclusively or mainly based on ethnic women's labor-force
participation are not useful to the issue of reproduction: e.g., Diane K. Lewis, "A Response
to Inequality: Black Women, Racism and Sexism," Signs: Journal of Women i n Culture and
Society 3, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 339-61.
12. For a critique of the new sociobiology, see Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and
Barbara Fried, eds., Womerz Look at Biology Looking at Women: A Collection ofFeminist Critiques
(Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkrnan Publishing Co., 1979); Chandler Davis, "La Sociobiologie
et son explication de I'humanite," Annales, E.S.C. 36 (July-August 1981): 531-71. For the
international dimension of older eugenics, see Chase; Loren R. Graham, "Science and
Values: T h e Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920's,"A~nericanHi.itorical
Revieup 82 (1977): 1133-64; G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politzcs in Britazn, 1900-1914
(Leyden: Nordhoff International, 1976); and Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Mother-
hood," Histor). Workrhop 5 (1978): 1G63. It is important to note that, in fascist Italy, race
404 Bock Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany

and second, in accord with new approaches in the United States, stimu-
lated largely by women of color, to conceptualize the connection between
racism and sexism not as the mere addition of two forms of
exploitation-as a double oppression-but as a manifold and complex
relationship.13

"Value" and "Invalidity": Women in the Race Hygene Tradition

In the late nineteenth century, a theory of the possibility, even
necessity, of "eugenic," "race hygienic," or "social hygienic" sterilization
emerged, which argued that those considered transmitters of "heredi-
tary" forms of "inferiority" (erbliche Minderwertigkeit) should be pre-
vented from having children. Presumably lacking in social value and
usefulness, they and their offspring were seen as not serving the interest
of the folk or the "racial body."'"y the end of World War I, when
German aggrandizement and stability seemed at its lowest, such steril-
ization was widely and passionately recommended as a solution to urgent
social problems: shiftlessness, ignorance, and laziness in the work force;
deviant sexual behavior involving prostitution and illegitimate births; the
increasing number of ill and insane; poverty; and the rising costs of
social services.15Recommendations for sterilization came from elements
of the right and of the left, from men and women, from those leaning

hygiene did not take hold. Of course, present policies in the United States and women's
campaign's for reproductive rights are immediately relevant to the issue and approach of
this essay: Committee for Abortion Rights and against Sterilization Abuse, CVomen under
Attack: .4bortion, Sterzl~zationAbusi., and R~productivrFrrrdom (New York: CARASA, 1979).
13. Such new approaches have been presented at the Third National Women's
- ~

Studies Association Conference on "LVornen Respond to Racism:' Storrs, Connecticut, May

31-June 6, 1981. Of particular \ignific;~nte~eernedto me the presentations by Vicky Spel-
man, Arlene Aviakin, and Mary Ruth LVarner on "Feminist Theory and the Invisibility of
Black Culture." See also Bonnie Thornton Dill, "The Dialectics of Black Womanhood,"
Sign!: Journal of Ll'ornpn in Culture and Socirty 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 543-55; and Cherrie
Moraga and Gloria Xnzaldua, eds., Tltic B n d g r Cnllrd ,My Back: M'ritzngs of Radical W o m r , ~r?f
Color (LVatertorvn, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981). For a differentiated version of the
double oppression approach, see Gerda Lerner, "Black Women in the United States: i\
Problem in Historiography and Interpretation" (1973), in T h e .Majoritj Finrls Iti Pmt: Plac-
ing Il'ornen in Histoty (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 63-82;
and Traching It'omrn'r Hi.\toty (Lt'ashington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1981),
pp. 60-65.
14. For early steriliration practice and theory, see Otto Kankeleit, Die C'fa-
f r u c k ~ h a r m a c h u ~azi\
~ g rac\rnhygzrni.tchrn zcnd i o z i a l ~ nGriinden (Munich: Lehmann, 1929), pp.
41-45; Hans Harmsen, Praktische Brviilkr~ungspolztik (Berlin: Junker 8c Diinnhaupt, 1931),
p. 84; Baur, Fischer, and Len/ (n. 6 above), 2:270.
15. There \<.asa huge tiu~nhel.of writings on this subject in the 1920s, and Chase (p.
349) seems to underestimate the German roots of the movement. Compare, as examples,
the works in n. 6 above.
Signs Spring 1983 405

toward theories of heredity, and from those with a more environmental

orientation.I6
This type of reasoning, with all its subtle appeal to naive belief in
modern science, social rationality, and planning has been called "sci-
entific racism"; it transcends the more traditional and more "gut ra-
cism."" Based on a polarity between "progress" and "degeneration," its
criteria of inferiority had at their center concepts of "value" and
"valuelessness" (Wert and Unwert, Minderwertigkeit and Hijherwertigkeit)
that were related to the social or racial "body" and its productivity. The
use of eugenic sterilization was intended both to control procreation
and, by defining and proscribing its unacceptable opposite, to impose a
specific acceptable character on women and men: the hardworking male
breadwinner, his hardworking but unpaid housewife, and children who
were a financial burden to no one but their parents. This was the "valu-
able life" as gender-specific work and productivity, described in social,
medical, and psychiatric terms. Or, in the more flowery language of gut
racists: "German blooded, nordic raced beings: right angled in body and
soul."1H
What were the social motives behind these policies and their wide
acceptance? The principal and most haunting specter for the "race" was
seen not only in the women's movement and in the lower-class uprisings
between the turn of the century and the 1920s, but in phenomenon that
seemed to encompass both: the unequal propagation of the "talented"
and the "untalented," the "fit" and the "unfit," the rich and the poor, the
deserving and the undeserving poor, those of social value and the "social
problem group."lg The better-off, the fit, those thinking rationally, the
upwardly mobile, those pursuing or competing for hard and honest
work, and women seeking emancipation all limited the number of their
children. The decline of the German birthrate after the 1870s, reaching
an international low point in 1932 and perceived as a "birth-strike" after
about 1912, was attributed mainly to women.20On the other hand, the

16. biarielouise Janssen-Jurreit, "Sexualreform und Ceburtenriickgang," in Kuhn

and Schneider (n. 8 a h o ~ e )pp.
, 5681.
17. Chase (n. 4 above), pp. xv-xxii and chap. 1.
18. Dze Sonnet Monatsschrifl,fiir nordische Ct'eltnnschauung u n d Lrbensgestaltung 10, no. 2
(1933): 11 1.
19. T h e latter terrn is taken frorn the address of the president of the British Eugenics
Society at the Third International Congress of Eugenics, New York, 1932, cited in Chase
(n. 4 above), p. 20.
20. In 1913, 4,000 working-class women assembled in Berlin to hear about the
"birth-strike" and attracted much attention. See Anneliese Bergmann, "Zur 'Gebarstreik-
debatte' der SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), 19 13," in Frauen suchen ihre
Geschichte: Studien zum 19. u n d 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Karin Hausen (Munich: C. H. Beck
Verlag, 1983), in press. Compare also G. Ardersleben, Der Grharstreik der Frauen und seine
Folgen (Lorch: Rohm, 1913); and Ernst Kahn, Der intrrnationale Gebiirstrpik (Frankfurt:
Societats-Verlag, 1930).
406 Bock Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany

mentally and financially poor and the restless were seen as copulating
and propagating indiscriminately, as in a "witches' sabbath,"21transmit-
ting to their offspring by the mechanism called heredity their poverty
and restlessness and their search for income from public welfare
funds.22
Whatever the historical reality of this "differential birthrate" may
have been,23 its social interpretation came to be the double-edged
essence of what was defined as "racial degeneration" or "race suicide."
The problem stemmed from women, more or less associated with the
women's movement, who preferred to have fewer children than their
mothers, and from women or couples who raised their children against
prevailing norms and at the expense of community and ~tate.~"he
proposed remedy was to reverse both trends: to impel the "superior" to
have more children and the "inferior" to have fewer or none. The first
aim was to be achieved through a heightened public concern as well as
financial and social incentives; the latter through sterilization, or, more
generally, the "eugenic" use ofjust those means by which certain women
or couples had limited their- f e r t i l i t ~ . ~ T rise
h e of this policy-sexist in
its demand for state control of procreation, and racist in its differential
treatment of "superior" and "inferior" procreation-can therefore be
seen as a dual attack against the "birth-strike" of the desirable elements
in the population and against the social maladjustment of those who had
not enjoyed the modern training in orderliness and the work ethic, the
"natural" task of "valuable" mothers. Thus special concern was given to
women, often illustrated by suggestive pictures in journals and pam-
phlets popularizing these ideas (see, e.g., fig. 1). "If we want to practice
race hygiene seriously, 'we must make women the target of our social
work-woman as mother and not as sexual parasite," urged the main
race hygiene review in 1909. In 1929, a widely known book on Steriliza-
tion on Social and Race Hygzenic Grounds suggested that "the number of
2 1 . Gustav Boeters, "Die Unfruchtbartnachung geistig Mindertvertiger," Lt'is-
.ren.schaftl~cheBeilngr~zur Leipziger Lehr~rzeztung28 (August 1928): 217.
22. Volc der Verhiitung unulrrtm Lebrn.s+zn Zjklus in 5 C'ortragen (Bremen: Bremer Bei-
trage zur Naturwissenschaft, 1933), pp. 15, 52, 61.
23. 'The "differential birthrate" is a main issue in all books on eugenics. On social
differences in fertility, see John Knodel, The Decline of' Fertility in Gennanj, 1871 -1 939
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 223-45; Chase (n. 4 above), pp.
403-5.
24. E.g., Roderich von Ungern-Sternberg, Die C'rsachen des Grburlenruckganges im
euro,biii.~chenKulturkrris (Berlin: Schoetz, 1932), esp. pp. 63-75, 174, 203; Grotjahn,
Gebztrtrn-Riickgang (11.5 above), pp. 3 16-1 7.
25. E.g., Grotjahn, Gehrtrn-Riickgang, p. 187: "Indeed, \ve should not underestimate
the danger that the methods of birth prevention, which . . . are necessary for a future
rational eugenic regulation of the process of the human species, are presently abused for
limiting the number of children independently of their value." Therefore he wants "to
turn the technique of birth control into the point of departure for an essential control of
hunian reproduction" (Die Hj@rne. . . [n. 6 above], p. 43).
Signs Spring 1 983 407

degenerate individuals born depends mainly on the number of de-

generate women capable of procreation. Thus the sterilization of de-
generate women is, for reasons of racial hygiene, more important than
the sterilization of men."26

"Kaiserschnitt" and "Hitlerschnitt": Nazi Body Politics

Nazi pronatalism for "desirable" births and its antinatalism for "un-
desirable" ones were tightly connected. On May 26, 1933, two penal laws
were introduced that prohibited the availability of abortion facilities and
services. More important Bras the stricter handling of the old antiabor-
tion law, resulting in a 65 percent increase in yearly convictions between
1932 and 1938, when their number reached almost 7,000.27From 1935

& l N k i . ? m ~ o ? & d *
a&-! ZaN &
6 , m b . w- Srhwmye~srkffen
&, Muttern d e srbm s'h&<h~,nn.ve betm Durchschn,H der Mutter dea
finder m de; Nlf5srhule h o t t e n . betreffenden Stodfu,ertels

FIG. 1.-This 1926 illustration is entitled "the inferior multiply more than the healthy
population." T h e chart shows two types of women, giving the average number of their
respective pregnancies: on the left, "mothers with feeble-minded children in schools for
backward children"; on the right, "the average [for] mothers in the same city areas."
Source: E. Dirksen, "Asociale Familien," Zeitsrhrlftfur Volksnufartung und Erbkunde 1 (Janu-
ary 1926): 11-16, esp. 15.
26. Josef Grassl, "Weiteres zur Frage der blutterschaft," Archzv fur Rmsen- und
Gesellsrhnftsbiolog?p6 (1909): 351-66, esp. 366; Kankeleit (n. 14 above), p. 95. These and all
other translations from the German are my own.
27. Rezchsgesetzblntt 193311, p. 296 (hereafter cited as RGB); IVzrtschnft und Statistzk 15
(1935): 737, and 19 (1939): 534.
408 Bock Ruczcm and Sexztm zn ,jTazz Germuny

on, doctors and midwives were obliged to notify the regional State
Health Office of every miscarriage. Women's names and addresses were
then handed over to the police who investigated the cases suspected of
being in actuality abortion^.'^ In 1936 Heinrich Himmler, head of all
police forces and the SS, established a "Reich's Central Agency for the
Struggle against Homosexuality and Abortion," and in 1943, after three
years of preparation by the ministries of the interior and of justice, the
law on "Protection of Marriage, Family, and Motherhood" called for the
death penalty in "extreme cases."29
T h e corollary was race hygienic sterilization. Along with the new
antiabortion legislation, a law was introduced on May 26, 1933, to le-
galize eugenic sterilization and prohibit voluntary stel-ili~ation."~ Beyond
this, the cabinet, headed by Hitler, passed a law on July 14, 1933, against
propagation of Irben,su~ziclertr.sLrhen ("lives unworthy of life"), now called
the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring." It
ordered sterilization for certain categories of people, its notorious para-
graph 12 prescribing the use of fi)rce against those who did not submit
freely.:" Earlier, on June 28, the Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick
had announced: "We must have the courage again to grade our people
according to its genetic values."""
Before we turn to the outcome of such value grading, it is important
to understand some lalvs that aggravated this policy, enabled its realiza-
tion, and linked it closely 110th to antiabortion policy and to future race-
hygienic extermination. Beginning in January 1934, on the initiative of
the "Keich's Medical Doctors' Leader" Gerhard Wagner, abortion of
"defective" pregnancies on the grounds of race hygiene lvas secretly
practiced with Hitler's approval; it was introduced by law on June 26,
1935.":' It Fvas legal only tvith a woman's consent, but after being
declared of "inferior value," she tvas sterilized, too, even against her tvill,
anti after 1938 she could not e\.en decide to revoke her initial consent.
In 1938 "gene care" ant1 "race care" merged. ;-2bortions of Jewish
Tvornen ivere "permitted." I I L I ~by 1942 it ivas time t o declare: "No more

28. KGB, 193511, p. 1035: Stephenson (n. 10 al,o\c), p. 68.

29. Bundesal-chi\ Kol,len/, K 1815517, pp. 251-52 (hereatte~.cited ;IS BAK): KGB.
194311, p. 140.
30. R(;B, 193311, p. 296; F:l,erl~a~.dtSchmidt, "Das Sterilisationspl-ol1Ie111n;lch d e ~ nin
tier Bundefrepublik geltentlen Strafr.echt,",]uri,\t~~tzritung 3 (February 5, 1951): 65-70.
31. KGB. 193311, p. .529; hIartin B r o s ~ a t ,D P I St(irit Hit[c,r~ (hfunich: Deutscher
Taschenbucli I'erlag, 1969), p. 336; Kurt No\v;ik, "Euthnric~vir"~ e r ~Sttrili.\~~nrrlg d irn " D r i t t ~ n
Rpl(h3':Dip K o r r / r ~ ~ ~ fdt o~ r r7~(ing~11\chr11 lozd hnthol~\rlir~~ Kirrhr )nil tlr~n"Grcutz zur Vprl~utnng
r ~ r h k ~ n r .\'nc./~iour/ic,\"
~kr~~ zirld drr "E11t/1ci1ici.\rc~"-,4ktiori(Gi~ttingen:V;~ndenhoeckX: Ruprecht,
1980), esp. pp. 64-6.5.
92. il'ilhel~n FI-ick. "lrup~-citIw(ire/ (la1 cr\lcrl S i l ~ n ~ ld,,\ g S n c . h r ~ ~ ~ - \ l i i n t l ~ g e ~ ~Jur
~i~~zr(rt~~\
R~z~e~lkrrurrgr- ~errd Kn.\\trrpe~/itih (Berlin: Scht-iftenreihe des Reichsausschusse\ f'ut- i'olks-
gesundheit~dienstI , 1933). p. 8.
33. Brovat, pp. 356-57; No\v;lk, p. (5.5.
Signs Spring 1983 409

applications for sterilization of Jews need to be made."34 By that time,

not just their "genes" but they themselves were being "eliminated."
In 1933, the government passed a law against "habitual de-
linquents" that provided for castration (i.e., took sterilization one step
further to the destruction of the gonads) in specified cases.35 While it
concerned men only (2,006 up to 1940), castration of women by de-
struction of the gonads (beyond tuba1 ligation of the ovaries) was in-
troduced in 1936, when sterilization by X-rays, known to have castrating
effects, was included in the sterilization law." Later, officials favored this
procedure as an easy-to-handle method for rnass sterilization of camp
inmates without their k n o ~ l e d g e . ~ ~
The law that provided for the enactment of all these policies was
passed in July 1934 to create a centralized system of "State Health
Offices" with "Departments for Gene and Race Care." Numbering 1,100
and staffed by 1943 with 12,600 State Medical Officials, they became,
fi-om 1934 on, the main agents of sterilization proposals and marriage
approvals." They also were the pillars of another huge enterprise: a
centralized index of' the "gene value" of all inhabitants of Germany
(Erbkartei) to become the basis of all state decisions on the professional
and fanlily life of' its subject^.^"
Popular vernacular expressed the situation pungently. Eugenic
sterilization rvas called Hitlerschnitt ("Hitler's cut"), thereby linking it to
an antiabortion policy which refused abortions even to women who had
gone through two previous Kc~iserschnitte(caesarean operations). Only
after three Kniserschnitte did a woman have the right to an abortion, and
then only on the condition that she also accepted the Hitlerschnitt.'"'
Transcending older political partisanships, prohibition of abortion and
compulsory sterilization, compulsory motherhood and prohibition of
motherhood-far fi-orn contradicting each other-had now become trvo

34. Decree from hlarch 19, 1942, quoted irl Lt'erner. I;eldschcr, Ras.c?rz- urrrl Erbpflege
irn drzit~rlirnRrtht (Ber-lin-Leipzig-L'ienna: Deutscher Rechtsverlag, 1943), p. 123; Stephen-
son (n. 10 above), pp. 62-63.
35. Law from Novernber 24, 1939, RGB. 1!)331I, 1). 995.
36. RGB, 193611, pp. 119, 122; BAK, R 221943, p. 234.
37. Leon Poliakov and Josef' il'ulf, etls., Dn.5 Drift? Rrlch utld ~ Z J IPL ~ P T I (Berlin: Arani,
1955), p. 385; 4lexander Slitscherlich and Fred Xlielke, ,\.Irrlzzitz ohnr .!fctl.cc.hlithkrit (1948;
reprint etl., Fr;~nkfurt:Fischer, 1978), pp. 240-48; BXK, R 181.5519.
38. [.a\\. f r o m July 3, 1934, RGB, 193411, p. 531; BAK, NSD .i01626, p. 10; Arthur
Gutt, Herbert I.inden, and Franz Xlafifeller, BIzi~.\~hutz-old E I ~ ~ g ~ . ~ u t ~ ~ l / ~ (Munich:
~itsges~tz
Lehmann, 1937). By the two laws described in t h r latter official commentary, marriage was
prohibited ~cith"alien races" as cell as with the "defective" among the "German-blooded."
In the "Klutschut~"(Nure~nberg)law, ~riarriageprohil~itionconc.erned, besides Jer\.s, "ne-
#roes, gypsies, itnrl ba5t;irds" (Gutt, Linden, anti hlalJfeller, p. 16).
39. Giitt, 1-inden, and Maflf'eller, pp. 9-10, 283-87.
40. Richard Grunberger, A Socicri Histop of the Third Rrich (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1971), p. 332; see also my article on steriliration and abortion (n. 8 above).
410 Bock Racz~mand Sexzsm zn *Vazz Germany

sides of a coherent policy combining sexism and racism. Only for de-
scriptive purposes d o the following sections deal with them separately.

Forced Labor f o r ivothers or "Children of Con$dence"?

Nazi population planners liked to register the gradual rise of the
extremely low birthrate after 1933 (the birthrate of the years 1934-39
was, on average, a third above the level of 1933, thus reaching again the
level of the mid-twenties) as "a completely voluntary and spontaneous
proof of [the] confidence of the German people in its Reich, its Fiihrer,
its future, a confession which could not be more beautiful" than in the
form of "children of confidence."" Sornetimes (and not only in the past)
this increase has been considered a proof of the suspicion that women
favored rather than rejected the regime and that they redirected them-
selves toward "Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche" after their emancipation in the
1920s." Such an argument, however, confusing as it does childlessness
and liberation, motherhood and backwardness, does not seem an
adequate instrument for the historical analysis of women's lives. What
was the real effect of the pronatalist aspect of Nazi population policy on
women specifically as well as on the whole society?
Nazi and non-Nazi demographers agree on the limited extent of'the
rise in the birthrate.4" More importantly, from the limited evidence we
have on women's motives for contributing to its rise, none seems to be
the result of Nazi politics and goals. Voluntary births clearly increased as
economic conditions improved. Wives of party officials and SS men, who
may have been closest participators in Nazi goals (but who, as part of the
upper class, had easier access to voluntary birth control) had extremely
few children." From the outbreak of Tvar in 1939 when, mainly under

41. Friedrich Burgdiirfrr. Gplnrrtpr~~chruztnd: Dip Knlturkrnnk~ztEurop(2.c und ihrp fiber-

u ~ i n d u n gin Di.ut.rchlnnd (Heidelberg-Berlin-Magedehurg: I1or.iirickel, 1942), p. 80, and K11i-
dpr d t , ~V e r t m u e ~ u(Berlin: Eher, 1942).
42. Bleuel (n. 10 above), pp. 21,45; Grunberger, chaps. 16, 17; Tim Mason, "\$'omen
in Germany, 1923-1940: Farnil?, \Velfare and LVork. I," Hislo? M'orkchop 1 (1976): 74-1 13,
esp. 87.
43. For the demographic debate see D a ~ i dV. Glass, Populnlion: Po11cii.s anti .Movi.rnentc
in EltroPp (1940; reprint ed., 1,ondon: Frank Cass, 1967), pp. 269-313 on Germany and
passiln-for other ~ u r o p e a ncountries; Knodel (n. 23 above): ~ e r ~ d i i r f eGr~,h u r t e r i s c h u ~ u ~ ~ d ;
Stephenson (n. 10 above); Mason, pp. 95-10.5, and "Women in Germany, 1925-1940:
Family, \VelfBre and Work. 11," Histo? 12'orkrhqb 2 (1976): .i-32, esp. 12-14; \Volfgang
Kollmann, "Be\iilkerungsentrvicklung in d e r Weimarer Republik," in Inrlustric,llr~c Sqctcm
und poiitisch~Entu!icklung in der M'~,imnrprR p p ~ ~ b l l eds.
k , Hans hfornmsen, Dietmar P e t ~ i n a ,
and Bernd \Veisbrod (Dusseldorf Athenaum-Droste, 1977), 1:76-84.
44. K. Astel anti E. LVeber, Dip Kinrli.rzc1h1 drr 29,000 politzschrri Lciler di.7 (;aztrc
Thuringrn der .VSDAP (Berlin: X'fet~ner,1943); Heinrich Himrnler, (;rhi.imri.den, 1933-
1945, ed. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Frankf'ltrt-Berlin-Vienna: Ullstein,
1974), p. 91.
Signs Spring 1983 411

the command of Fritz Sauckel, unemployed (mostly middle-class)

women were encouraged or forced to join the war effort in the muni-
tions industries and employed (mostly lower-class) women were forbid-
den to quit their jobs, hundreds of thousands of women used the only
alternative to forced employment open to them: pregnancy. Popular wit
called these women Sauckelfrauen and their children Sauckelkinder, while
Nazi leaders accused them of "lack of comprehension for the necessity of

However, while women's positive response to pronatalism seems

limited, we must also try to relate the rise of the birthrate to the one
directly coercive measure of pronatalism: forced labor for mothers
through the prohibition of abortion for "valuable," "German-blooded"
women. Antiabortion policies are sometimes considered the main reason
for the rise in births. In fact, there is some evidence, though locally
limited, that after 1932 the rise in births nearly equalled the decline in
abortions.46 This argument could be decisive, if it were measurable.
Fortunately for those women who resorted to abortion, it is not: the
relationship between known and unknown abortions and that between
spontaneous and induced miscarriages is controversial, not only in
democratic societies but even under the tight control and supervision of
the Nazi regime.
While abortions are numbered as having been between a half and
one million per year between 1930 and 1932, a gynecologist in 1939
counted 220,000 miscarriages in hospitals, of which he estimated
120,000 to be abortions. Criminal police experts estimated that the
number of unknown abortions equalled the number that came to their
attention.47In the 1930s, very much as in the 1920s, various documents
tell of regional "abortion epidemics" in which abortions were performed
by pregnant women themselves or by "old shrews."48In 1937 Himmler
gave as estimates in various secret documents the numbers of 400,000
and 600,000-800,000 abortions per year.49
These numbers seem high, particularly if measured against the ris-
ing number of trials and convictions for abortion. Taken together, they
permit conclusions that challenge claims of women's easy compliance
with Nazi pronatalism. Nonetheless, those who were denied abortion or
45. Leila J . Rupp, "I Don't Call 'That Volhgemeinschaft: Women, Class, and War in Nazi
Germany," in Women, War and R ~ ~ o l u t i o ed.
n , Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett (New
York and London: Holmes & Meier, 19801, p. 43; Bleuel (n. 10 above), p. 81; Winkler (n. 8
above), pp. 72-73. T h e quotation is from a high government official: Gitte Schefer, "Wo
Unterdriickung ist, da ist auch Widerstand: Frauen gegen Faschismus und Krieg," in
Frauengruppe Faschis~nusforschung,ed. (n. 8 above), p. 289.
46. Glass, pp. 31 1-13.
47. BAK, R 1812957; Atina Grossman, "Abortion and Economic Crisis: T h e 1931
Campaign against $ 218 in Germany," ,Vew German Critique 14 (Spring 1978): 119-37.
48. BAK, R 1812957.
49. Himmler, p. 91.
412 Bock Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany

who did not want to risk prosecution, even if they did not want children
or were endangered by childbirth, had to accept motherhood as forced
labor: the labor of childbirth in its modern misogynist form and the
labor of additional unpaid h o u s e ~ o r k . ~ ~
A last consideration helps to answer our initial question. The "qual-
itatively" neutral birthrate does not tell us about the relation of "undesir-
able" children to the "desirable" ones so dear to Nazi population politi-
cians. Although it makes little sense to try through numerical count to
match one against the other-and thus as a women's historian to repeat
the favorite eugenics game called "differential birthrate of the inferior
and superiorn-we should definitely not assume that all children were
welcome.s1 While on the one hand the Nazis became worried around
1937 about something they called Erbangst, people's fear of having chil-
dren because there was so much talk about unworthy genes,52 on the
other hand there were German (though not "German-blooded") women
who succeeded in conceiving desired children during the time lag be-
tween their sentence of sterilization and its actual e n f o r ~ e m e n tMost
.~~
important, Nazi pronatalism excluded from the ranks of honor and
allo~vancesevery large family found to be "hereditarily defective or ra-
cially mixed or asocial, unorderly, [a] drinking family, [with] no orderly
family life, [in which the] children [are] a burden: family is only large,
but undesirable"" (see, e.g., fig. 2).

"Lives Unworthy of Life"

The sterilization law, meant to prevent children considered lebena-
unulertes Leben ("lives unworthy of life") came into force on January 1,
1934. It listed nine diagnostic causes whereby a person could be sen-
tenced by one of about 250 special "genetic health courts" to steriliza-
tion; five categories were related to psychiatric "invalidity," three to
physical "invalidity," the last to alcoholism. Authorities gave differing
estimates of how many should be sterilized, somewhere between 5 per-
cent and 30 percent of the population; the minister of the Interior
recommended 20 percent in his speech of June 1933.5s During the
50. Adrienne Rich, (ljll'uman Born: ,Zlothrrhood as Experii.nc~a w l Iizstztution (New York:
\.V. i V . Norton 8c Co., 1976), chap. 7.
51. Mason (n. 43 above), p. 101; Bleuel (n. 10 above), p. 43.
52. Alexander Paul, "1st Erbangst berechtigt?" Volk und R a s p 16 (1941): 130-35.
53. This is e\ident from the documents of the sterilization courts on which I am
working. See also Theresia Seible (a sterilized German gypsy woman), "Aber ich wollte
vorher noch ein Kind," Courage 6 (May 1981): 21-24.
54. Vom Sieg (lpr M74Je11 zum Sivg d ~ It'~~gr,n
r ( Berlin: Reichsbund der Kinderreichen,
1942), p. 23. Space does not permit me to deal with an important financial corollary to the
race hygienic body policies: "incenti\esn such as marriage loans and child allowances given
only to the "desirables" and only to husbands, not to rvives.
55. Frick (n. 32 aboie), p. 3.
Signs Spring 1983 413

nearly six years preceding the outbreak of World War 11, about 320,000
persons (nearly .5 percent of the population) were sterilized under the
terms of this law. This figure included some 5,000 eugenic abortions
with subsequent sterilizations (under comparable laws in thirty states of
the United States, 11,000 persons were sterilized between 1907 and
1930, and 53,000 more by 1964). While men alone determined steriliza-
tion cases in court, the victims were divided evenly between men and

Zakl 11.

n n r n o 4 Derbre4er oermeqren lid) qeute im bentl4en Dolte mirfIi4.

f e trtfftn auf:

Mannliche Eine kriminelle Eltern von

Verbrecher Ehe Hilfsschulkindern

4,9 Kinder 4.4 Kinder 3,5 Kinder

Ehe aus der ebildeten

Die deufsche Familie ~chic%t

2.2 Kinder l,9 Kinder

FIG.2.-The heading of this illustration claims, "Today only criminals really multiply
among the German people." T h e number below each picture identifies the average
number of children supposedly born to that social category. Shown in the top row are,
from left to right, "male criminals," "a criminal marriage," and "parents of those in schools
for back\vard children"; below are shown "the German family" and "marriage among the
well-educated." Source: Otto Helmut, Volk irz Gefnhr: Dpr G~burtenschzc~und und sPzne Folgen
fur Devtschlands Zukvnft (Munich: Lehmann, 1933), p. 31.
414 Bock Racism and Sexism i n Nazi Germany

women. Three-quarters were sterilized u n d e r the law's first two

categories: 53 percent (with a somewhat higher share among women) for
"feeble-mindedness," 20 percent (with a somewhat higher share among
men) for "schizophrenia."" Between 1934 and 1937, about eighty men
and 400 women died in the course of the operation.
An attempt to identify the actual victims of race hygienic steriliza-
tion may help to illuminate not only their lives and social situations but
also the forms and functions of reproductive racism and some links with
racism's better known historical- "solutions." T h e majority of those
sterilized under the law were not (as in the United States) asylum in-
mates, or ethnic minorities, but noninstitutionalized persons of "Ger-
man" ethnicity. T h e poorer strata of the population had the highest
share (unskilled workers, particularly agricultural laborers), and three
categories of women were far overrepresented: house servants, un-
skilled factory or farm workers, and jobless houservives, especially those
married to unskilled workers. Many prostitutes and unmarried mothers
were among them.57"Deviancy from the norm," from "the average," was
the crucial criterion in the courts. T h e "norm" itself was elaborated ever
more clearly as demonstrable through adherence to the work ethic, self-
sacrifice, parsimony, and through consequent upward mobility: the
"German work character." For wornen, this ideal was represented by the
worker who performed ungrudging housework and efficient labor in
outside employment; her antithesis was the slut, the prostitute.
T h e other sterilization victims between 1934 and 1939 were inmates
or ex-inmates (searched out in the old files) of institutions, mainly of
56. For the social and historical significance of the first category, see Chase (n. 4
above), esp. chap. 7; of the second, see Thomas S. Sras~.,Schizoph7-enia (New York, Basic
Books, 1976). he precise number of sterilizations is unknown: Compare Nowak (n. 31
above), pp. 6.3, 188, n. 6. In 1967, an interstate comlnission of the Federal Republic of
Germany in~estigatedthe nutnber of "those unjustly sterilized under nazism" and on the
b,a s:. ~ sof the la\%.While the number estimated (300,000-320,000) seems justified, this is
certainly not true for the estimate of " ~ ~ n j u ssterilizations
t" (83,000); the documetlt has not
been published. T h e other information is taker1 from BAK, R 1815585, pp. 329-31. See
Arthur Giitt, Ernst Riidin, and Falk Ruttke, Grcrtz zur Vrrhutung rrbkrunken .lrachu'uchses ?lorn
14. J u l i 1933 (Munich: Lehtnann, 1936). For the U.S., see Chase, p. 350; Baur, Fischer, and
Len/ (n. 6 above), 2:27l.
57. This is a preliminary ekaluation of the records of the sterilization courts in three
Gerrnatl cities; it agrees, generall), ~viththe results of Gisela Dieterle (Freiburg) rvho is
working on the records of another city, and with Wilfent Ilalicho, "Sterilisation in Koln auf
Grund des Geset~esLur Verhutung erbkl-anken Nachwuchses, . . . 1934-1943" (medical
diss.. University of (:ologne, 1971), esp. pp. 160-65. There has been no research on the
sterilization of male homosexuals, mostly performed outside the court procedure of the
sterilizatiotl la\<-.Lesbian botnen are hardly ever metltioned in the court records (and very
rarel) in other archival documents of 1933-45). We must assume, ho~vever,that they kvere
strongly represented among the women in the asylums, and from reports given by women
who were inmates of' concentration camps, ive knou that many leshians were among those
incarcerated. See, e.g., Fania Fenelon, The 2\.lz~rzcic~nscf A z ~ t c h i ~ j ~(London:
tz Joseph, 1977),
chap. 21 (trans. from the French Su1si.c pou?- l'orchrct?-r [Paris: Stoc-UOpera blundi, 19751).
Szgns Spring 1983 415

psychiatric clinics and of psychiatric departments of regular hospitals.

More precisely, they were all those discharged from the clinics because
of their recovery, or because public funds for the clinics were reduced;
their recovery did not, according to race hygienic thought, involve their
"genes," which they might pass on to posterity. It is well known that most
inmates of psychiatric institutions came from a background of poverty.
Patients in specified, sexually segregated "closed institutions" were not
sterilized if they stayed there at their own expense.58 A considerable
number of people used this loophole and entered such an institution if
they could afford one. However, this option was closed by the
"euthanasia" project "T 4," in which, from 1939 to 1941, up to 100,000
inmates of these institutions were killed outright as "useless eaters"; after
August 1941 many more were killed through plain starvation. In
another way, race hygienic sterilization was a direct prelude to mass
murders: the prohibition against bearing "unworthy" children was ex-
panded into the mass murder of about 5,000 such children, sixteen years
and under, between 1939 and 1944. In order to get control over these
children, the government would often force their mothers into war in-
dustry so that home child care was impossible." For both sorts of mass
murders, a secret and elaborate machinery was set up, resembling in its
procedures the nonsecret sterilization bureaucracy.
The transition to still another form of mass murder is clearly visible.
Project "T 4" was meant to be kept secret, but the news spread rapidly,
arousing fear and the suspicion that sterilization of the "useless" was just
a first step. Public opinion and pressure-which was, in 1941, largely led
by women, children, and old people-in fact forced Hitler and his S S
doctors to stop "T 4" and the planned murder of 3 million "invalids."
But the gas chambers, used for the first time in this enterprise, were
transported with their entire staff to occupied Poland, where they were
installed for the "final The terror that had met resistance
within Germany was exported beyond her frontiers to work more
smoothly.

58. According to an addition to the law from December 5, 1933: Giitt, Riidin, and
Ritttke, p. 84. For the general poverty of asylum inmates, see Klaus Diirner, Burgrr zrndIr7-e
(Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1969).
59. Klaus DGrner, "Nationalso~ialismusund Lebensvernichtung," V z ~ r t r ~ ~ a h r ~ s h r f t r j u r
Z~itgnchichtr 19 (1967): 12 1-52, reprinted in Klaus Dorner, Dlagnosrn der P.iychiatrir
(Frankfirrt and New York: Campus, 1975), pp. 59-99, esp. pp. 7 6 8 2 ; Dorner et al., eds.,
Der Kneg grgrn (lie psjchi~rh Krankrn (Rehhurg and Loccum: Psychiatrie-Verlag, 1980);
Nowak (n. 31 above), pp. 77-85.
60. >litscherlich and bfielke (n. 37 ahove), pp. 197-205. For the merger betbyeen gut
and scientific racism in Germany, see esp. Chase (n. 4 above), chap. 15. For the continuity
of' methods and means, see Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The A t t ~ m p tto Exterminate
the Jertfi of E u r o p ~ ,1 939-1945 (London: Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., 1993), chaps. 6 and 7;
Kaul Hilberg, The Dotruction c i j Europmn Jruo (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), pp.
26&77, anti chap. 9.1, esp. pp. 562-63, n. 21.
416 Bock Rncz~mand Sexzsm in I$r'uziGennunj

These links between race hygiene inside and outside the death-
and-work and death-by-work camps suggest that only the merger of gut
racism with the more scientific, bureaucratic, and planned approach of
eugenic racism was able to bring to reality a bureaucratic, scientific, and
faultlessly efficient genocide on the scale of the Holocaust.
Connections between these t ~ v oexpressions of racism are evident
not only in their methods but also in their victims: along with the "de-
viant" groups already mentioned, ethnic minorities-specifically gypsies
and most of the Germans of black color-were targets for s t e r i l i ~ a t i o n . ~ ~
T h e division between those who Ivere and were not eligible for race
hygienic sterilization coincided to a large degree with a prior division
~vithinthe lower classes: betlveen the subproletarian strata including part
of the ethnic minorities on the one side, and on the other, the proper
and orderly German workers hailed by many Nazis as the hard and
hard-working core of racial superiority. Predominantly unskilled, the
former were not integrated into the stable "norm" of waged ~$,orkfor
men and un~vagedhouse~vorkfor women; the official labor movement,
which had largely excluded thern, had during the 1920s taken a position
tolvard the unskilled and to~vardethnic minorities very much like that of
the American Federation of' Labor.
H o ~ . e v e rIve
, should not disregard the number, though limited, of
middle- and upper-class victims of racist psychiatry and s t e r i l i ~ a t i o n . ~ ~
T o some extent, race hygiene crosses class lines, as do, to a larger degree,
sexism and gut racism (inost visibly in the case of anti-Semitism). T o the
extent that it does, it can be seen as a policy directed against those who
"deviate" not just from general social norrns but from the norms and
expectations of their specific class. Its purpose is to "select" against those
who d o not fit into the class or the class-specific sex role to 1$.11ichthey
supposedly belong. In this rvay, race hygiene contributes to a confirma-
tion of the class structure not just at its lower level, but at all its levels.
Thus race hygiene carries over the attitudes and implementation of'
racism from the social conflicts bet~veenethnicities into social conflicts
~vithinan ethnicit);. From the perspective o f its victims, the terins "ethnic
racism" and "social racism""" might denote the connection as ~vellas the
difference bet~\.eenboth expressions of racism.
6 1. See n . 53 ;ibove, and Keincr Poln~nerin.".~IcFI/I\IP).II)~R di'r R / I P ~ I I / ( ~ I I / ~ ~ ( I)n.\
~JI(~~(/(,":
Sc/ri( k.trtl c'inrrfnrh~got~
d rut.\th(~n.\l~rr(I('~l~r~/,
1918-1 937 (Dr1sseltlor.1: Droste, 1970).
62. 1)alicho (11. 37 ;~l,ove),pp. 157-60 (12-20 1 x 1 - c e nof~ ;ill victims).
6:l. 'These terms are, 'is might I)e ol)vious, not meant to ~ii;~r.k the "ethnic" as "nonso-
cial" ant1 t h e r e f i ~ r e;I\ "hiologicnl." (:leal.l?. \\.hat is meant by "biological" in the racist
tradition is plainl? "social" ant1 often enorlgti tlescribetl in plair~lysocial concepts. I'he
a h o \ e tertns are Incant to call altetitioti to the links bet\\ecn tliff'erent tlisroric;ll fol-rns of
racism. Rlor.eo\el.. "social ~.acisrn"seems to me more accurate than "social Dal.ninisln," as it
is usually called, since I)a~.\vincel.t,iinl) tlid not star-t it. E \ e n though social hiatory is not-e
co~nplicatedrh'in "Slalrhus st;irted it all" (C:tiase [n. 4 above], p. I ' L ) , it is true that the issues
in clitfitiol~h a \ e oltlct- andlor dif'tel-cnt I-oots than I);~r\vin.
Signs Spring 1983 41 7

Moreover, scientific (and gut) racism had a decisive function in the

spread and confirmation of two sexual double standards: assignment of
typically modern, sexually differentiated roles and labors to women and
men,6%nd assignment of different roles and labors to "superior" and
"inferior" women. According to theoreticians of race and race hygiene,
the difference and polarity between the sexes (reasonlemotion, activity1
passivity, paid worklhousework) is fully developed only in the
"superior," the "nordic," races; among "inferior races," including those
of low "hereditary value," the sexes are less differentiated-and thus
heavy and cheap labor is good for b o t l ~ . ~ V h e assignments
se might both
appropriately be called aspects of "sexist racism."

"Birth-War" in the World War

With the declaration of war in 1939, another stage of the "birth-
war"66 was inaugurated, exacerbating previous trends. No more than
some main features can be presented here. A decree from August 31,
1939, ruled that the sterilization law was to be applied only in those cases
"where a particularly great danger of propagation is imminent."67While
this change in policy may give some insight into the earlier handling of
this "danger," its principal rationale lay in the 117ar. Sterilization candi-
dates could not be counted upon to be compliant war ~vorkers,and the
old race hygiene personnel Ivas needed for other purposes." In fact, the
number of sterilization trials was drastically reduced.
Sitnultaneously, ho~vever,sterilization policy was extended and
radicalized in three dimensions beyond the 1933 law. Mass sterilizations
Ivere executed in concentr-ation camps, mostly on Jewish and gypsy
women; many gypsies had the "choice" between sterilization and camp.
Such sterilizations in and outside the camps were done mainly for the
sake of medical experiments and for population control, that is, in order
to impede "inferior" offspring." Second, rnany women from the con-

64. Eutrernelv illuminating examples are the race hygiene classics by Baur, Fischer.
and Lenr (n. 6 above), esp. vol. 2; and Rlulim ( n . 5 above).
65. E. G. Paul Schult7e-Naumhurg, "Ilas Eheproble~nin d e r Nordischen Kasse," Die
.Sonn(~ 9 (1932): 20-25. Cf. Karin Hausen. "Family and Role Division: I'he Polarization
o f Ser;u:~lStereotypes in the 19th Century." in Tllr Gc,r-~ncrnF(tmilj, ed. Kichal-d J . Evans
and IV. K. Lee (1.ondon: Croorn Helm, 1981). pp. 51-83.
66. Paul D a n ~ e r C
, ; ~ h ~ r / ~ r ~ k(Berlin:
~ . l r g Verlag Viilkisher IVille, 1936; Munich and
Berlin: Lehrnann, 1937, 1938, 1939).
67. KGB, 193911, p. 1560.
~ I),-ittrn Rricl~(Berlin: blarhold, 1979), p. 75.
68. hlanfred Hiick, D I PH i l f \ s t h z ~ l1rn
6 9 . See n . 37 above, a n d J a n S e h n , "Gal-I Claubergs verbreclierische U n -
f'ruchtbarinachurigs\,ers~iche an Haf'tlings-Frauen in den Nazi-Konrentrationslagern,"
H r p r Icon Azctchzc~ilz(OSwiecim: Parisrxc.o\ve h l u r e u ~ n\v OSwiecimiu [State museum of. Ausch-
w.itz], 1959). 2:2-32.
418 Bock Raczsm and Sexz~min Nnzz Germany

quered and occupied territories in the east-about 2 million women had

been deported as forced labor-were subjected to compulsory abortion
and sterilization for the sake, again, of population control and in order
to maintain an efficient work force unhampered by the care of children.
Little as yet is known about their lives. It is clear, however, that abortion
was "allowed" to them, and that from 1942 on, an eastern working
woman's pregnancy was reported-via management and regional labor
offices-to a special regional SS officer who tested her "racially" and
decided about the outcome of her pregnancy.;('
Even less is known about the third dimension of the new policy, the
"birth-war" against the "asocials." "Asociality" had been an important
criterion in the sterilization courts; many had been sterilized for such
behavior, and "asocials," including prostitutes, had been proportionately
high among those deported to concentration camps during the second
great wave of imprisonment from 1936 to 1941.;' However, this
criterion still had smacked too much of the "social" instead of the
"biological," and it had not always been easy to classify such persons
under one of the four psychiatric categories of the 1933 law.;' But
meanwhile, race hygiene theory had established the hereditary character
of the disease "asociality" with such efficiency that it had become a cen-
tral category of racism. After 1940, when many "asocials" were released
from the camps to answer an urgent shortage of labor, a new law was
being elaborated that provided for their sterilization. In terms of con-
temporary psychology, the definition of "asocials" was extended from
the "psychotic" to the "psychopathic" and the "neurotic," while the bill
called them simply "parasites," "failures," "itinerants," "good-for-
nothings." T h e legislation Ivas to be enforced right after the war, and
many high and low government and party agencies continued to discuss
it throughout the war.;"
Among women, the good housewife and industrious mother could
be sure to evade sterilization. Unwed and poor mothers with "too many"
children, wornen on welfare, and prostitutes could not be so sure. Ever
more obviously, the "birth-war" applied typically racist measures that
violated the bodily integrity of' those considered socially deviant and

70. O n foreign wornen mainly from the east: Ingrid Schupett;~,"'Jrder das Ihre':
Frar~ener~verbstatigkeit und Einsart \ o n F'remdarheiterri und -;irbeiterinnen im Z\veiten
il'eltkrieg." in Frauengruppe Faschisrnust;)rscliung, ed. (n. 8 above), pp. 29y2-318; Fran-
cistek PoXornski, ,4spekty rasozL'P zi'po,\t~pou'uniu2 rohotnrknrni przymzrrouyrni 2 ic,riccrmi a'oj~nriymr
111 Rzrszy, I 9 3 9 4 5 [Racial aapects in the treatment of forced 1aborer.s and war prisoners of
the Third Reich] (il'r-ocra~v:ZakXatl Nnrodorv> i ~ n Ossolinskicli,
. 1976): Doczrmrntn Oc-
cuprrtionis (Poznan: Insty tut Zachodni, 107.5, 1976), L O I S . 9 and 10.
71. Frank l'ingel, H?tjt/ingr u n t ~ SS-Hrrl-\c.lrnjt
r (Hamburg: Hoffman X- Chmpe, 1978),
pp. 69-80; Dalicho (n. 57 above), pp. 54, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66.
72. Karl Lucltvig L.echler-, "Erkennung ~ ~ Ausmerze n d tler (;e~neinsctiaf'tsu~if'iihigen,"
Drut.\ch~s,jrzt~hlcitt 70 (1940): 293-97.
- '
1.3. T h e clocurnents are scattered in Inan)- files of such agencies.
Signs Spring 1 983 4 19

linked ever more closely the various forms and victims of racism. In an
official, though secret, decree of September 1940, the "Reich's Health
Leader" Leonardo Conti granted the State Health Offices permission to
perform eugenic sterilization and abortion on prostitutes, on women of
"inferior character," and on those of "alien race."74 The sterilization law
planned for the future was anticipated in practice.

Conclusion: Sexism and Racism

Nazi racism and sexism concerned all women, the "inferior" as well
as the "superior." The "birth achievement" demanded of acceptable
women was calculated carefully according to the numbers of those who
were not to give birth.75And the strongest pressure on such acceptable
women to procreate, to create an orderly household for husband and
children, and to accept dependency on the breadwinner perhaps came
not so much from the continuous positive propaganda about "valuable
motherhood," but precisely from the opposite: the negative propaganda
and policy that barred unwelcome, poor, and deviant women from pro-
creation and marriage and labeled either disorderly women or single
women with too many children as inferior. Thus, racism could be used,
and was used, to impose sexism in the form of unwaged housework on
"superior" women.
On the other hand, women who became or were to become targets
of "negative race hygiene" tended also to be those who did not accept, or
could not accept, or were not supposed to accept the Nazi view of female
housework, which had been propagated in its main features since the
late eighteenth century. Sexism, which imposed economic dependency
upon "superior" married women, could be used, and was used, to im-
plement racism by excluding many women from the relative benefits
granted to "desirable" mothers and children and forcing them to accept
the lowest jobs in the labor-market hierarchy in order to survive. In fact,
modern sexism has established, below the ideological surface of theories
on "women's nature" and the "cult of true womanhood," two different,
though connected, norms for children. The demand was made of some
women to administer orderly households and produce well-educated
children, the whole enterprise supported by their husbands' money;
others, overburdened and without support, were obliged to adopt me-
nial jobs which paid little or nothing while their children, like them-
selves, were treated only as "ballast." Racist-sexist discourses of various
kinds have portrayed socially, sexually, or ethnically "alien" women as
74. T h e pertinent documents are scattered in various archives.
7 5 . E.g., Burgdorfer, Gehrtenschrc~und (n. 41 above), pp. 13fj-47; G. Pfotenhauer,
"Fortpflanzungspflicht-die a n d e r e Seite des Gesetzes zur Verhiitung erbkranken
Nachwuchses," Drr ofintlichr Getundhritsdirnst 2 (1937): 604-8.
420 Bock Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany

nonwomen, and thus as threatening to the norms for all other women,
or as threatening, and therefore as nonwomen: thus the racist view of
Jewish or gypsy women as prostitutes, the eugenic sexologists' view of
lesbians as pseudo-men, the race hygienic view of prostitutes as asocial
and infectious to the "racial body,"76 the fantasy of Polish or "feeble-
minded" women "breeding like animals." But of course, much more is
involved here than (predominantly male) images and symbol^,'^ in-
fluential though they may be in determining women's very real treat-
ment and self-image. Women's history needs to concentrate on the lives
of those "nonn-women without marginalizing them as (male) history has
done.
Precisely because of the complex links between sexism and racism
and, therefore, because of the relevance of reproductive racism to all
women, we should be careful not to term simply "sexism" the demand
placed on ethnically or socially "superior" women to have children they
may not want, and not to term simply "racism" the ban against ethnically
or socially "inferior" women having children, even though they may
want them. More strictly speaking, we might call the imposition on the
first group of women "racist sexism," since their procreation is urged not
just because they are women, but because they are women of a specific
ethnicity or social position declared as "superior." Accordingly, we might
call the imposition on the second group of women "sexist racism," since
their procreation is prohibited not just on grounds of their "genes" and
"race," but on grounds of their real or supposed deviation, as women,
from social or ethnic standards for "superior" women. Establishing in
such terms the dual connection between racism and sexism does not (as
may be evident from the context) give different weights to the experi-
ences of racism and sexism, or suggest that racism is primary in one case
and sexism primary in the other. Precisely the opposite is true: where
sexism and racism exist, particularly with Nazi features, all women are
equally involved in both, but with different experiences. They are sub-
jected to one coherent and double-edged policy of sexist racism or racist

76. For lesbian wornen and their presentation as "pseudo-men" by rnale psychiatrists
since the last third of the nineteenth century, see Esther Newton and Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg, "Male Mythologies and Their Internalization of Deviance from Krafft-Ebbing
to Kadclyffe Hall," and Gudrun Schwartz, " I h e Creation of the ,Mannuvib, 1860-1900"
(papers presented at the Fifth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Vassar
College, June 16, 1981); the latter is published as "'hlannweiber' in Mannertheorien," in
Frauen suchrn zhrr G~schzclitr:Stndien zum 19. und 20. J a h r h u n d e ~ t , ed. Karin Hausen
(Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1983), in press. For male views of prostitutes, see my a r t i ~ l e
"Prostituierte im Sari-Staat," in ll'zl- urul F1-nuen wir ctrulrrr ctuch, ed. Pieke Biermann (Kein-
bek: Rowohlt, 1980), pp. 70-106;' Judith \Valko~\.itz,Prostitution c~nrl Victonnn Society:
--
Uromen, Class and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. chap. 10.
I I . For an approach focusing on such symbols, see Elizabeth Janeway, "UThoIs Syl-
via? O n the Loss of Sexual Paradigms," Sign.7: Journcll of TVomm in Culture and Societ? 3, no. 4
(Summer 1980): 573-89.
Signs Spring 1983 421

sexism (a nuance only of perspective), but they are segregated as they

live through the dual sides of this policy, a division that also works to
segregate their forms of resistance to sexism as well as to racism.
Attempting to look at the situation of all women from the perspec-
tive of "nonn-women may help to analyze and break down the bound-
aries of such segregation. As far as the struggle for our reproductive
rights-for our sexuality, our children, and the money we want and
need-is concerned, the Nazi experience may teach us that a successful
struggle must aim at achieving both the rights and the economic means
to allow women to choose between having or not having children without
becoming economically dependent on other people or on unwanted sec-
ond and third jobs. Cutbacks in welfare for single mothers, sterilization
abuse, and the attack on free abortion are just different sides of an attack
that serves to divide women. Present population and family policy in the
United States and the Third World make the German experience under
National Socialism particularly relevant. New attacks on free abortion,
the establishment of university departments of "population science,"
sterilization experiments on women and sterilization of welfare mothers
without their knowledge, pressure on gypsy women (especially those on
welfare) not to have children, xenophobic outcries against immigrants
"breeding like animals" and sometimes asking for their "castration or
sterilization," all-too-easy abortions and sterilizations on Turkish wom-
en, the reduction of state money connected to human reproduction, both
private and public, have all occurred in Germany during the last two
years.78In the course of the present economic crisis, what will follow from
these still seemingly unconnected events is an open question.

Zentralznstitut fur Sozialwissenschaftlzche Forschung

Free University of Berlin

78. "Population Science" has been established in Balnberg and Bielefeld, ~vhile
women have been, in vain, trying to get wornen's studies recognized and financed: Britrtige
zur frmznistzsrhrn Throlie und Praxic 5 ( A ~ r i l1981): 119-27. For other information on
irnrnigrant women, sterilization, rvelfare, and state benefits, see the follo\ving issues of
Courage: 2 (March 1977): 1 6 2 9 ; 3 (April 1978): 14-29; 3 (September 1978): 11; 3 (October
1978): 44-47; 4 (June 1979): 39-40; 4 (Septernber 1979): 27-29; 4 (October 1979): 12-17;
5 (April 1980): 12-13; 5 (May 1980): 12-13; 6 (March 1981): 5-8,52; 6 (May 1981): 16-33;
6 (December 1981): 22-33; 7 (January 1982): 8-1 1. See also Zu Hnusr in der F r e d e , ed.
Christian Schaffernicht (Fischerhude: Verlag Atelier, 1981), pp. 74-75.