Nazi Germany

Antinatalism

For the purposes of raising the population's “quality,” the National Socialist state pursued policies to control population growth as part of a national program of eugenics. People considered to be of inferior value (minderwertig) were bound by law to use birth control. Sterilization was promoted through antinatalist propaganda. In 1934, a law was passed to permit sterilization of persons considered [Page 903]undesirable, including people with mental illness, epilepsy, hereditary blindness or deafness, alcoholism, and the mentally retarded. Genetic Health Courts were established to determine who should be sterilized, and between 1933 and 1945, almost 200,000 women (1 percent of childbearing women) were selected, on eugenic grounds, for compulsory sterilization. About 500 children of mixed African and European heritage (the offspring of French colonial troops) were also sterilized. Some estimates put the total number of people sterilized by 1939 at over 400,000.

Nonvoluntary abortions, imprisonment of child-bearing women and mothers, and mass murders were justified on social, cultural, racial, and political grounds. In 1939, the Aktion T-4 program authorized doctors and officials to kill individuals considered “unworthy of life.” The first victims were con-genitally deformed children, but later the program was established to include adults; the program was halted in 1941, but almost 70,000 people had been killed by that point. Aktion T-4 was followed by Aktion 14f13 (also known as the Final Solution), which authorized the mass killings of people considered undesirable, including Jews and Gypsies as well as political prisoners, handicapped persons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. German physicians and other health care professionals participated in all phases of the German eugenics program, including identifying persons who should be killed or sterilized and in developing the pseudoscience that supported their actions.

Women in concentration camps were kept in special prisons, the largest of which was Ravens-brück, or in segregated areas within camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. Pregnant women were generally forced to have abortions or were sent to their deaths (as were infants and small children) because they were considered incapable of work. Women were also forced to participate in medical experiments, including efforts to create efficient means of sterilizing large number of people by means such as surgery, drugs, and exposure to radiation.

Pronatalism

When the National Socialist regime took power, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior (1933–43), announced that the government would be promoting larger families through low-interest loans for marriage, as well as allowances for large families.

...