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Utopian Biopolitics

Reproductive Policies, Gender Roles, and Sexuality in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union

David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

Reproduction was a matter of extreme importance to Nazi and Soviet leaders, and for this reason alone their reproductive policies merit close scholarly atten- tion. But Nazi and Soviet attempts to manage reproduction are also significant in what they reveal about their leaders’ respective visions of how to trans- form populations and shape societies. As was true of governments throughout interwar Europe, the Nazi and Soviet regimes assumed that the state could and should regulate reproduction. Particularly given the need for a large population in an age of mass warfare, virtually every country in Europe enacted pronatalist policies. But within this common rubric of state management of reproduction, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union pursued very different reproductive poli- cies – policies that reflected stark ideological, structural, and disciplinary dif- ferences between the two countries. Each regime sought to transform society, reshape social bonds, and rewrite the social contract along fundamentally illib- eral yet modernist lines. Individual liberties were rejected in favor of two quite different collectivist projects: the establishment of a racially defined Volksge- meinschaft to provide social support for the hegemony of the “Aryan” master race over Europe and the world and the much more universalist project of creating a classless, socialist society to serve as the model for the emancipation of humanity as a whole. Both of these agendas called for individual citizens to view reproductive and sexual choices in terms of service to the state. Yet the divergence of goals – the Nazi exaltation of the “Aryan” race above and against all others versus the Soviet development of a universal sociopolitical model for the entire human race – combined with immense differences in economic and social structure to produce quite different policies toward reproduction.

The differences in how reproduction was managed in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany can serve as a reminder of the weaknesses of the concept of totalitarianism in comparing the two regimes. On the one hand, a significant superficial similarity in how motherhood was glorified and the fact that both strongly supported the basic idea that state welfare should take precedence

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over individual welfare could lead one to conclude that both displayed a total- itarian tendency to integrate the private sphere into state projects. While this similarity should not be discounted and in fact provides the foundation of the comparison to follow, the differences far outweighed the similarities, high- lighting the necessity of exploring ideological, social, and cultural differences and actual policy implementation in each case.1 Methodologically, the sheer complexity of reproduction as a social, cultural, and political issue requires an approach that crosses previously sacrosanct historiographical boundaries that have often served to keep actually quite related themes in isolated boxes. Historians have too often unquestioningly replicated contemporary prejudices or the disciplinary specialties of their historical subjects, methodologically sep- arating, for example, sexuality from reproduction, the history of women or gender from the history of society and politics more generally, or the history of demography from the history of war. A comparison of reproductive poli- tics in two totalitarian regimes emphasizes the artificiality of these divisions, because it points to the interconnectedness of these spheres; only by including these various perspectives can the differences in what are superficially similar totalitarian projects be explained.

Population policy is a particularly amenable topic to international com- parison, since the very idea of controlling birthrates arose out of concerns about international competition. The combination of similarities and differ- ences between the Nazi and Soviet cases will emphasize not only the usefulness of the comparison, but also the degree to which reproductive policies were intertwined with the larger ideological goals of each state. Population policy in the mid-twentieth century was, after all, a zero sum game. Fear of the other was the motivating factor in encouraging a higher birthrate at home. This was always explicit in German rhetoric about the danger of falling birthrates, par- ticularly during the interwar period. Although the Soviets explicitly rejected the link between the birthrate and military might, the specter of international com- petition always loomed large, and actual experiences in World War II encour- aged a rethinking of the relationship between war and babies. The degree to which each of these societies viewed themselves as being engaged in a life- and-death struggle for survival also had a profound effect on gender roles and associated social, family, and health policies. Both the looming presence and the real experience of war infused social policies with a tone of urgency that intensified tendencies toward social classification and the hardening of norms common to all modernizing states. Normative gender ideals were enshrined into government policy in both states, providing, for instance, clear ideologi- cal pronouncements and policies about the roles of mothers and fathers. The threat of death (taken by both societies to mean social or national rather than

1 One might add that the totalitarian model also obscures the fact that both Soviet and Nazi welfare policies had precedents and counterparts in nontotalitarian states. See Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about ‘Modernity,’” Central European History 37, no. 1 (2004): 1–48.

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individual death) made calls for gender conformity seem all the more vital. In both regimes, homosexuality was viewed as a threat to the survival of the nation, since it was presumed to weaken fighting strength. In Nazi Germany (and to some extent in the Soviet Union) motherhood was extolled as a nation- alistic provision of the state with soldiers. These rhetorical responses to human sexuality and reproduction did result in policies that actively curtailed individ- ual choice in the reproductive and sexual sphere. Women were prevented from becoming full public actors in Nazi Germany, and in both countries homosex- uals were persecuted, while able-bodied men were forced to understand their roles as citizens to be intimately intertwined with their duties as soldiers.2 But these elements of social control belied the energizing effects of many policies oriented toward reproduction in the two regimes. Far from simply controlling sexual desire, the regimes tended to awaken it through promises of a utopian future and the creation of enthusiasm for new roles for the individual within the state. Totalitarian biopolitics promised to reward individuals for their phys- ical risks and their willingness to direct sexual desire toward nationalistic or ideological goals.

To compare these processes in Nazi and Soviet society, three fundamen- tal differences will be emphasized (though not discretely separated) below. First of all, differences in the material circumstances of the two societies must provide the background for any comparison of social policy.3 We must not lose sight of the fact that the Nazis appropriated bureaucratic and political structures in what was a relatively stable, industrially advanced society, while the Soviets sought to remake the Russian social and political system funda- mentally by replacing existing structures and forcibly accelerating processes of industrialization and urbanization.4 A second and quite obvious difference is the striking dissimilarity in approaches to eugenics. In contrast to eugenicists in Nazi Germany (and many other Western nations), Soviet eugenicists failed to reconcile their science with the ruling ideology; the Soviet government ulti- mately denounced eugenics as a “fascist science,” with decisive consequences for reproductive policy. A final stark contrast between the Soviet and Nazi regimes are their assumptions about gender. Although superficially similar (in terms of glorifying motherhood and condemning homosexuality, for instance),

2 This is a theme that deserves its own extended treatment and comparison but can only be lightly touched on here. Important recent literature includes: Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001); Thomas Kühne, “Zwischen Männerbund und Volksgemeinschaft: Hitlers Soldaten und der Mythos der Kameradschaft,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 38 (1998): 165–89.

3 Susan Gross Solomon makes this point convincingly for abortion policy: “The Soviet Legalization of Abortion in German Medical Discourse: A Study of the Use of Selective Perceptions in Cross- Cultural Scientific Relations.” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 455–85, esp. 469.

4 This comment was inspired by Karl Schlögel’s contributions to the discussion about state violence at the first meeting of the authors of this volume.

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policymakers in the two regimes fundamentally disagreed about the relation- ship between the family and paid labor – the single-breadwinner family in Nazi ideology contrasts with the dual-wageearner model of Soviet households.

state management of reproduction

The conceptual and structural preconditions for state attempts to manage reproduction were not created by totalitarian states. The roots of such interven- tion lay in the early modern period, when rulers became increasingly interested in the population and its productive capacity. In particular, cameralist thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries systematically analyzed the rela- tionship between the state’s economic and military power and the size and productivity of its population. During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers developed ideas about the rational reordering of human society, and these notions further heightened the ambitions of political leaders to use state power to reshape the population. But it was only in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of new professional disciplines, that government officials and reformers began thinking about “social” problems. This trend would con- tribute to state welfare programs and state attempts to manage reproduction.

Reproduction had previously been considered a natural phenomenon – something that lay beyond state control or scientific management. Even seventeenth-century cameralist thinkers who viewed a large population as a source of cheap labor and national wealth had only vague conceptions of how one might manage reproduction to control the quantity and quality of chil- dren born.5 But when social scientists and government officials began to think of society as an object to be studied, sculpted, and improved, reproduction emerged as an important sphere of state interference. Throughout the eigh- teenth century, demography and associated fields developed as disciplines, and their practitioners began to study birthrates. In the nineteenth century officials began to compile regular censuses, which made it possible to study long-term population trends and to aspire to influence them.

The most prominent founder of the new science of demography, Thomas Malthus, had warned of overpopulation in his 1803 Essay on the Principle of Population. Declines in mortality rates had indeed allowed populations to rise rapidly in the eighteenth century, as England’s population jumped from 5.6 to 8.7 million between 1741 and 1801.6 By the late nineteenth century, however, fertility had declined, and warnings about overpopulation shifted to

5 For a philosophically oriented overview of early modern population policy see Martin Furhmann, Volksvermehrung als Staatsaufgabe? Bevölkerungs- und Ehepolitik in der deutschen politischen und ökonomischen Theorie des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002). A more convincing and historically contextualized account that emphasizes the history of sexuality is Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

6 Maria Sophia Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–2.

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fears of underpopulation. In France, the first country to experience a decline in fertility, a census in 1854–5 revealed that the total number of deaths exceeded the total number of births. Worries about depopulation proliferated following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, when French leaders began to fear that their population was too small to compete militarily with Germany. By 1900 an extra-parliamentary commission on depopulation was created; it reported that the “development, prosperity and grandeur of France” depended upon raising the birthrate. In other European countries falling fertility by the end of the nineteenth century also prompted warnings of national decline and demographic extinction. In Germany, the annual birthrate of 42.6 per thousand in 1876 had dropped to 28.2 by 1912, and the 1912 census provoked national alarm about “race suicide.”7

In the wake of the First World War, political leaders across Europe sought to manage and increase their populations as never before. Mass warfare required huge numbers of troops and made clear the link between population size and military power. Moreover, the horrendous casualties of the war prompted fears in many countries about their populations’ capacities to sustain military action in the future. Political leaders came to see the size of the population as a critical resource, necessary for national defense, and they focused on reproduction as central to sustaining the population. As a member of the British government declared in 1915: “In the competition and conflict of civilizations it is the mass of the nations that tells. . . . The ideals for which Britain stands can only prevail as long as they are backed by sufficient numbers. . . . Under existing conditions we waste before birth and in infancy a large part of our population.”8 Similarly the German General Staff, in a 1917 memorandum on the German population and army, stated that the falling birthrate was “worse than the losses through the war” in causing population decrease.9

When fighting ceased, the major combatants were faced not only with the frightful human cost of the war, but with a demographic catastrophe. France lost 1,393,515 soldiers, Britain 765,400, and Italy 680,070. One German statis- tician calculated that in addition to its 2 million soldiers killed in action, Ger- many lost 750,000 civilian victims of the Allied blockade, 100,000 people to the 1918 influenza epidemic, up to 3.5 million never born because of the war, and 6.5 million people no longer in Germany because of territorial losses, for a total deficit of nearly 13 million.10 The loss of young men across Europe

7 Quine, 52–65, 100–1. 8 Pat Thane, “Visions of Gender in the Making of the British Welfare State: The Case of Women

in the British Labour Party and Social Policy, 1906–1945,” in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s, eds. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (London: Routledge, 1991), 105.

9 General Ludendorff, The General Staff and Its Problems: The History of the Relations between the High Command and the German Imperial Government as Revealed by Official Documents, vol. 1, trans. F. A. Holt (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 202.

10 Quine, 17–18; Cornelia Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (London: Macmillan, 1992), 31.

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reduced the number of potential fathers so sharply that Britain’s birthrate fell by roughly 40 percent between 1914 and 1930, prompting one member of parliament to declare that population decline constituted “a danger to the maintenance of the British Empire.”11 One German social hygienist warned that Germany in 1924 had a birthrate of only 20.4 per thousand people, barely high enough to maintain the population at current levels, and he concluded, “we must . . . make possible to every married couple by means of economic insurance of parenthood that they shall fulfill their reproductive duties.”12

German social hygienists also warned about the disastrous demographic con- sequences of the spread of fertility-threatening venereal diseases caused by the separation of families and the supposed loosening of sexual morality during the war.13 The VD crisis (real or perceived) thus prompted policymakers to link reproduction with sexual behavior explicitly in a way that had not been socially acceptable before the war.14 The crucial goal of preserving the fertility rates, they argued, justified unsavory references to individual sexual choices.

In Russia, unlike in some countries of Western Europe, fertility remained high throughout the nineteenth century. But Russian casualties in the First World War proved as severe as those in Western Europe and, when added to deaths during the Civil War and ensuing famine, totaled 16 million.15 This demographic cataclysm provoked concern among Soviet leaders and scholars and prompted intensified attention to population statistics. The Central Statisti- cal Administration compiled detailed monthly statistics on Civil War casualties for every province and district of the country.16 It also established a commis- sion to study the effect of First World War casualties and noted that these losses severely diminished the labor as well as the military capacity of the population.

11 Quine, 17–18; PRO MH 58/311. The number of births per thousand people in England and Wales fell from 25.5 in 1920 to 14.4 in 1933. See Thane, “Visions,” 99–100.

12 Alfred Grotjahn, “Differential Birth Rate in Germany,” in Proceedings of the World Popula- tion Conference held at the Salle Centrale, Geneva, August 29th to September 3rd, 1927, ed. Margaret Sanger (London: E. Arnold: 1927), 154; Soloway, 277. On Canada, see Cynthia R. Comacchio, “‘The Infant Soldier’: Early Child Welfare Efforts in Ontario,” in Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, 1870–1945, eds. Valerie Fildes et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 106.

13 Historians dispute the actual numbers. Richard Bessel argues, for instance, that venereal diseases did not substantially increase as a consequence of the war. See Germany after the First World War (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1993), 238.

14 Doctors, educators, health activists, and government officials generally began their speeches and pamphlets on the subject with an apology for the unpleasant and embarrassing subject they would be addressing. See Annette F. Timm, “The Politics of Fertility: Population Politics and Health Care in Berlin, 1919–1972” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999), 83–4.

15 Ansley Coale, Barbara Anderson, and Erna Harm, Human Fertility in Russia since the Nine- teenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 16; Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union (Geneva, 1946), 40–1.

16 RGAE f. 1562, op. 21, d. 3552, ll. 1–20; see also Vl. Avaramov, “Zhertvy imperialisticheskoi voiny v Rossii,” Izvestiia narodnogo komissariata zdravookhraneniia 3, no. 1–2 (1920): 39– 42; Serge Bagotzky, “Les pertes de la Russie pendant la guerre mondiale (1914–1917),” Revue internationale de la Croix Rouge 61 (1924): 16–21.

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It called “the depreciation of the labor productivity of millions of the most able-bodied elements of the population,” a matter in urgent need of statisti- cal study.17 One Soviet professor declared that the Russian empire’s prewar population of 172 million had fallen to 90 million as a result of wars, famine, and territorial losses. He equated a large population with national security and warned that some Western European countries, notably Germany, were threatening to overtake the population of the Soviet Union.18

Despite horrendous wartime losses, the Soviet Union faced less of a decline in the postwar birthrate than did the countries of Western Europe. Because Soviet society was still largely a peasant population in the 1920s, its birthrate remained high despite the loss of young men during World War I and the Civil War. Nonetheless, Soviet officials and demographers continued to monitor population trends closely and were alarmed by the precipitous drop in fertility that accompanied industrialization, collectivization, and the 1932–3 famine. The Central Statistical Administration tabulated annual fertility and mortality rates for every administrative district in the country, so Soviet officials knew, for example, that there were nearly ten times as many deaths as births reported in Khar’kov district in 1933, as a result of the famine in Ukraine.19 An extensive demographic study in 1934 revealed that the Soviet birthrate overall had fallen from 42.2 births per thousand people in 1928 to 31.0 in 1932. Moreover, S. G. Strumilin, the author of the study and one of the country’s leading statisticians, demonstrated that the drop in fertility correlated with urbanization and the entrance of women into the industrial workforce – trends that had to continue if industrialization were to move ahead.20

Strumilin’s other major finding was that among groups in the population, those with higher wages had lower fertility. Not only did workers have lower fertility than peasants, but urbanized workers had lower fertility than peasant in-migrants to the city, and white-collar employees had the lowest fertility of all. This discovery contradicted previous research that had identified economic hardship as the primary cause of low fertility.21 Soviet officials now had to revise their assumption that the birthrate would rise as material conditions improved. Increasingly they saw low fertility as the result of women’s choices to have abortions – choices made by women who, in their view, could afford

17 RGAE f. 1562, op. 21, d. 25, l. 17; also Trudy komissii po obsledivaniiu sanitarnykh posledstvii voiny 1914–1920 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1923).

18 Prof. K. K. Skrobanskii, “Abort i protivozachatochnye sredstva,” Zhurnal akusherstva i zhen- skikh boleznei 35 no. 1 (1924), as cited in Janet Hyer, “Managing the Female Organism: Doctors and the Medicalization of Women’s Paid Work in Soviet Russia during the 1920s,” in Women in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117.

19 RGAE f. 1562 s. ch., op. 329, d. 21, ll. 125–7. According to official statistics, the totals for all Ukraine in 1933 were 449,877 births and 1,908,907 deaths; l. 109.

20 S. G. Strumilin, “K probleme rozhdaemosti v rabochei srede,” Problemy ekonomiki truda (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo polit. Lit-ry, 1957), 194–8.

21 Strumilin, 201–4; V. Z. Drobizhev, U istokov sovetskoi demografii (Moscow: “Mysl’”, 1987), 22.

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to have children but chose not to out of personal preference. One other factor that exacerbated the decline in fertility and Soviet officials’ concern was the abnormally small population cohort that entered its childbearing years in the mid-1930s. The First World War had not only decimated a generation of young men, but had greatly reduced the number of children born between 1915 and 1920. It was this reduced cohort that reached childbearing age in the mid-1930s, even further depressing the birthrate.22 Consequently Soviet officials became as obsessed with declining birthrates as did their counterparts in Western Europe.

In addition to its demographic repercussions, World War I also reinforced social Darwinist ideas about the competition of nations, and the struggle of races to survive and propagate. Mussolini articulated these ideas most explic- itly when he declared, “Fertile people have a right to an Empire, those with the will to propagate their race on the face of the earth.”23 Leaders throughout Europe linked falling birthrates in the 1930s to a decline in national power. One Spanish demographer warned that without more children, “Spain will be reduced, she will shrink, the national economy will be without producers and consumers; the State, without soldiers; the Nation, without blood.”24 Franco had the goal of increasing the Spanish population to 40 million within a few decades and saw this as a means to recapture Spain’s faded glory and world prominence.25 The Swedish government appointed a population commission in 1935 following the publication of a best-selling book by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal which described the falling birthrate as a slow, national suicide.26 And a range of political leaders and scholars in interwar Romania also believed that the country’s strength and survival rested on its birthrate and “biological capital.”27 Population policy and even the motivation to improve reproductive health care were thus never purely domestic concerns. They always depended upon international comparisons, and, particularly in totalitarian regimes, con- cerns about strengthening the birthrate were linked to processes of national self-definition.

Even before the rise of the Nazis, social Darwinian concerns about the need to strengthen the health of the population in preparation for international competition were arguably stronger in Germany than in any other European

22 E. A. Sadvokasova, Sotsial’no-gigienicheskie aspekty regulirovaniia razmerov sem’i (Moscow: Meditsina, 1969), 28–9.

23 David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 59. See also Quine, 34; Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65–8.

24 Mary Nash, “Pronatalism and Motherhood in Franco’s Spain,” in Bock and Thane, eds., 163. 25 Quine, 88. 26 Karin Johannisson, “The People’s Health: Public Health Policies in Sweden,” The History of

Public Health and the Modern State, ed. Dorothy Porter (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 1994), 178.

27 Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).

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country. But several different types of social Darwinian and eugenic thinking were prevalent in the Weimar period. There can be no convincing argument made about a direct line of continuity between the radically elitist and eugeni- cally interventionist Darwinian thinking of, say, Alfred Ploetz at the turn of the century and the racial ideology of the Third Reich. Between these two temporal signposts one finds a diversity of eugenic thought, including a numer- ically strong and politically influential contingent of socialist eugenicists, who espoused socially progressive and class-sensitive social policies while national- istically insisting on the need to direct vast government resources to the threat of population decline.28 Soon after World War I, progressive doctors who were often affiliated with the Social Democratic Party were instrumental in creat- ing the new hybrid field of social hygiene, with its emphasis on prevention of national decline and its insistence that medicine and welfare programs had to attack both problems, declining quantity and quality in the population. By the time the Nazis came to power, they could build on widespread fears of the national consequences of a declining birthrate, fears that had been fanned by an extremely wide diversity of social and scientific “experts” of all political persuasions. Even socialist reformers like Alfred Grotjahn (the first director of the department of social hygiene in the medical faculty at the University of Berlin) whose explicit concern was the improvement of the lot of working-class citizens insisted on the higher national purpose of their efforts and the need to avert impending national decline.29

Nevertheless, social hygienists and eugenicists of leftist persuasions were pushed to the side or actively repressed under the Nazis (not least because many of them were of Jewish heritage),30 and eugenics and population policy in Germany took on a fiercely racist tone. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler stressed the racial ideology that would underlie all National Socialist efforts in the sphere of reproductive health:

That which today all sides have neglected in this area, the völkische state must make up for. It must place race at the center of everyday life. It must guarantee [racial] purity. It must declare the child to be the most valuable product of any Volk. It must see to it that only those who are healthy produce children; that only one sin really exists: to bring a child into the world despite one’s own illnesses or

28 See Michael Schwartz, Sozialististische Eugenik: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 1890–1933 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995).

29 On Grotjahn see Karl-Heinz Roth, “Scheinalternativen im Gesundheitswesen: Alfred Grotjahn (1869–1931) – Integrationsfigur etablierter Sozialmedizin und nationalsozialistischer Rassen- hygiene” in Erfassung zur Vernichtung: Von der Sozialhygiene zum “Gesetz zur Sterbehilfe,” ed. Karl-Heinz Roth (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft Gesundheit, 1984), 31–56.

30 In Berlin in 1933, 3,423 of the total of 6,558 doctors were “non-Aryan,” amounting to 52.2 percent. The percentage of Jewish doctors in insurance practice was even higher: 59.7 percent. See Stephan Leibfried and Florian Tennstedt, “Health-Insurance Policy and Berufsverbote in the Nazi Takeover,” in Political Values and Health Care: The German Experience, ed. Donald W. Light and Alexander Schuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 163–84.

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one’s own inferiorities, while there is one highest honor: to forgo it. On the other hand it must also stand as reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the nation.31

All individual reproductive decisions, Hitler argued, must be directed toward the goal of strengthening the nation and subordinating individual concerns to the good of the Volk. Here, as in other statements from Nazi leaders, the implication was that without this kind of attention to the connection between individual reproductive decisions and the survival of the race, the very survival of the nation was threatened.

Soviet leaders also envisioned reproductive competition between countries, but they conceived of this competition in ideological rather than biological or racial terms. The Central Statistical Administration compiled annual charts on fertility, which showed in 1935, for example, that Soviet fertility was higher than that of all “the capitalist countries” (listing all the other countries of Europe).32 I. A. Kraval’, the head of the statistics division of Gosplan, argued that the Soviet Union’s higher fertility proved the superiority of socialism over capitalism.33 And in 1935 Stalin boasted that because of workers’ improved material conditions, “the population has begun to multiply much more quickly than in previous times. . . . Now each year our population increases by around three million people. This means that each year we receive an increase equiv- alent to the whole of Finland.”34 Such thinking interpreted high fertility as a sign of superiority, though in the Soviet case the competition was conceived as between political systems rather than between races.

Soviet leaders’ sense of reproductive competition differed from that of other European leaders, because they had a different conception of their popula- tion. The Soviet Union was a multinational federation, in which all national and ethnic groups were supposed to be equal partners. According to Marx- ist ideology, national differences both within the Soviet Union and between other countries were to disappear over time, as all national and ethnic groups became merged under socialism.35 Given this ideological orientation, competi- tion between nations to propagate and dominate other peoples or races made no sense. Instead a high birthrate among all nationalities in the Soviet Union would demonstrate the superiority of socialism and help it spread to other countries.

31 My translation of a quote from Mein Kampf, cited in “Grundthemen der weltanschaulichen Schulung: Bevölkerungspolitik des Dritten Reiches und ihre Träger” n.d. (an internal educa- tional pamphlet for health administrators), BAB/NS 22/521.

32 RGAE f. 1562, s. ch., op. 329, d. 83, l. 1. The report also listed the fertility rates of republics within the Soviet Union. Armenia had the highest fertility, followed by the Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Tajikistan.

33 Pravda, January 1, 1936, 8. 34 Quoted in “Zabota o zdorov’e detei,” Gigiena i zdorov’e, no. 9 (1938): 1. 35 In practice, the Soviet government actually fostered national particularism. See Yuri Slezkine,

“The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particular- ism,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 414–52; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

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Reproductive policies in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were largely administered through their respective health care systems, and for that reason it is helpful to consider briefly the formation and structure of these systems. As a largely rural, underdeveloped society, prerevolutionary Russia had neither adequate medical facilities nor a centralized state health care sys- tem. Medical care was primarily provided by locally based zemstvo physicians, who, despite their lack of resources, aspired to provide free, universal health care to Russia’s overwhelmingly peasant population. Following the October Revolution, the Soviet government placed all medical care under centralized state control. It founded the Commissariat of Health on July 11, 1918, empha- sizing the need for coordinated state action to fight epidemics, purify drinking water, improve sanitation, and provide health care for “the broad mass of the population.” While zemstvo doctors were initially hostile toward the Soviet state, most came to see the Bolsheviks as allies in their efforts to establish free and universal health care (and abolish private medicine), to prevent epidemics, and to promote sanitary education. Some of them even joined the Bolshevik Party and played a leading role building the Soviet health care system.36 The structure of the Soviet health care system, then, reflected a number of currents in the new Soviet state: the anticapitalism and statism of Bolshevik ideology, the centralizing prerogative in the fight against epidemics raging in the coun- try, and zemstvo physicians’ belief in social medicine, with an emphasis on free universal health care, preventive medicine, sanitation, and hygiene.37

Despite the initial ambition of Soviet health officials and doctors to provide free, universal health care, they lacked the resources to fulfill their goals. Under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, existing state clinics and hospitals remained badly underfunded and plans to broaden health care went unreal- ized. During the early 1930s, the Commissariat of Health expanded health care in factories and prioritized the well-being of industrial workers, largely neglecting the rest of the population. At the end of the 1930s, Soviet officials increased allocations for the health care of the general population, and in par- ticular emphasized maternity care and the construction of children’s hospitals. These priorities signaled a weakening of the productivist emphasis in state health care and also reflected the pronatalist campaign in the period leading up to the Second World War.38 Even given the considerable expansion of the Soviet health care system during the Stalinist period, medical services overall continued to be inadequate. Notwithstanding health officials’ objective of pro- viding comprehensive health care to the population, they were unable to over- come the country’s prerevolutionary legacy of underdevelopment. During the

36 John F. Hutchinson, “Who Killed Cock Robin?: An Inquiry into the Death of Zemstvo Medicine,” in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, eds. Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 4, 20.

37 Hutchinson concludes that the Commissariat of Health “owed much more to Russian precedent and tradition than to Bolshevik ideology.” John F. Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 202.

38 Chris Burton, “Medical Welfare during Late Stalinism: A Study of Doctors and the Soviet Health System, 1945–1953” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000), 33–9.

98 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

industrialization drive and the Second World War, the Soviet government chan- neled most available resources to building steel mills and expanding military production, while shortages of qualified medical personnel and facilities con- tinued. As we will discuss below, these deficiencies hampered official efforts to entice women to have more children by providing maternity services and to use medical personnel in a policing role to prevent women from having abortions.

Like the Soviets, Nazi politicians and propagandists considered health care a key pillar of the new society. Unlike their Soviet counterparts, however, the Nazis did not have to create entirely new structures of health care provision but could impose their theories upon an already comprehensive and highly bureau- cratized system. Beginning with the 1883 Bismarckian law on compulsory sick- ness insurance for workers, which established the world’s first national health care program, the scope of medical involvement in society had already been dramatically increased.39 German citizens were the beneficiaries of the most comprehensive and accessible health care system in the world. Indeed, one could argue that by exposing doctors to the working classes for the first time, univer- sal health insurance inspired medical ideas about influencing health outcomes on a mass scale. This almost universal system of health care was a structural prerequisite for National Socialism’s intervention into reproductive health care, though not without a substantial ideological and structural reorganization.

Soon after coming to power in 1933, the National Socialists set out to rad- ically transform the system of health insurance funds.40 Capitalizing on the discontent that had grown during the economically unstable Weimar years, the Nazis set out to restructure the administration of health care entirely with the goal of redirecting it toward “the healthy, enthusiastic, productive, military fit, racially valuable German man of the future.”41 Personal needs, the right to life, and individual bodily integrity were subordinated to the quest for “perfect human material,” and all forms of self-government within insurance funds were quashed.42 Soon after, extensive and ultimately fruitless efforts to integrate and restructure Germany’s regionally diverse health care system began under the auspices of the the Law for the Standardization of the Health Care System (Gesetz über die Vereinheitlichung des Gesundheitswesens) of July 3, 1934, which sought to create a centralized health care administration while replacing voluntary and government welfare agencies with new organizations devoted

39 For a synopsis, see Donald W. Light, “State, Profession, and Political Values,” in Political Values and Health Care: The German Experience, ed. Donald W. Light and Alexander Schuller (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1986), 3.

40 Extensive doctors’ strikes in the 1920s, declining medical benefits during the inflationary period and the depression, and infighting among the administration (accused of mismanagement), business circles, and doctors groups all contributed to a negative public attitude toward the existing system.

41 A 1939 quote from the Nazi Minister of Labor, Seldte, cited in Peter Rosenberg, “The Origin and the Development of Compulsory Health Insurance in Germany,” in Political Values and Health Care: The German Experience, eds. Donald W. Light and Alexander Schuller (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT University Press, 1986), 119.

42 Ibid.

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to racial hygiene and the National Socialist Weltanschauung.43 This effort at Gleichschaltung (synchronization) in the medical sphere created a new sys- tem of state-run health bureaus and state-appointed medical administrators to facilitate standardization across the Reich. A new focus on “genetic and racial counseling” was to replace the Weimar tradition of linking health care to economic productivity. The public health system was now to become the “executive organ of National Socialist genetic health policy.”44

Complete federal unity in health care was never achieved, and battles between state and communal medical administrations raged throughout the Third Reich.45 Nevertheless, Arthur Gütt, Ministerial Director of the Volks- gesundheit (people’s health) department of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, continually praised the achievements of standardization and argued that it had helped improve Germany’s genetic health (Erbgesundheit) while weeding out those with genetic illnesses and inferiorities (Minderwertigkeiten).46 To counteract the decline in genetic value (Erbwerte), Gütt created 742 regional health offices (Gesundheitsämter) across the country.47 But federal authorities never had the resources to take control of the health offices in large cities, who continued to depend upon local administrative practices. Nevertheless, Nazi medical reorganization imposed an administrative structure that aided in the dissemination of racial ideas and created a bureaucracy for the elimination of racially and genetically “inferior” individuals. Institutions that had originally been set up in the Weimar Republic to help the chronically sick to improve their standard of living and become reintegrated into society were now converted to the purpose of weeding these undesirables out of the ranks of those deserving government assistance.

eugenics

The emphasis on the collective good and on racial health is an indication of the centrality of eugenics in Nazi health care. Under the Nazis, eugenics became

43 The standard account of the struggles surrounding this law is: Alfons Labisch and Florian Tennstedt, Der Weg zum “Gesetz über die Vereinheitlichung des Gesundheitswesens,” vom 3. Juli 1934: Entwicklungslinien und -momente des staatlichen und kommunalen Gesundheitswe- sens in Deutschland (Düsseldorf: Akademie für ôffentliches Gesundheitswesen, 1985). See also Norbert Frei, ed., Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik in der NS-Zeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991).

44 Winfried Süß, “Gesundheitspolitik,” in Drei Wege deutscher Sozialstaatlichkeit: NS-Diktatur, Bundesrepublik und DDR im Vergleich, ed. Hans Günter Hockerts (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 63.

45 Ursula Grell, “‘Gesundheit ist Pflicht’ – Das öffentliche Gesundheitswesen Berlins 1933–1939,” in Totgeschwiegen 1933–1945: zur Geschichte der Wittenauer Heilstätten; seit 1957 Karl- Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik, 2nd ed., ed. Arbeitsgruppe zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Karl- Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik (Berlin: Hentrich, 1989), 52.

46 See for example, Ursula Grell, “Aufgaben der Gesundheitsämter im dritten Reich,” Archiv für Bevölkerungswissenschaft (Volkskunde) und Bevölkerungspolitik 1 (1935): 280–1; and Arthur Gütt, Der Aufbau des Gesundheitswesens im Dritten Reich, 4th rev. ed. (Berlin: Junker and Dünnhaupt, 1938), 12.

47 Arthur Gütt, Die Rassenpflege im Dritten Reich (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlaganstalt, 1940), 14.

100 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

the guiding principle of medical practice, not just in the field of reproduction, but in almost every medical specialty. Unlike socialist schools of thought on eugenics, which had often stressed the need to prevent illnesses for humane reasons, the guiding principle of Nazi eugenics was racial hygiene. Advocates of Nazi racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene) were guided by the pessimistic assumption that doctors had to be guardians of racial purity, turning their attention to both internal (genetic) and external (racial) threats, if an almost inevitable degeneration of the German Volk was to be avoided. Hereditary illnesses were defined more broadly and more ideologically than ever before.48 Nazis like Arthur Gütt insisted, for instance, that racial hygiene and eugenics should target not only physical features and deficits but also “mental and spiritual qualities and with them character.” The purview of genetics was thus widened and the links among eugenics, racism, and population policy were made explicit. “Whoever recognizes genetic science,” Gütt insisted, “must necessarily embrace not only the concept of race itself, but also the necessity of population and racial policy.”49 It should also be noted that while National Socialist eugenics, like Weimar eugenics, was mostly practiced in a Mendelian mode with an emphasis on the immutability of genetic traits, Lamarckism and the idea that environment might affect the germplasm crept in when it was ideologically convenient.50

Discussions about the need to protect men against venereal disease, for instance, included the argument that these diseases might damage the male germ cell (Keimzelle), and distinctions between congenital and genetic defects were often fuzzy.51

It should not be surprising, of course, that Nazi eugenics did not maintain strict scientific standards. Race was generally defined in genetic and biological but also in spiritual terms. According to Gütt, racial purity, and society itself, could be damaged through cultural mechanisms that destroy both the psycho- logical and physical reproductive energies of the Volk. Gütt argued that only

48 For an overview see: Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany 1904– 1945,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3–68.

49 Arthur Gütt, Bevölkerungs- und Rassenpolitik (Berlin: Industrieverlag Spaeth & Linde, 1936), 20.

50 Mendelian genetics, inspired by the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the monk Gregor Mendel, holds that individuals inherit a set of unchanged units (now called genes) from both parents. For any given pair of inherited units, only one will emerge as a trait in an individual. (There will not, in other words, be a blending of traits.) But the parental trait that is not mani- fested in the individual can still be passed on to that individual’s offspring. Mendel’s basic tenets still form the foundation for our understanding of genetic transmission. Lamarckian genetics, on the other hand, derived from the thinking of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1824), hold that the environment can affect the genetic traits of an individual and that these acquired traits can then be passed on to the next generation.

51 See the discussion of Keimschädigung in Heinz Woltereck, ed., Erbkunde, Rassenpflege, Bevölkerungspolitik: Schicksalsfragen des deutschen Volkes (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1935), 102–7. By 1935 the idea that VD could cause a Keimschädigung had been discounted. See Bodo Spiethoff, Die Geschlechtskrankheiten im Lichte der Bevölkerungspolitik, Erbgesundheits- und Rassenpflege (Berlin, [1934]), 13.

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an active fight against these cultural forces and the degenerate races that pro- duce them could bring about national renewal. Social policy, he argued, must contain both “eliminationist” (ausmerzenden) and “supportive” (fördernden) policies so that the inferior (Minderwertigen) and weak no longer drained away resources from the important task of fortifying genetically healthy and valu- able (lebenswerten) Germans.52 From the beginning, then, demands for eugenic measures were phrased in terms of a life-or-death struggle that could only be won on Darwinian terms. In the Nazi interpretation this meant weeding out all weak links and insisting that the German Volk was an organic, racial unity.

The Nazis were single-minded in their desire to eliminate all types of disabil- ity from German society, and they relied on a racialized definition of the Volk to justify the separation, segregation, and eventual sterilization or elimination of both unfit Germans (mentally retarded, congenitally diseased, homosexu- als, political dissidents) and otherwise genetically healthy non-Germans (Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs).53 Too much has been written about the consequences of this ideology even to summarize here, and the harshest resulting measures (euthanasia and racial genocide) fall outside the purview of this essay.54 For our purposes it must suffice to highlight the culturally pessimistic and ulti- mately militaristic language of Nazi eugenics, since this contrasts dramatically with the medical language in Stalinist Russia. Adolf Hitler was particularly likely to link reproduction and militaristic goals. In a speech in Nuremberg on September 13, 1935, he said: “I would be ashamed to be a German man if in the case of war a woman ever had to go to the front. Woman has her own battlefield: With every child she bears for the nation, she fights her battle for the nation.”55

This militaristic language contrasts with the Soviet perspective on eugenics, particularly in the Stalinist era. In the 1920s, German and Soviet eugenicists had actually engaged in a lively exchange of ideas, though the compatibility of their perspectives was, even then, often superficially exaggerated by their shared

52 He uses these terms in ibid., 8. 53 See Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und

Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986). It is now becoming commonplace to think of euthanasia as the first stage of the Holocaust. See: Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and especially Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

54 Leaving aside works that specifically set out to describe and explain the Holocaust, the most oft- cited general accounts of Nazi racial hygiene and eugenics are: Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).

55 “Grundthemen der weltanschaulichen Schulung,” in BAB/NS 22/521.

102 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

position as international outcasts (the Germans as the initiators of World War I, and the Soviets as the creators of a hated Communist regime).56 Scientists and health experts in each country, Susan Gross Solomon informs us, also often used each other’s demographic statistics in disingenuous ways to support polit- ical causes at home.57 Close cooperation ended, however, even before the rise of the Nazis, as we shall soon see, and the respective ideological frameworks of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes had a decisive impact on scientific thought in each country. Soviet policymakers, some of whom were initially convinced that eugenics was compatible with the Bolshevik dream of revolutionary trans- formation, came to believe that Mendelian genetics was incompatible with the project to create new Soviet citizens. The pessimism and militarism of German- style eugenics were rejected in favor of a more positively oriented faith in the need to concentrate on improving the social environment.

The Soviet government initially embraced eugenics and in 1920 created the Russian Eugenics Society (under the Commissariat of Health). The following year the Soviet Academy of Sciences founded its Bureau of Eugenics. These official organizations helped Russian eugenicists keep up their contacts with eugenicists abroad, as the Russian Eugenics Society selected a representative to the International Commission of Eugenics; established contacts with eugenic societies in the United States, England, and Germany; and sent its president to the 1924 International Congress of Eugenics in Milan.58 The society’s journal, Russian Eugenics Journal, reviewed a large number of foreign books on eugen- ics and published the programs of foreign eugenic societies. It also published articles analyzing the impact of the war on the populations of Europe and advocating registration and control of marriage for eugenic reasons.59

Because Marxism emphasized the role of the environment in shaping the individual, official ideology favored Lamarckian over Mendelian eugenics. Accordingly most Soviet eugenicists maintained a Lamarckian orientation. Despite this orientation, however, the Soviet eugenics movement eventually ran afoul of official ideology. In 1930, at a time when a Marxist orthodoxy was imposed on all social sciences, the Soviet government disbanded the Russian Eugenics Society. And in keeping with the fervor of the industrialization drive,

56 Loren R. Graham, “Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s.” American Historical Review 82, no. 5 (1977): 1148.

57 Susan Gross Solomon, “The Soviet Legalization of Abortion in German Medical Discourse: A Study of the Use of Selective Perceptions in Cross-Cultural Scientific Relations.” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 455–85.

58 Mark Adams, “Eugenics as Social Medicine in Revolutionary Russia: Prophets, Patrons, and the Dialectics of Discipline-Building in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, eds. Susan Gross Solomon and John Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 204–7; Loren Graham, Between Science and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 232–5.

59 A. V. Gorbunov, “Vliianie mirovoi voiny na dvizhenie naseleniia Evropy,” Russkii evgenicheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1922); Prof. P. I. Liublinskii, “Brak i evgenika” Russkii evgenicheskii zhurnal, no. 2 (1927). The Commissariat of Health’s Department of Foreign Information also reported on eugenic ideas promoted in other countries; GARF f. A-482, op. 35, d. 144, ll. 306–12.

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Russian eugenicists were forced to concede that the development of natural resources was more important and practical than the eugenic development of the population.60 Nevertheless, the formal termination of the eugenics move- ment did not mean the end of eugenic thinking among Soviet scientists and policymakers. Many eugenicists moved over to the Gorky Research Institute of Medical Genetics, where they continued to discuss human genetics without using the term eugenics.61

The final demise of Soviet eugenics occurred in 1936–7, when the work of geneticists at the Gorky Institute became associated with fascist eugenics. Trofim D. Lysenko and his followers were eager to attack hereditary genetics in order to buttress their own Lamarckian genetics, and they denounced a number of leading medical geneticists who were subsequently arrested and shot during the purges.62 The fact that eugenics was ultimately condemned as a fascist science demonstrates not only the influence of ideology, in particular Marxism’s emphasis on environmental over genetic determinants of social behavior, but also Soviet leaders’ desire to highlight ideological distinctions by differentiating socialist from fascist reproductive policies. Contrary to Soviet officials’ claim, eugenics was not exclusively a fascist science, because it was practiced widely in nonfascist countries such as the United States. But with rising ideological and international tensions of the 1930s, the Soviet Union rejected eugenics more firmly than ever, not only because it contradicted Soviet nurturist and universalist thought, but because they associated it with fascism.

Eugenics is perhaps the clearest example of state and expert attempts to effect a biosocial transformation through control of reproduction. The appeal of eugenics lay in its promise to improve the human species through techno- cratic means. In an age when population management seemed not only possi- ble but necessary, it is not surprising that so many political leaders and social reformers turned to eugenics. But equally interesting is the way that eugenics assumed such different forms depending upon political ideologies, social con- ditions, and the ethnic mix of populations. The ultimate demise of eugenics in the Soviet Union illustrates that even the government most committed to social transformation could reject a science of human biological transformation for ideological reasons. The rejection of eugenics, however, did not lead to a rejec- tion of efforts to encourage a higher birthrate. In fact, the Stalinist case in particular demonstrates the necessity of keeping the various categories (eugen- ics, population policy, reproductive politics, racial hygiene) separate. Although many historical case studies demonstrate how interrelated these fields often were, the practical implementation often looked quite different, and the differ- ent ideological strands must be kept separate in any international comparison.

60 Adams in Solomon, ed., 219. 61 Mark B. Adams, “Eugenics in Russia, 1900–1940,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in

Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 188–9.

62 Adams, “Eugenics in Russia,” 196.

104 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

A comparative examination of the implementation of reproductive policies in the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia makes this clear.

the implementation of reproductive policies: coercion

and incentive

Political leaders’ consternation with population trends led them to contemplate ways to increase the birthrate. Once populations could be represented statis- tically, and fertility trends explained on the basis of demographic studies, it became possible to conceive of state and expert control of fertility. Contracep- tion, abortion, and reproductive health became a focus for state intervention. Governments across Europe also began to provide material support for moth- ers. A wide range of people, from state officials and health experts, to members of women’s organizations and religious groups, agitated for increased govern- ment aid to mothers. While the politics of maternalist welfare, and the policies adopted, varied from one country to another, the overall trend was toward extensive state intervention and propaganda designed to promote motherhood. There are significant differences in the forms that the “rationalization” of moth- erhood took in each case, and the Nazi and Soviet regimes ascribed very differ- ent roles to the genders. Yet both formulated policies toward reproduction and sexuality that intertwined elements of coercion and incentive in the effort to instrumentalize private spheres of life in the interests of larger ideological goals. Coercion often went hand in hand with state-legitimizing incentives for com- pliant or supportive citizens.63 An outline of the implementation of population policy in each regime will demonstrate that the categories of pronatalism and antinatalism should be employed only with due consideration of the fact that policies in either category could serve to coerce citizens into acting against their wishes or – sometimes simultaneously – reward them in the interests of propa- ganda and state legitimation. The rubric of totalitarianism does not account for this ambiguity and fails to highlight the complexity, internal inconsistency, and mixed results of social policy, in terms of both political goals and the impact on individuals.

National Socialist coercive pronatalism began soon after the Machtergrei- fung (seizure of power). The Nazis were very explicit about their intentions to confine woman to her “smaller” role of house, home, and family and reserve the public sphere for men. Speaking to the National Socialist Women’s Orga- nization in September 1934, Hitler argued:

If the man’s world is said to be the State, his struggle, his readiness to devote his powers to the service of the community, then it may perhaps be said that the woman’s is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home. But what would become of the greater world if there

63 For a pioneering study of how the valorization of motherhood helped bolster the goals of the Nazi regime, see Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Woman, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).

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were no one to tend and care for the smaller one? . . . The two worlds are not antagonistic. They complement each other, they belong together just as man and woman belong together. We do not consider it correct for the woman to interfere in the world of the man, in his main sphere. We consider it natural if these two worlds remain distinct. To the one belongs the strength of feeling, the strength of the soul. To the other belongs the strength of vision, of toughness, of decision, and of the willingness to act. In the one case this strength demands the willingness of the woman to risk her life to preserve this important cell and to multiply it, and in the other case it demands from the man the readiness to safeguard life. The sacrifices which the man makes in the struggle of his nation, the woman makes in the preservation of that nation in individual cases. What the man gives in courage on the battlefield, the woman gives in eternal self-sacrifice, in eternal pain and suffering. Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her people.64

Unlike the Soviets, who at least in theory envisioned an equal role for women in the economy and public sphere, women in the Third Reich were explic- itly informed that their natures and duties were primarily maternal. The first indication that the Nazis would make good on these ideological claims about women’s role through coercive measures was the speed with which they shut down the birth control clinics that had proliferated in the Weimar Republic.65

Authorities initially relied on anti-Communist legislation to shut down the clinics, since many were run by the KPD or by Communist doctors.66 Despite these early measures, birth control practices were widely disseminated in the Third Reich.67 Contraceptives only came under a comprehensive ban in Jan- uary 1941, when Heinrich Himmler issued a Police Ordinance banning their production and distribution.68 It is significant that Himmler’s ban excluded

64 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, ed., Nazism, 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 1 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 449.

65 Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 136–49; and Gabriele Czarnowski, “Frauen – Staat – Medizin: Aspekte der Körperpolitik im Nationalsozialismus,” Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 8 (1985): 84–5.

66 Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), 19. 67 Historians have not yet achieved consensus on the availability of birth control in the Third

Reich. This is perhaps a problem of definition. The fact that condoms were excluded from laws outlawing birth control in the Third Reich meant that they were officially classified as prophylactics (against venereal disease), despite the fact that they could also be used for birth control. Historians (not to mention their historical sources) have not always been specific enough about what they mean when they write about birth control. When, for instance, Robert G. Waite argues that that even teenagers were “well acquainted with contraceptives” in the early 1940s and that teenage girls in Lüneburg used birth control regularly, he does not say what kind of devices or practices they were actually using (see Robert G. Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 3 [1998]: 434–76). It is necessary, in other words, to distinguish between prophylactic birth control (condoms), nonprophylactic birth control (which can include, of course, various forms of continence and “natural” methods), and nonprophylactic contraceptive devices.

68 Discussions about making birth control illegal, supported by Adolf Hitler, began much earlier. See the minutes of meeting of Sachverständigenbeirat für Bevölkerungs- und Rassenpolitik, 3 August 1933, in BA-B, R43 II/720a, Bl. 120–6.

106 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

condoms. Concerns about venereal disease and the view of many Nazi leaders (particularly Himmler) that male workers and soldiers required sexual outlets to be effective and productive persuaded them that condoms had to remain available to men seeking the services of prostitutes. While women’s sexuality was conceived exclusively in terms of the relationship to reproduction, men were expected (even encouraged) to stray, in the interests of improving fighting morale and worker productivity.69

Pointing out this encouragement of male extramarital sexual activity should not be taken as an argument that the Nazi ideal of supporting the family weakened or conflicted with actual practice; Nazi leaders like Himmler simply assumed that even family men would be promiscuous. But these policies do point to the need to relativize our focus on “family policy” by putting it in context with other Nazi views on sexual behavior.70 The Nazi emphasis on the family was accompanied by a coercive attitude toward nonmarital sexual activity, but not in the sense that the antifascist sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s claimed.71 Contrary to some stereotypes, the Third Reich was not a particularly sexually repressive society, since individuals were encouraged to engage in sexual activity outside marriage as long as it resulted in the birth of more “Aryan” babies or invigorated men for productive work in industry and soldiering. Whereas Soviet policymakers raged against the “Red Don Juans” who abandoned their families, the Nazis accepted promiscuity and virtually insatiable sexual appetites as central to male nature. Himmler, in fact, assumed that these urges would be racially valuable, since they would prompt truly patriotic Germans to produce “Aryan” children both within and outside tra- ditional marriages. The best soldiers, he insisted – those most likely to require prostitutes for sexual relief on the front because of their strongly masculine energies – would also, for the same reasons, be the most prolific of citizens once they returned to their wives.72

69 The result of this mentality was state support for prostitution. See Annette F. Timm, “Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and Militarized Masculinity in the Third Reich.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1–2 (2002): 223–55.

70 See, for example, Pine; Irmgard Weyrather, Muttertag und Mutterkreuz: Der Kult um die “deutsche Mutter” im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993); and Gabriele Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Paar: Ehe- und Sexualpolitik im National- sozialismus (Weinheim: Deutsche Studien Verlag, 1991).

71 Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 393–444. Herzog exposes the ideological and historically inaccurate nature of the New Leftist claim “that it was sexual repression that engendered the Nazi capacity for cruelty and mass murder” (397).

72 See his famous October 1939 speech, in which he called upon all racially “valuable” and patriotic Germans to produce children, even if they were illegitimate, to feed the nation’s need for soldiers. This was a very controversial stance, even within the party. See George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985), 166–7. The impact of the speech on actual practice has been vastly overblown, particularly by those who have used it to make the inaccurate claim that Himmler’s Lebensborn maternity homes were “breeding farms” where SS soldiers impreg- nated fertile Aryan women. The most authorative book on the Lebensborn is Georg Lilienthal, Der “Lebensborn e.V.”: Ein Instrument nationalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik (Stuttgart: Fischer

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The comparison to Soviet policies is instructive. Soviet young people, Sheila Fitzpatrick informs us, received conflicting messages about sexual freedom. Soviet propaganda about the emancipation of women and explicit arguments by party members like Aleksandra Kollontai gave them the impression that “sexual and political liberation went together.”73 This ran counter to the views of Lenin and other Old Bolsheviks, who expected sexual restraint and viewed sexual freedom as a distraction from the task of building a new society. An anti-decadence propaganda campaign was accordingly directed at Komsomol members in 1926–7.74 While sexual norms continued to be debated through- out the 1920s, by the 1930s, with the end of NEP and small-scale capitalism, the danger of bourgeois influences within the family receded in the minds of Soviet leaders, and they more actively promoted stable families and sexual pro- priety. At the same time, they never adopted the strict division of gender roles characteristic of the Nazis, and indeed they recruited women into the industrial workforce.75 The absence in the Soviet Union of the kind of racial ideology that prompted Nazi policymakers to view the family as the “germ cell” of the nation and illegitimate children as a “gift” to the Führer (as long as they were racially “desirable”) meant that despite revolutionary rhetoric, official Soviet policy on sexuality was much less radical than that of key National Social- ists. While Himmler and others advocated a kind of repressive desublimation, as Herbert Marcuse once described it,76 Soviet officials sought to sublimate sexual energies to the tasks of socialist construction. No generalization about

1985). Actual practice in Lebensborn homes must be distinguished from the fantasies of some Nazi leaders (particularly Himmler) about policies to be introduced in the future. See Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, ed. and with introduction by Heinrich Fraenkel, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973), 169.

73 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 68. See also Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

74 Ibid., 69. 75 For further discussion, see Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry

in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Melanie Ilic, Women Workers in the Soviet Interwar Economy: From “Protection” to “Equality” (New York: St. Martin’s Press in association with Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1999).

76 In late 1941, Marcuse wrote an unpublished analysis in which he argued that the Nazis had lifted sexual taboos for repressive purposes. (See “Über soziale und politische Aspekte des National- sozialismus,” in Herbert Marcuse, Feindanalysen: Über die Deutschen, ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen and Detlev Claussen [Lüneburg: zu Klampen Verlag, 1998], 91–117, available in translation as Technology, War and Fascism.) He argued here that the sexual activity in Nazi youth camps, the sexual excesses of the “racial elites,” and anti-Semitic pornography were all part and parcel of Nazi population policy. They were ways of rewarding and/or encouraging the extra labor power required from the population to achieve the aggressive racist aims of the state. By lifting sexual taboos, Marcuse argued, the Nazis made sex into a political domain. Hitherto repressed sexual energies were now socialized and put to work for the regime. The individual was taught to understand his/her sexual satisfaction as a patriotic duty. In the process the last bastion of the individual – the last area in which private wishes and desires could be addressed and fulfilled – was torn down.

108 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

attitudes toward sexuality could thus encompass practice in these two regimes (either internally or in comparison). Seemingly sacrosanct ideological values (such as the centrality of the family in Nazi social policy, or ideas about sexual liberation in the Soviet Union) were regularly compromised in the interests of what were considered more pressing practical exigencies.

The degree of support for bourgeois family values among Nazi policymakers depended upon their perceived value for the militaristic goals of the regime. While prostitution was tolerated and even planned (though not publicly val- orized) as a reward for hard-fighting soldiers, and extramarital sex was encour- aged if it produced more “Aryan” babies, unorthodox forms of sexual expres- sion thought to diminish fighting strength were actively repressed. Himmler’s argument for prostitution rested on his belief that the close comradeship of the fighting unit (the Männerbund) created a breeding ground for homosexual urges that needed to be counteracted through punishment and the creation of possibilities for heterosexual sex.77 Aside from making prostitutes available, he ordered that soldiers engaged in the invasion of Poland in 1939 would be released “from otherwise necessary bourgeois [bürgerlicher] laws and habits” so that children could be conceived “even outside of marriage with German women and girls of good blood.” Bourgeois values were to take a backseat to the “victory of the child” as a necessary corollary to the “victory of the sword.”78 Hitler, though less vocal on the subject, agreed, insisting, “Our uprising has nothing to do with bourgeois virtues. We are an uprising born of our nation’s strength – the strength of its loins as well, if you like.”79 Sexual prowess, reproduction, and fighting strength were all combined in this world- view, and homosexuality, particularly in military ranks, thus represented not just a moral, but a military threat. This view prevailed against the more lib- ertine arguments of Ernst Röhm, who argued against all forms of bourgeois prudishness in sexual matters, particularly with reference to homosexuality.80

77 Justifying his tolerance for military prostitution, Himmler argued: “In this area we will be as generous as we can possibly be, since one cannot on the one hand want to prevent that the whole male youth wanders off towards homosexuality and on the other hand leave them no way out.” Quoted in Christa Paul, Zwangsprostitution: Staatlich errichtete Bordelle im Nationalsozialis- mus (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994), 12. On the Männerbund and militarized masculinity in the Third Reich, see George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985); and Thomas Kühne, “‘Aus diesem Krieg werden nicht nur harte Männer heimkehren’: Kriegskamaradschaft und Männlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Männergeschichte – Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne, Reihe Geschichte und Geschlechter, ed. Thomas Kühne (Frankfurt am Main [u.a.]: Campus, 1996).

78 “SS-Befehl für die gesamte SS und Polizei” 28 Oct. 1939, in Bundesarchiv (Berlin) – hereafter BA-B – NS19/3973.

79 Quoted in Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany (New York: Dorset Press, 1996), 3.

80 Ernst Röhm openly rejected bourgeois sexuality and its hypocrisies in his 1928 autobiography, Die Geschichte eines Hochverräters (Munich, 1928). But, as Eleanor Hancock has argued, this position was always an uncomfortable one in the Nazi Party and “came into conflict with the more usual National Socialist view of sexuality, which saw its main purpose as reproduc-

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The militarization of masculinity in the Third Reich ultimately won the day on issues of sexual propriety. In cases where sexual energies could be harnessed to military campaigns, they were encouraged. When sexual activity was thought to threaten fighting strength, as did homosexuality, it was harshly repressed.81

But the emphasis on uniting military and reproductive energies also affected those who conformed to the Nazi masculine ideal. Married men in SS units were often given short leaves to visit with their wives in hotels near the front, in the hope that they would conceive a child.82 Himmler expected SS members to be exemplary fathers of large families (with at least four children), and he expected infertile SS couples to adopt. SS officers were compelled under a 1936 order to become supporting members of Lebensborn e.V., an organization dedicated to helping racially valuable families with many children and unwed mothers about to give birth to racially valuable children.83 Fatherhood and soldiering were linked in Himmler’s ideology. He even considered requesting funding for Lebensborn directly from the military budget of Generalfeldmarschall Keitel.84

While this never happened, Himmler did find ways of using the victories in the East to help create his racial utopias, in terms of not only annihilating racial enemies, but also adding to the racial stock of the Volksgemeinschaft. In March 1939, he had mused

that every nordic person that we take from other peoples will be a loss of leadership-capable blood for them and a benefit for us. Through every successful action, we gain two people, one that our opponent loses and who will no longer be standing against us as an enemy, and one that will now be standing with us and finding for us.85

Later in the war, this theoretical zero sum game became a reality, and Lebens- born officials began kidnapping Aryan-looking Polish children and adopting

tion.” See Eleanor Hancock, “‘Only the Real, the True, the Masculine Held Its Value’: Ernst Röhm, Masculinity, and Male Homosexuality,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 4 (1998): 623–4.

81 Space constraints preclude a detailed discussion of the persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich. This subject has received detailed attention in recent years. For brief overviews see: Geoffrey Giles, “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler’s SS and Police,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1–2 (2002): 256–90; Geoffrey Giles, “‘The Most Unkindest Cut of All’: Castration, Homosexuality, and Nazi Justice,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992): 41–61; and Erwin J. Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman et al. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 365–79.

82 For an examples Himmler’s orders to this effect, see BAB/NS19/2769 and BA-B – NS19/3594. 83 An excerpt from this order is reprinted in BA-B – /NS19/3973, Bl. 9–10. 84 A 1940 draft letter (that was never sent) argues that properly funding Lebensborn could prevent

six hundred thousand abortions yearly, thus providing an extra two hundred regiments of soldiers within eighteen or twenty years. See letter dated July 1940 in BA-B – NS19/1082, Bl. 6–7.

85 Himmler to Reichsminister Lammers, 11 March 1939, BA-B – NS2/55, 1939), Bl. 139–40.

110 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

them out to German families, many of whom were unaware of the exact cir- cumstances of the children’s departure from their homes.86 This program is perhaps the best example of how Nazi conceptions of family were explicitly linked to violence and to primitive understandings of the connection between physical (in this case military) strength and the right to fatherhood.

The Soviet attitude toward fatherhood had an entirely different focus. In tandem with its pronatalist campaign, the Soviet government sought to enforce paternal obligations. A 1933 decree that required all births to be registered within one month included provisions for a mother to name the father of her child regardless of whether they were married or even whether he was present. Men who did not acknowledge paternity of a child would still be registered as the father if a mother named him as such and provided any evidence of cohabitation.87 In 1936 the same law that outlawed abortion and made divorce more difficult also tightened regulations on child support. It set minimal levels of child support as one-fourth of the unmarried or divorced father’s salary for one child, one-third for two children, and one-half for three or more children. It also increased the penalty for nonpayment of child support to two years in prison.88 In subsequent years the Soviet government proved serious about paternal responsibility and took numerous steps to track down delinquent fathers.89 Soviet propaganda also stressed the importance of paternity; a lead article in Pravda entitled “Father” stated that “a father is a social educator. He must prepare good Soviet citizens.” Another article stated, “A poor husband and father cannot be a good citizen. People who abuse the freedom of divorce should be punished.”90

It was just prior to the campaign to strengthen the family that the Soviet government recriminalized male homosexuality. In December 1933 the head of the Soviet secret police, Genrikh Iagoda, sent Stalin a draft decree outlaw- ing sodomy and justified it by citing “associations of pederasts” engaged in “the recruitment and corruption of completely healthy young people.” The Politburo approved the ban on male homosexuality, which was issued as law in March 1934.91 Dan Healey notes that the Soviet recriminalization of sodomy was preceded by Hitler’s accession to power and a virulent propa- ganda war between fascism and communism which included mutual accusa- tions of homosexuality. In this atmosphere, homosexuality became associated with fascism in the eyes of Soviet officials, and in fact Maxim Gorky justified

86 See Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections, 1938–2001 (London: Penguin Books, 2000).

87 Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie: Kodifitsirovannyi sbornik zakonodatel’stva RSFSR na 1 ianvariia 1934 goda (Moscow, 1934), 49.

88 Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii, no. 34 (21 July 1936): 515–16. 89 GARF f. 9492 s.ch., op. 1, d. 2, l. 183; TsMAM f. 819, op. 1, d. 3, l. 1; f. 2429, op. 7, d. 200,

l. 34; d. 220, l. 4. 90 Pravda 9 June 1936, 1; Ogonek 10 January 1936, 4; Timasheff, 197. 91 Istochnik, no. 5–6 (1993): 164–5.

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the antisodomy law with the slogan “Destroy the homosexuals – fascism will disappear.”92

Healey also points out that attacks on homosexuality coincided with the Soviet government’s mid-1930s drives to cleanse cities of “social anomalies” and to promote the (heterosexual) family. In 1936 the Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko linked homosexuality with bourgeois decadence and coun- terrevolution and stated that it had no place in a socialist society founded on healthy principles. He called homosexuals “declassed rabble, either from the dregs of society or from the remnants of the exploiting classes.” Krylenko declared that homosexuals were not needed “in the environment of workers taking the point of view of normal relations between the sexes, who are build- ing their society on healthy principles.”93 Emphasis on the family should thus be seen as part of a larger effort by the Soviet government to make hetero- sexuality and procreation compulsory in the interests of the state and larger society.94

In addition to enforcing heteronormative behavior and paternal obligations among men, the Soviet government sought to rationalize and maximize repro- duction through a range of studies and measures to safeguard women’s repro- ductive capacities. Soviet medical specialists in the 1920s used the language of industrial production to describe reproduction, including the term “productive capacity” to describe women’s ability to become pregnant and bear healthy babies.95 A. S. Gofshtein, in his article “The Rationalization of Maternity,” described mothers as “producers” and wrote that pregnancy could be “pro- ductive” or “unproductive,” depending on whether it ended with the birth of a healthy child or with miscarriage, abortion, or infant mortality. Gofshtein studied the histories of pregnant women and calculated that women would optimize their productivity by having three children, all four years apart. He noted that more frequent pregnancies weakened “the female organism,” pro- duced sickly children, and diminished women’s value in the workforce.96 Other Soviet doctors studied reproductive capacity by combining obstetrics and gyne- cology with anthropometry (for example, measuring women’s pelvises). One

92 Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gen- der Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 182–90. See also Laura Engelstein, “Soviet Policy toward Male Homosexuality: Its Origins and Historical Roots,” Journal of Homosexuality 29, no. 2–3 (1994): 155–78.

93 N. V. Krylenko, “Ob izmeneniiakh i dopolneniiakh kodeksov RSFSR,” Sovetskaia iustitsiia, no. 7 (1936), as cited in Healey, 196. See also James Riordan, “Sexual Minorities: The Status of Gays and Lesbians in Russian-Soviet-Russian Society,” Women in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160; Igor Kon, “Sexual Minorities,” in Sex and Russian Society, eds. I. Kon and James Riordan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 92.

94 On the prosecution of sodomy cases after 1933, see Healey, chapter 8, 207–28. 95 Hyer, 113. 96 A. S. Gofshtein, “Ratsionalizatsiia materinstva,” Vrachebnoe delo , no. 19 (1927), as cited in

Hyer, 113–18.

112 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

researcher warned that women who worked in factories had narrower (and hence inferior) pelvises than women who did not.97

Because women in the Soviet system were expected to serve as both mothers and workers, specialists showed particular concern with the effects of industrial labor on women’s reproductive abilities. They conducted studies on the effect of heavy lifting and concluded that it could damage pelvic organs and cause problems with pregnancy. In 1921 and again in 1927 the Soviet government established employment guidelines to ensure that women were not in jobs that required heavy lifting, for fear that such work would harm their reproductive organs.98 Health officials also promoted physical examinations and education as means to protect women’s reproductive capacities. Delegates to the Third All-Union Conference on the Protection of Maternity and Infancy in 1926 stressed that young women from the beginning of their sexual maturity should have regular medical consultations, initially arranged through schools. They also noted that these consultations would give doctors the opportunity to edu- cate them about the dangers of abortion and diseases. Throughout the 1920s specialists on women’s hygiene and sexual enlightenment carried on studies and educational efforts, most of which emphasized the social importance of women’s reproductive health and childbearing.99

The legislative centerpiece of the Soviet government’s campaign to raise the birthrate was the decree of June 27, 1936, which outlawed abortion, except for medical reasons. Politburo discussion of the decree prior to its promulgation emphasized the importance of achieving the maximal possible birthrate.100 The Politburo subsequently decided “to limit as much as possible the list of medical reasons” for permitting an abortion, and this decision was promulgated later in a November 1936 decree that limited the medical reasons for permitting an abortion to cases in which hereditary diseases were likely or in which a woman’s life was endangered. The decree stated, “Abortion is not only harmful for a woman’s health, but is also a serious social evil, the battle with which is the duty of every conscious citizen, most of all medical personnel.”101

The ban on abortion was preceded by a huge publicity campaign and public discussion of a draft of the decree, and it was followed by further propaganda on the new law’s validity and importance. Numerous articles stressed the harm

97 Hyer, 115. 98 Hyer, 116–17; Thomas Schrand, “Industrialization and the Stalinist Gender System: Women

Workers in the Soviet Economy, 1928–1941” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994), 159– 60. Similar policies regulating work for pregnant women were instituted in Weimar Germany. See Patricia R. Stokes, “Contested Conceptions: Experiences and Discourses of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Germany, 1914–1933” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2003).

99 Resoliutsii III Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po okhrane materinstva i mladenchestva (1926), 17–18; Malinovskii and Shvartsman, 5. For discussion of Soviet sexual enlightenment pro- grams, see Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007).

100 Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii, no. 34 (21 July 1936): 510–11; RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 976, l. 4.

101 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 980, l. 1; d. 982, ll. 126–30.

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that abortions did to women’s physical and mental health.102 (No mention was made of the extreme danger posed to the health of women who in the wake of this law sought illegal abortions.) One article asserted that the “single goal” of the decree was “the protection of the health of the Soviet mother.”103

Commissar Semashko warned that abortion could not only cause infertility, but also have an adverse effect on a woman’s other organs and nervous system. But he also justified the ban on abortion as crucial to “the state task of increasing the population of the Soviet Union.” He went on to compare the fertility rate of the Soviet Union with those of other industrialized countries and argued that the abortion ban would allow the country to maintain or even increase its superior birthrate.104 Here again it is noteworthy that Semashko referred to increasing the population as a “state task.” Rather than conceptualize population issues in terms of “national superiority” or “race suicide,” he and other Soviet leaders espoused a nonracial approach that sought to boost the birthrate to build socialism and prove its ideological ascendance.

This, of course, contrasts sharply with the racialized reproductive policies in the Third Reich. Nazi racial hygienists went beyond arguments about prov- ing the superiority of their political and health care system through higher birthrates and conceived of even the domestic population in highly competitive terms. An ideological division was made between those who were and those who were not considered racially and genetically desirable. The former were to have no access to abortion, since the children they might produce were con- sidered too valuable to the nation. Differential access to abortion based on racial criteria can thus be viewed as a form of coercive pronatalism.105 Those of “lesser value” (Minderwertigen), while also not given reproductive choice, were certainly provided access to or sometimes forced into an abortion. Abor- tion laws, which had been liberalized somewhat in the Weimar Republic, were tightened in May 1933.106 Thereafter a woman who procured or induced an abortion for herself or the practitioners of abortion were subject to between one-day and five-year detentions, or up to fifteen years if money had changed

102 Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka, no. 11 (1936): 6; Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka, no. 12 (1936): 1. See also Izvestiia, 5 June 1935.

103 Pravda, 5 September 1936, 4. 104 N. A. Semashko, “Zamechatel’nyi zakon (o zapreshchenii aborta),” Front nauki i tekhniki, no.

7 (1936): 38. For further discussion, see Susan Gross Solomon, “The Demographic Argument in Soviet Debates over the Legalization of Abortion in the 1920s,” Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique 33 (1992): 59–82.

105 Atina Grossman also makes this argument. See her chapter “The Debate That Will Not End: The Politics of Abortion in Germany from Weimar to National Socialism and the Postwar Period,” in Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, eds. Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks (Washington, DC, and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195–6. This runs counter to Gisela Bock’s argument (in Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus) that Nazi reproductive policies can be characterized as primarily antinatalist.

106 Paragraphs 219 and 220, which had been eliminated from the Penal Code in Weimar era reforms, were reintroduced, once again prohibiting education about abortion or abortifacients.

114 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

hands.107 Then in June 1935, the policies on abortion were linked explicitly to eugenic sterilization measures when an amendment to the July 14, 1933, sterilization law (the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Off- spring, which had called for the mandatory surgical sterilization of all people with “hereditary” diseases)108 declared even very late-term abortions legal if they were certified eugenically necessary by a medical commission. Thereafter, eugenic abortions were followed by sterilization. That Nazi medical authorities envisioned abortion primarily as a eugenic measure was further emphasized in the Reichsärztekammer’s 1936 “Guidelines for Interruption of Pregnancy and Sterilization on Health Grounds,” which narrowed the possibilities for thera- peutic abortions (that is, abortions made necessary by threats to the woman’s health) to only very severe cases.109

Nazi abortion policy must be understood as a continuation of the spirit of the 1933 sterilization law, not least because the two policies were eventually linked. The first sterilization law had been followed by an extensive propa- ganda campaign that used terms like “differential decreases in the birthrate,” “quantity versus quality,” and “constitution of the genetic makeup of our Volk” to argue that sterilization of the unfit was a necessary countermeasure against racial degeneration.110 Despite the antinatalist tone of the policies on sterilization and abortion, they were formulated with the understanding that such measures were a necessary step toward eventually increasing the number of desirable births. The desire to prevent the hereditarily sick from reproducing must be understood in the context of the twisted Darwinian logic of Nazi law- makers: they assumed that an ever-increasing number of diseased individuals would overwhelm societal resources and eventually lead to both a qualitative and a numerical decline in the German population. Pronatalist and antinatalist tendencies in the Third Reich are thus not easily separated, and a lack of vol- untary access to abortion and birth control coexisted with forced sterilization and abortion for those declared racially and eugenically “of lesser value.”111

Banning abortion in the Third Reich, as in the Soviet Union, was a form of coercive pronatalism for the portion of the population considered racially desir- able, even while it must also be considered a eugenic and antinatalist measure

107 Pine, 20. 108 The official English translation of the law described these in the following terms: innate mental

deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depressive-insanity, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary (Hunting- ton’s) chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, severe hereditary physical deformity. See “The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Disease in Posterity,” clipping in Freie Univer- sität Berlin, Sammlung Rott (hereafter FUB, Slg Rott), C5b, 9101, Box 8. For an official text and explanation of the law see: Arthur Gütt, Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses vom 14. Juli 1933, mit Auszug aus dem Gesetz gegen gefährliche Gewohnheitsverbrecher und über Massregeln der Sicherung und Besserung vom 24. Nov. 1933 (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1934).

109 Grossmann, “The Debate That Will Not End,” 196. 110 Cited in Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus, 90. 111 Gabriele Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Paar, 15.

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for others. A similar mixture of pronatalist and antinatalist objectives was apparent in marriage policy.

In this context, we must also mention the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the most infamous of which was the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” or the Blutschutzgesetz, which outlawed marriages between Jews and gentiles and classified Jews according to degree of racial mixing. Soon after, on October 18, 1935, the Ehegesundheitsgesetz (marital health law, offi- cially called the Gesetz zum Schutze der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes) was proclaimed. This law definitively transformed marriage counseling from the Weimar model (which although professing eugenic considerations “mostly provided contraceptives and sex advice”) to a system of government spon- sored Bevölkerungspolitik – large, “fit” families became the exclusive goal of marital health regulations.112 The law prohibited marriages between partners likely to produce “undesirable” offspring or between an infertile, sterilized, or otherwise unfit partner and a racially desirable one.113 Additional decrees to the marital health law stipulated that health certificates (Ehetauglichkeits- zeugnisse),114 which had been certified by newly created counseling cen- ters for genetic and racial health (Beratungsstellen für Erbgesundheit und Rassenpflege), had to be exchanged before marriage. A circular clarifying the application of the law emphasized the eugenic considerations that should be applied, stating that “careful evaluation of all circumstances speaking for and against the marriage must be undertaken, primarily with reference to genetic and health considerations.”115 Despite the link between the Ehegesundheitsge- setz and the Blutschutzgesetz, then, the emphasis of the former remained on eugenic health rather than racial considerations. The Ehegesundheitsgesetz was clearly directed at the majority population and meant to strengthen the core society for nationalistic purposes. An increasing number of exceptions made during the application of the law demonstrates the degree to which policy- makers saw this aspect of their racial policy as a legitimizing feature of the regime. The aim was to sell the Ehegesundheitsgesetz to the German public as an instrument of personal protection.116

It is clear, then, that neither Nazi nor Soviet reproductive health policy confined itself to coercive measures and that even some apparently coercive policies were formulated so as to encourage compliance on the part of citizens. We will now turn to policies that provided even more explicit incentives for

112 Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 141. 113 The law also only applied to German citizens, or in cases of German men who married foreign

women. If a German woman married a foreign man, their future children were not considered Germans and the woman lost her citizenship.

114 Note the change in terminology from Weimar usage, which had called marital health certificates Ehegesundheitszeugnissen. It is no longer simply health, but “fitness” for marriage that is being certified.

115 Reichsminister des Innern to Landesregierungen etc., 18 Feb. 1939 in Landesarchiv Berlin (hereafter LAB), Rep. 12, Acc. 1641, Nr. 239.

116 For further clarification see Timm, “The Politics of Fertility,” 289–300.

116 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

citizens who were either racially desirable (in the Nazi case) or politically compliant, demonstrating that population policy was not only an instrument of social control but also a means of legitimizing state projects. It was a crucial component of the respective projects to remake society.

Alongside coercive measures to raise the birthrate, the Soviet government offered financial inducements for women to have many children. The same decree that outlawed abortion granted women a 2,000-ruble annual bonus for each child they had over six children and a 5,000-ruble bonus for each child over ten children. These bonuses drew an immediate response from women with seven or more children. Local officials were deluged by requests from (primarily peasant) women who qualified for these bonuses.117

In addition to bonuses paid to individuals, the Soviet government encouraged motherhood by providing maternity facilities and services. Within months of coming to power, the Soviet government founded a large number of maternity homes, nurseries, milk kitchens, and pediatric clinics. With the pronatalist push of the mid-1930s, funding for maternity wards and nurseries increased even more, though not nearly enough to meet the needs of the millions of women in the workforce. Given that the Soviet government channeled virtually all resources into rapid industrialization, it lacked the money for adequate child care facilities. But in principle, the Soviet government committed itself to complete care for mothers and children.118 The Soviet government also sought to ensure that women did not avoid pregnancy for fear of losing their jobs or wages. As early as 1921 the government decreed that pregnant women who were unable to work were entitled to receive their full salary from workers’ insurance funds. By 1927 Soviet law guaranteed women eight weeks of paid leave both before and after giving birth.119

As part of its pronatalist campaign of the mid-1930s, the Soviet government also celebrated motherhood and portrayed having children as a natural and ful- filling part of a woman’s life. Articles in the Soviet press stressed the happiness that children brought to women’s lives. One testimonial from a woman with five children described how much her children loved her, while another article claimed that children took care of each other, so that having many children was an advantage rather than a burden.120

While Soviet efforts to glorify motherhood resembled pronatalist propa- ganda in other countries, they were distinguished in one crucial way. The Soviet government encouraged and expected women to continue working while

117 Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii, no. 34 (July 21, 1936), p. 511; GARF f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 2753, l. 4. The Soviet government had to allot 35 million rubles in 1936 alone to pay such bonuses; GARF f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 2753, l. 31.

118 Drobizhev, 109, 122; GARF f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 2754, l. 45. See, for example, the draft of a pamphlet by Elena Stasova, “For Women in the USSR All Paths Are Open,” in which she stresses the concern and material aid provided by the Soviet government to mothers. RGASPI f. 17, op. 120, d. 202, l. 11.

119 GARF f. 4085, op. 12, d. 320, l. 16; Molkov, ed. (1927), 318. 120 Martenovka, 1 May 1936, 5; Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka, no. 15 (1936): 5; Rabotnitsa i

krest’ianka, no. 2 (1936): 20. See also Gigiena i zdorov’e, no. 4 (1938): 6.

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pregnant and after giving birth. To ensure that pregnant women could find or maintain jobs outside the home, the Politburo approved a decree in Octo- ber 1936 that made it a criminal offense to refuse to hire or to lower the pay of women during pregnancy.121 Soviet leaders, then, constructed gender in a way that stressed women’s roles as both workers and mothers, and they insisted there was no contradiction between the two. In contrast, many officials and social commentators in Western Europe blamed feminism and women’s employment outside the home for the weakening of traditional female roles and the decline in the birthrate.122

As we have already seen, the Nazis emphasized that woman’s place was in the home, and most of the positive financial incentives they offered to encour- age women to have more children were predicated on the assumption of a single-earner family. Differing markedly from Soviet policy, the Nazis offered some of their financial incentives for births only to women who gave up paid employment. The policy of providing marriage loans to genetically “fit” cou- ples began as a labor policy – as a measure to decrease unemployment by removing women from the workforce. Enshrined in section five (Promotion of the Marriage Rate) of the Law to Decrease Unemployment of June 1, 1933,123

the law on marriage decreed that eligible couples could apply to receive loans of up to one thousand Reichsmarks to buy goods needed to establish a household. Eligibility was limited to engaged or recently married couples when the wife or female partner was employed but promised to give up her job upon marriage. The exact stipulations of length of employment were gradually loosened, so that by the end of August, even women who had only worked for a period of six months sometime between 1928 and 1933 were eligible. Gabriele Czarnowski has argued that the policy was not simply a reactionary effort to redomesticate women, but rather a very modern attempt to manipulate female labor. The ini- tial goal of expanding job opportunities for men by removing married women from the labor market was abandoned in the changed economic circumstances after 1936. After the boom in armaments industries and the resulting shortage of labor, women no longer had to give up their jobs to receive the loans.124

As one contemporary commentator put it, the “population political goal [of the law] remained the same as it had been in 1933,”125 but it now served to encourage rather than discourage female employment, since the requirement of previous employment remained.

Nevertheless, after 1936, the primary effect of the law was to place an ever-expanding percentage of married couples under eugenic surveillance, since racial and eugenic criteria were stipulations for eligibility. By 1937, Czarnowski

121 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 981, l. 69. 122 See Offen, 138. 123 A copy of the law, along with the various revisions and decrees, can be found in Reichsfi-

nanzministerium, Ehestandsdarlehen (Berlin, 1935). 124 The changes to the marriage loan policy in 1937 were not simply cosmetic. A separate law,

“The Law for the Promotion of Marriage Rates,” was promulgated. 125 Cited in Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Paar, 105; Erich Berlitz, Ehestandsdarlehen (Berlin and

Vienna: Spaeth & Linde, 1940), 39.

118 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

argues, the racial hygienic criteria were dominant, and “the public health examinations for marriage loans proved themselves to be one of the most important turning points between ‘supportive’ and ‘eliminationist’ reproduc- tive politics.”126 In other words, this apparently “positive” eugenic measure provided public health doctors with a wealth of genetic and social informa- tion about prospective marriage candidates that could be used for negative eugenic purposes. Ever more stringent and bureaucratically organized eugenic testing for marriage loans led to a decrease in the number of couples applying for them. New forms in January 1934 were likely partly responsible for this decrease, since patients had only to look at the long list of illnesses and the blank spaces for information on family members to begin to fear that there might be information they had better hide from medical officials.127

All the same, the policy must be interpreted as an attempt to legitimize the health plans of the regime. For the most part, marriage loans were provided as a benefit and accepted by the public as a right of citizenship. A demonstration of this can be found in a letter of complaint from a Berlin man whose fiancée had just undergone a health examination for a marriage loan application in May 1936. After complaining about general bureaucratic delays and annoyances, the author described his outrage at the conditions under which his fiancée was examined:

One has to report . . . to room 35, am Urban, for a blood examination. On this door hangs a large enamel sign “Clinic for the Venereally Diseased.”

Any commentary about this would actually be superfluous, but in the hopes of emphatically awakening the bureaus that will perhaps receive this letter, and which are apparently somewhat obtuse, I would like to say, that . . . every deli- cately sensitive female heart is extremely offended and shamed to sit next to the painted flowers [Pflänzchen], whose source of income is too obviously visible in their appearances, [not to mention the fear] of then being denounced by the mouth of some casual acquaintance as belonging to the contaminated. Apparently the head of this clinic has more understanding than the administration of the district of Kreuzberg, because he saw us together upon our request and added the phrase “. . . for a marriage loan” when he called our names.128

The tone is clearly that of an outraged citizen who feels that he has not been treated with due respect. There is a sense of entitlement, and his goal, he claims, is to improve conditions so that others will not have to suffer through the same. The complainant’s outrage is not imaginable outside a context of considerable consensus about the state’s right to be involved in marriage. It is not the pol- icy itself that the man decries, but the disrespectful way that it was carried out. The complaint is therefore evidence that marriage loans were part of the

126 Ibid., 109. 127 Ibid., 133. 128 The letter, dated 26 May 1936, was typed out (it is unclear whether the emphasis is from the

original author or whether it was added by the typist) and forwarded to the Oberbürgermeister in the HGA through the Stadtmedizinalrat. The matter was taken seriously, and immediate changes were recommended. LAB, Rep. 12, Acc. 1641, Nr. 246.

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construction of consensus in the Nazi state – they proved to many citizens that all the talk about hearth and home had some substance.129 While ultimately unsuccessful in actually raising the birthrate, these measures prompted a con- siderable degree of voluntary public involvement in state welfare measures.

A similar policy, that has received more attention from historians, was the practice of rewarding mothers of many children with service crosses and small gifts.130 Beginning in 1939, crosses were awarded to mothers with four or more children (in bronze for four or five children, silver for six or seven, and gold for eight or more) on Mother’s Day – now on August 12, Hitler’s mother’s birthday. Like the marriage loans, these crosses also awakened a sense of enti- tlement in the population and were meant to integrate their recipients into the ideological and social structure of the Nazi state. Irmgard Weyrather has argued that the crosses functioned “as a binding agent to the regime and as con- tent of the political religion of National Socialism.”131 Reactions to the medal ceremonies were generally positive. Government informers, who collected data on public opinion about the medals, noted that the most significant complaints arose when mothers considered to be “asocial” (that ill-defined term that could encompass anything from having a child who had stolen something, to obvi- ous social dysfunction, criminality, or mental illness) were granted motherhood service crosses.132 In general, though, propaganda efforts paid off with large numbers of applications for the crosses. In the first few years of the program, for example, the Berlin district health offices were flooded with applications and begged for extra personnel to process them, particularly once the war began in 1939.133 Award ceremonies and propaganda made explicit connec- tions between the war effort and the mothers who had provided the Reich with sons and soldiers.

comparing pronatalist state intervention

While leaders in all European countries shared pronatalist goals, the policies they adopted varied considerably from one country to another. Nazi officials sought to control the “quality,” the “racial fitness,” and the quantity of chil- dren born, and they enacted antinatalist as well as pronatalist measures. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, promoted reproduction among all citizens,

129 Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and Family in the Politics of Postwar Ger- many (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 17.

130 See especially Weyrather, Muttertag und Mutterkreuz. 131 Ibid., 151. For a copy of the official policy see “Das Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter,” AGfV

Mitteilungen, no. 2 (16 January 1939): 1–2. 132 Ibid., 147. 133 See, for example, the letter from the district of Treptow to the Oberbürgermeister, 6 May 1939,

in LAB, Rep. 12, Acc. 1641, Nr. 247. In October 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior issued a directive to all regions to clear up the backlog of applications immediately and make every effort to ensure that at least all those women over 50 years of age had their crosses in hand before Christmas. Letter describing RMI memo from Oberbürgermeister Berlin, 30 Oct. 1939, in ibid.

120 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

without regard to race, nationality, or mental and physical abilities. The par- ticular reproductive policies adopted by the Soviet government were a result not only of socialist ideology, but also of the nurturist orientation of Russian disciplinary culture – itself a product of Russian political and social condi- tions. While Soviet policies, then, were part of an international trend toward state management of reproduction, they reflected a particular disciplinary and ideological orientation, as well as a distinct conception of the population. By placing in comparative context Nazi and Soviet reproductive policies, from abortion legislation and the promotion of motherhood to eugenic policies and child-raising programs, it is possible to demonstrate how the broader shift toward state interventionism assumed particular forms in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the Third Reich, reproductive policy and the biological determinism that was its foundation were one component of what one might think of, following Detlev Peukert, as an attempt to transcend death through nonreligious means. In his article “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” Peukert describes a process through which, over the course of the century, the early successes of biomedicine and improved hygiene and welfare methods in cities, schools, and social programs inspired experts in the natural and social sciences, especially medical professionals, to ever-increasing optimism for the future perfectability of society.134 The Nazi state radicalized the already overly optimistic goals of the early social hygienists. Since the very concept of Volksgemeinschaft was vague and difficult to define in the positive, Peukert argues, the National Socialist movement “drifted onto an increasingly radical negative concentration on the eradication of a world of enemies.”135 Without religion to explain death, and faced with evidence that scientific optimism about the perfectability of society and the eradication of illness had been premature or entirely misguided, National Socialism sought ever more radical solutions to social problems.136 An irrational search for new means of avoiding death was the consequence:

A “logodicy” of the human sciences accordingly drives the sciences into irrational- ity. It inevitably becomes fixated on the utopian dream of the gradual elimination of death, even while this dream is unfailingly confuted in the life of each particular individual. One obvious escape from the dilemma is to split the target of scientific

134 Peukert’s argument follows in the tradition of early philosophical reactions to the Holocaust, like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Frag- ments, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum Books, 2002). Others have in turn followed in Peukert’s footsteps in analyzing the history of social policy from the perspective of the Enlightenment goal of human perfectability. See, for example, Manfred Kappeler, Der schreckliche Traum vom vollkommenen Menschen: Rassenhygiene und Eugenik in der Sozialen Arbeit (Marburg: Schüren Presseverlag, 2000).

135 Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in Reevaluating the Third Reich, eds. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (New York and London: Holmes & Meier 1993), 236.

136 Ibid., 238.

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endeavor into the merely ephemeral body of the individual, and the potentially immortal body of the Volk or race. Only the latter – specifically, its undying material substratum in the form of the genetic code – can guarantee the undying victory of science itself.137

The obstacle of the individual body and its unwillingness to conform to utopian ideals could now be pushed aside with a simple decision: individuals could be determined fit to enter the “ideal Volkskörper” or they could be cast aside and eventually eliminated. The collective body was thus preserved, purified, and made eternal. This attempt at transcending the limits of earthly existence was also linked to the broader ideological goal of creating the “thousand-year Reich,” since increasing the quality and quantity of births was always tied to goals of an aggressive military policy. The apparent contradiction between the search for Lebensraum and claiming that birthrates were plunging to dangerous levels can only be reconciled with reference to this larger goal.

In the Soviet Union, Marxist ideology militated against the biological deter- minism that served as the basis for the strange and semimystical mixture of pro- and antinatalism in the Third Reich, stressing instead environmen- tal and socioeconomic determinants of people’s consciousness and behavior. Even prior to the October Revolution and the establishment of Marxism as state ideology, Russian social scientists and physicians tended to reject biolo- gistic explanations in favor of environmental and social ones. As members of the Russian intelligentsia, they blamed the downtrodden condition of Russian peasants and workers on the despotic tsarist autocracy, and the impoverished circumstances in which the population lived. Seeing the masses as an ally in their struggle against the autocracy, they believed in the people’s innate goodness and sought to educate, uplift, and liberate them. Indeed to the extent that many members of the Russian intelligentsia saw the uplifting of the masses as their mission, they gravitated toward medicine and social science that rejected bio- logical determinism. Russian disciplinary culture, then, like Marxism, strongly favored nurturist over hereditarian explanations and programs.138

Accordingly, the Soviet government encouraged reproduction among all members of the population, without distinction by ethnicity or class. Soviet health officials stressed the need to increase postnatal care among national minorities in order to raise their birthrates.139 When the Soviet government began granting women a 2,000-ruble annual bonus for each child they had over six children, it specified that mothers with seven or more children should receive bonuses regardless of their social origins, and even regardless of whether their husbands had been arrested for counterrevolutionary activity.140 Thus the

137 Ibid., 241. 138 Prerevolutionary Russian social thinkers’ rejection of Malthusian ideas was also shaped by

social and political conditions. See Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

139 Resoliutsii III Vses. Soveshchaniia po okhrane materinstva i mladenchestva (1926), 2, 10. 140 GARF f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 2754, l. 32.

122 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

Soviet government promoted reproduction even among those it considered class or ideological enemies, in contrast to the Nazi government, which limited the reproduction of those it considered racial enemies.

Soviet pronatalism can thus be distinguished from its Nazi counterpart by quite a different purpose for increasing the birthrate. While Nazi population policy was intimately connected to plans for racial and political dominance over Europe and the world, the Soviets explicitly rejected arguments linking the goal of higher birthrates to increases in military strength. Already in May 1918, with memories of the carnage of the First World War still fresh, Soviet delegates to a congress on social welfare resolved that infant mortality be reduced and children’s lives preserved “not for a new slaughter, but as builders of a new, beautiful, working life, as spiritually and physically strong citizens, fighters for the ideals of socialism and humankind.” The resolution went on to reiterate that children not be raised to be slaughtered in wars caused by “the criminal negligence of a capitalist state,” but rather to provide productive labor to build the new society.141 The Soviet purpose for increasing the population, then, was to produce laborers rather than soldiers. Of course Soviet leaders also had military concerns, particularly with the rising international tensions of the late 1930s, but such concern was a defensive one.

While there were considerable differences between the theoretical goals of Nazi and Soviet pronatalism, we must also note a striking similarity in how the two regimes viewed reproductive politics as a politically (and perhaps psycho- logically) mobilizing sphere of government action. In both cases the regimes attempted to construct a new imaginary for the guidance of personal sexual and reproductive decisions. Through a wide spectrum of social policies, both the Nazis and the Soviets attempted to reconcile the apparent contradiction between individual sexual and reproductive desires and the needs of a collec- tivist state. They created an entirely new form of enthusiasm for the creation of life, a motivation to reproduce that was now to be tied to larger state ideological goals. Individuals were expected to make personal sacrifices; materialistic and sexual desires were to be controlled or subordinated to higher-order causes: the creation of a racialized Volksgemeinschaft or a socialist utopia. Both the cre- ation of life and the risk of death (on the battlefield or in childbirth) were framed in collectivist terms. In itself, this was not a huge departure from the symbolic meaning given to life and death in modern states since at least the French Revolution. But in return for individual submission to varying forms of mass mobilization, the two dictatorships offered much more specific promises for new beginnings. Individuals were told exactly how they would be participating in idealized societies with their own intrinsic (not God-given) purposes, giving their individual private choices new meaning. Valorization and reward (in the form of health and welfare benefits) encouraged emotional responses to a new configuration of social reproduction. This was less a process of social control

141 As cited in Drobizhev, 110.

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than it was an energization of the symbolic meaning of citizenship and individ- ual participation in the state. While the goals of Nazi and Soviet reproductive policies diverged sharply, the utopian impulse and the motivation to employ reproductive policies to integrate individual actions into a state-collectivist project were similar.

Also similar was the ultimate ineffectiveness of pronatalist policies in both states. We can summarize the situation for the Third Reich by stating that no sustained increase in the birthrate was achieved.142 Even where small increases are apparent, we must keep in mind that statistical analyses of the birthrate actually tell us very little about the success of Nazi pronatalism. The brief rise in the birthrate between 1933 and 1938 (up to 1,349,000 per year from 971,000) can just as easily be attributed to the effects of natural business cycles that were also prevalent in other European countries as to the success of Nazi population policy. The birthrate had, after all, been at a low point in 1933 and would presumably have risen regardless of social policy.143

The social impact of these policies, while even more difficult to measure, was certainly more significant. The initial announcement of the marriage loans policy was greeted with enormous public enthusiasm. Applications in the first few months far surpassed expectations. By the spring of 1934, 194,485 loans had been granted across the Reich.144 In Berlin, the newspapers reported an increased enthusiasm for marriage and credited it to the availability of mar- riage loans. Both the Vossische Zeitung and the Völkischer Beobachter pro- claimed Berlin an example to the rest of the country, citing 10,251 applications for marriage loans by November 1933.145 The flood continued into January 1934, with the Berliner Tageblatt claiming that twelve thousand couples had applied for loans in the last three months.146 As we have seen, this enthusiasm waned as the eugenic testing involved became more stringent and known to the general public. Nevertheless, the numbers of voluntary participants can- not be discounted. The enthusiastic public reception of both marriage loans and motherhood crosses certainly helped create feelings of inclusion for those who benefited.147 As in other times and places, it will always be impossible to make generalized arguments about the population’s motivations for having children. But there is certainly enough evidence to suggest that the population

142 Czarnowski, “Frauen – Staat – Medizin,” 81. 143 See Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus, 142–53 144 Ibid., 112. 145 “Ehestandstandsdarlehen in Berlin: Bisher 5000 Anträge bewilligt,” Vossische Zeitung, 22

November 1933, clipping in FUB Slg Rott, C6(4), Box 10; and “Die heiratsfreudige . . . : Bisher über 10 000 Anträge auf Ehestandsdarlehen,” Völkischer Beobachter, 22 November 1933, in ibid.

146 Keine Bedenken beim Ehestandskandidaten . . . ”: Heiratslustige vor dem Richterstuhl des Arztes,” Berliner Tageblatt, 5 January 1934, clipping in ibid.

147 Weyrather makes this argument about motherhood crosses, and I find it much more convincing than Gisela Bock’s insistence (Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus, 142–53) that the crosses had nothing to do with pronatalist policies. Weyrather explicitly takes Bock to task on this point. See Muttertag und Mutterkreuz, 151.

124 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

was willing to accept the marriage loans and motherhood crosses as a bonus of belonging to the national Volksgemeinschaft and as a public reward even when most still continued to think of reproduction as a private act. This valorization of motherhood bore no direct relationship to effective welfare support for fam- ilies; nor did it likely increase the number of children that a given family was likely to have. But it may well have encouraged some to have children earlier than they had originally planned, and, even more importantly, it likely coaxed them into understanding this act as an expression of national duty.

A similarly lively response followed the implementation of the new mar- riage laws. The public reception of the Nazi attempt to legitimate social policy through a redefinition of marriage was not, as has occasionally been asserted or implied, universally negative. The collection of private petitions to federal, state, and city governments reveals that many citizens saw the new laws as a means of manipulating social policy for their own ends. Citizens wrote to government demanding that official calls for more healthy German children be supported with improved access to medical care, decreased rents, and better economic conditions.148 There were also personal appeals to the Führer, ask- ing him to introduce laws that would allow them to better control the marital choices of their children. The tone of these letters, even from the hands of relatively uneducated citizens, proves that Nazi propaganda about the declin- ing birthrate and the need to implement population political laws had reached public consciousness even during the early days of the Third Reich.

What was the popular response to the Soviet pronatalist campaign? Government reports indicated that the population received the decree ban- ning abortion “enthusiastically.” Some women who received birth bonuses did write letters to thank Stalin and promised to continue having children.149 Yet in practice the response of most Soviet women was far from enthusiastic. The ban on abortion led to a huge number of illegal abortions. Commissariat of Health reports in October and November 1936 cited thousands of cases of women hospitalized after poorly performed illegal abortions. Of the 356,200 abortions performed in hospitals in 1937, and 417,600 in 1938, only 10 per- cent had been authorized, and the rest were incomplete illegal abortions.150 In response the Soviet government stepped up efforts to identify those who per- formed illegal abortions and in 1937 arrested and convicted 4,133 abortionists. As the law dictated, those found guilty of performing abortions were sentenced to a minimum of two years in prison.151 But despite considerable efforts, Soviet

148 See, for example, the letters in BA-B – RMI 1501/26231, Bl., 44–6, 61–3, 70, 77–80, 198. 149 GARF f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 2753, ll. 15, 22, 26, 35. 150 GARF f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 2753, l. 85; RGAE f. 1562 s.ch., op. 329, d. 407, ll. 22–5. Another

1937 report noted that the figure of 323,438 cases of incomplete abortions that had to be completed in hospitals in the RSFSR was clear evidence of a mass of underground abortions; GARF f. A-482, op. 29, d. 5, l. 9.

151 Sovetskaia iustitsiia, no. 34 (1936 34), 16; RGAE f. 1562 s.ch., op. 329, d. 407, l. 25; TsMAM f. 819, op. 2, d. 27, ll. 12–15. Those who had performed multiple abortions often received four years’ imprisonment or more.

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authorities found it difficult to catch underground abortionists, because women who entered hospitals after botched abortions rarely cooperated with police.152

The ban on abortion did result in a rise in the birthrate, but this rise was lim- ited and temporary. The birthrate per thousand people rose from 30.1 in 1935, to 33.6 in 1936, to 39.6 in 1937. But in 1938 the birthrate began to decline again, and by 1940, marital fertility for European Russians was below the 1936 level.153 The enormous social disruption of the purges and mobilization for war in part accounted for the decline of the birthrate beginning in 1938. But even before these disruptions the birthrate had not even approached preindustrial- ization levels, and evidence on illegal abortions indicates that Soviet women as a whole did not abide by the government’s abortion ban. As Soviet authorities had noted in 1920, but then chose to ignore in 1936, the outlawing of abortion only drove women to seek illegal abortions. Repression proved ineffective at raising the birthrate in the long term.

The Second World War produced catastrophic casualties and further depressed fertility, so it is not surprising that during the war and postwar period the Soviet government made renewed efforts to prevent abortions and raise the birthrate. In July 1944 it issued a new family edict that retained the 1936 ban on abortion and made divorce even more difficult and expensive. The new law also ended single mothers’ right to sue fathers for child support and in its place granted them state financial assistance.154 But many women continued to terminate their pregnancies, and in 1945 the Soviet government expressed alarm at the extremely high rate of underground abortions.155 The Ministry of Health reported that in 1949, 93,597 women had been granted legal abortions for medical reasons, but it estimated that this figure accounted for only 10.4 percent of all abortions – meaning that over eight hundred thousand under- ground abortions had taken place that year.156 The Ministry recommended that doctors closely monitor pregnant women (including visiting their homes and forcibly hospitalizing those women suspected of wanting an abortion) as the best way to prevent abortions, but doctors by and large did not engage in this type of policing. Understaffed hospitals and clinics lacked the person- nel for home visits and lacked the beds to hospitalize pregnant women. Nor

152 From 1938 to 1940, prosecutions for abortion declined, and despite a rise in convictions in 1941, the criminalization of abortion overall proved to be, in the words of one leading scholar, “a particularly ineffective extension of the criminal law.” Peter Solomon, 220–1.

153 Lorimer, 134; Coale, 16. Fertility in the first quarter of 1938 was substantially below the 1937 level; RGAE f. 1562 s.ch., op. 329, d. 186, l. 5. For further discussion, see Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 294–5.

154 See Greta Louise Bucher, “The Impact of World War II on Moscow Women: Gender Con- sciousness and Relationships in the Immediate Postwar Period, 1945–1953” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1995), 9.

155 Burton, 281. 156 Bucher, 236. Oral history interviews conducted by Bucher in Moscow in the early 1990s

revealed that most women knew of underground abortionists and that the practice was widespread; 251.

126 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

is it clear that doctors would have policed women’s pregnancies even if they were able. Some doctors warned that pregnant women would avoid clinics if medical personnel played a policing role, and others even performed illegal abortions themselves.157 Birth bonuses and the glorification of motherhood also proved ineffective in the fight to prevent abortions and raise the birthrate. The women who received the bonuses were primarily peasant women who already had many children prior to the introduction of monetary incentives. The resources allotted to expand maternity wards and child care were insuffi- cient to improve markedly the lives of mothers. Government priorities contin- ued to focus on heavy industry, while child care systems and communal dining facilities remained woefully underfunded. And given the equally underfunded consumer sector, women had enormous difficulty simply obtaining basic neces- sities for their children.

One other crucial consideration is women’s place in the workforce. As men- tioned above, women had been recruited in large numbers into industry during the 1930s, and the official emphasis on motherhood was in no way intended to free women from their obligation to perform “socially useful labor” outside the home. Indeed the Second World War further accelerated women’s entrance into industry – women constituted 92 percent of all new workers recruited between 1941 and 1950 – and postwar propaganda continued to stress women’s roles as both workers and mothers.158 Soviet law did allow women up to two months of maternity leave – a fact Stalin took care to stress publicly – but this was only another small inducement for women to have children.159 The realities of Soviet life saddled women with the double burden of full-time work and uncompen- sated domestic chores. Soviet leaders wished to exploit both the labor and the childbearing capabilities of the female population, and they proved unwilling, official rhetoric notwithstanding, to assume state responsibility for domestic chores and child raising.160

While the war served to advance the goals that Soviet population policy had originally set out to achieve (the integration of mothers into the workforce) it greatly complicated some, though not all aspects of Nazi population policy. It is certainly true that the war provided a cover for genocidal crimes in the East and the maltreatment of slave laborers and others on German soil, drastically increasing the intensity of the regime’s violence toward certain groups of clearly defined enemies. This aspect of Nazi population policy has been explored in detail elsewhere and is not the primary focus of the present essay. Keeping this in mind, however, we can also argue that the war limited the reach and decreased the power of various other bureaucracies involved in population

157 Bucher, 238–42; Burton, 289–90. 158 Bucher, 7, 23. 159 See Stalin’s statement for the resolutions of the 1935 congress of collective farm shock workers,

RGASPI f. 17, op. 120, d. 138, l. 85. 160 For further discussion, see David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet

Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), chapter 3, 88–117.

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management. Leaving aside the obvious fact that wars tend to separate potential fathers from potential mothers, manipulation of individual decision making became more difficult under conditions of extreme understaffing and general social turmoil as the war progressed. Decisions about genetic “value” now tended to be made on a rather ad hoc basis. Local health administrators even began to believe that stringent definitions of genetic fitness previously stipulated for marital health examinations, marriage loans, and other population policies were being relaxed. Although they were admonished by officials from the Reich Ministry of the Interior,161 it is clear that work in local marital health clinics no longer proceeded entirely according to plan during the war. For one thing, the war drastically increased the daily workload in the genetic health clinics (as a result of a flood of marriage loan applications from soldiers about to leave for the front, and an increase in political pressure to process applications for motherhood service medals) while halving the available personnel, now regularly called into military service or seconded to other duties.162 Under these conditions, local health offices in Berlin reported that they only had time to track down the most pressing sterilization cases and that the monitoring of “asocials” was now all but impossible.163 Needless to say, Allied bombing raids in the major cities also destroyed the files necessary to implement these various policies.

These factors clearly limited the scope and breadth of Nazi population policy during the war. Given the increased latitude of local officials to decide which cases were truly “pressing” and which were not, and given the absence of supporting documents, it is likely that the enforcement of strict provisions for positive eugenic measures and the selection of individuals for negative eugenic measures became even more random and less predictable. As the war dragged on and Germany’s military position weakened, the façade of a comprehensive system of eugenic controls began to crumble. In September 1944, the Reich Ministry of the Interior informed the chancellery that total war conditions required further restrictions to the sterilization law. Most genetic health courts were shut down as of October 1, 1944, with only one lower court remaining

161 The RMI’s Linden wrote to Berlin’s genetic health court on 5 Dec. 1939 complaining that too many health offices were taking the August directive as a sign that sterilization policy and the implementation of the marriage law were to all but cease during the war. He instructed Berlin authorities that “the laws should be carried out within the boundaries of the possible.” See Linden to Erbgesundheitsgericht, Berlin, 5 Dec. 1939, in LAB, Rep. 12, Acc. 1641, Nr. 246.

162 See Chef der Sippenamt im RuS. Hauptamt SS, 26 Oct. 1939, in ibid. and Sütterlin “an die Gesundheitsämter,” 21 Dec. 1939, in LAB, Rep. 12, Acc. 1641, Nr. 247. See also “Vierteljahres-Bericht April–Juni–Juli–Sept. 1939” signed by Reinhardt, 15 Nov. 1939, in ibid. By 1940, several districts reported that motherhood service medal applications were tak- ing precedence over genetic data collection and other duties. See, for example, the reports from Tempelhof dated 6 September 1940, in ibid.

163 Ibid.: Kreuzberg, 6 Sept. 1940; Schöneberg, 13 Sept. 1940; and Lichtenberg, 10 Sept. 1940. The Berlin district Horst Wessel, for instance, faced 1,600 unprocessed sterilization cases going back as far as 1934. See Bezirksbürgermeister in Horst Wessel to Oberbürgermeister, 9 May 1939, in ibid.

128 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm

for each state. Pending cases were to be dropped unless they were “particularly urgent and straight forward.”164

To sum up, it seems clear that taken as a whole and leaving the case of the Holocaust aside, World War II had quite different effects on the politics of reproduction in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet case, the war reinforced the original motivations and goals of these policies, highlighting the increasingly important integration of women into the workforce. In the Third Reich, the most striking effect of the war was to make it increasingly difficult actually to implement the coercive population policies directed at the general population (as opposed to more easily identifiable enemy groups). In neither case did policies geared toward increasing the birthrate actually work.

conclusion

All this leaves us with the puzzling question of whether Nazi and Stalinist regimes had more in common with each other in the sphere of reproductive policies than one or the other of them shared with nontotalitarian regimes. The question cannot be fully answered here, but it must remain in the back of our minds as we attempt to draw conclusions from this comparative analysis. One cannot argue, for instance, that totalitarian systems of government nec- essarily lead to an intense concern with population policy and/or reproductive policy. While the Nazi case would seem to bear out a connection with total- itarian/utopian ideology and intensified concern with issues of reproduction, closer examination reveals that the concern with marriage and reproduction and the increasingly genocidal nature of Nazi population policy had more to do with the specific racial ideology of the regime than with any peculiarly total- itarian feature. The comparison with the Soviet Union bears out the problems with totalitarianism as an explanatory model in this particular case. It is also only with attention to racial policy that we can understand the seeming contra- dictions between antinatalist and pronatalist tendencies in Nazi reproductive politics.

In the Soviet case, we find that reproductive policies had much in common with other contemporary examples. Like governments throughout Europe in the interwar period, the Soviet government utilized a combination of propa- ganda, incentives, and (beginning in 1936) a ban on abortion to try to raise the birthrate. While the rhetoric of Soviet leaders also – as in the Nazi case – depicted reproduction as a matter of each citizen’s duty to the state, actual policies remained rather innocuous in comparison with their Nazi counter- parts. The Soviet government in no way sought to limit the reproduction of any of its citizens and rejected the eugenic sterilizations practiced not only in Nazi Germany but in Scandinavian countries and the United States. Soviet reproductive policies more closely resembled those of the Catholic countries

164 BA-B – R43 II/722, Bl. 206–9. See order in Ministerialblatt des Reichs und Preussischen Ministerium des Innern, Ausgabe B, Nr. 37, 6 Sept. 1944.

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of Western Europe – France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal – which also sought to raise the birthrate without limiting the reproduction of those members of society deemed “unfit.”

Our conclusions on the issue of the uniqueness of these two cases and the degree to which this particular national comparison is useful are at an admit- tedly very preliminary stage, but our account certainly suggests the importance of the differences in ideology in shaping reproductive policies in each case. Different ideological goals crucially influenced policy implementation in each case. It mattered, in other words, that Nazis were envisioning a semimystical, racially pure, and eternal Volkskörper when they set out to transform how indi- viduals made reproductive and sexual decisions, while the Soviets were chiefly concerned with increasing labor power for the task of socialist construction.

Finally, one might add that much more thought must be given to the com- parison of how the respective populations responded to reproductive policies. We have hinted here that both regimes made an effort to depict these policies (even some of the more coercive measures) as positive, legitimizing policies of national cohesion. Coercion was often counteracted or ameliorated through various financial or symbolic rewards, and, at least in the German case, coer- cive measures directed toward clearly defined “outsiders” served to highlight the insider status of those not affected. But we need to think more about how successful this integrative aspect of reproductive policy was in each case. The Third Reich, despite economic constraints, had more money to give to these programs. On the other hand, the Soviets’ acceptance of women’s dual func- tion as mothers and workers was at least a realistic appraisal of actual social circumstances and avoided the kind of contradiction between the ideology of feminine domesticity and the reality of widespread female employment faced by Nazi policymakers. Since neither of these regimes succeeded in substantially influencing birthrates, we must go beyond the statistical analyses of traditional demographic history and integrate sociohistorical and sociocultural perspec- tives to begin to find answers to such questions.

Part I GOVERNANCE

3 Utopian Biopolitics: Reproductive Policies, Gender Roles, and Sexuality in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union

State management of reproduction
Eugenics
The implementation of reproductive policies: coercion and incentive
Comparing pronatalist state intervention
Conclusion