What Was the Position of Women in the Nazi State

In Nazi Germany, a great deal of importance was given to family and marriage. The importance of these on the breeding of more children lead to a number of policies and encouragements under Hitler´s ruling, to try and boost countries population. This increase in population would be needed in case Lebensraum had occurred. This expansionist idea by Hitler and the Nazi party resulted in the way the status of women was affected at the time.

The expectation of women at this time was to stay at home, keeping it nice for the husband and the family. Their lives following the ideals that they should only worry about the church, children and cooking. Such idea corroborated by one of Joseph Goebbels statement, “The mission for women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world”. In contrast to the Weimar republic where the status of women was very different, as it reached millions of working women, the Nazi had as an objective for women to stay at home with the goal of increasing the birth rate, which encouraged the idea of women as homemakers and mothers.

The ways these expectations were fulfilled was by forcing women doctors, teachers and civil servants to end their careers and stay at home. This than lead in 1937 to there only being a very few number of women in fulltime jobs which were not purposed for war. The policies which were enabled mostly pertaining to the encouragement of marriage and child birth did increase the German population in the long run. One of these policies being the “Law of encouragement of marriage” established in 1933, which promised every newly wedded couple 1000 mark loan which at the time represented a nine month salary. 800.000 couples accepted to these terms, as if they had one child 250 marks would be taken off the debt, two children 500 marks and if they had four children 1000 marks would be absolved. These extreme measures showed the importance it was for the Nazi party to increase their population in order to achieve the lebensraum plan. By having more young children they would also be able to mold them into young soldiers and mothers. This