'Beyond Totalitarianism - Stalinism and Nazism Compared'

104 David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. TimmA comparative examination of the implementation of reproductive policies inthe Third Reich and Stalinist Russia makes this clear.the implementation of reproductive policies: coercionand incentivePolitical leaders’ consternation with population trends led them to contemplateways to increase the birthrate. Once populations could be represented statistically,and fertility trends explained on the basis of demographic studies, itbecame possible to conceive of state and expert control of fertility. Contraception,abortion, and reproductive health became a focus for state intervention.Governments across Europe also began to provide material support for mothers.A wide range of people, from state officials and health experts, to membersof women’s organizations and religious groups, agitated for increased governmentaid to mothers. While the politics of maternalist welfare, and the policiesadopted, varied from one country to another, the overall trend was towardextensive state intervention and propaganda designed to promote motherhood.There are significant differences in the forms that the “rationalization” of motherhoodtook in each case, and the Nazi and Soviet regimes ascribed very differentroles to the genders. Yet both formulated policies toward reproduction andsexuality that intertwined elements of coercion and incentive in the effort toinstrumentalize private spheres of life in the interests of larger ideological goals.Coercion often went hand in hand with state-legitimizing incentives for compliantor supportive citizens. 63 An outline of the implementation of populationpolicy in each regime will demonstrate that the categories of pronatalism andantinatalism should be employed only with due consideration of the fact thatpolicies in either category could serve to coerce citizens into acting against theirwishes or – sometimes simultaneously – reward them in the interests of propagandaand state legitimation. The rubric of totalitarianism does not account forthis ambiguity and fails to highlight the complexity, internal inconsistency, andmixed results of social policy, in terms of both political goals and the impacton individuals.National Socialist coercive pronatalism began soon after the Machtergreifung(seizure of power). The Nazis were very explicit about their intentions toconfine woman to her “smaller” role of house, home, and family and reservethe public sphere for men. Speaking to the National Socialist Women’s Organizationin September 1934, Hitler argued:If the man’s world is said to be the State, his struggle, his readiness to devotehis powers to the service of the community, then it may perhaps be said thatthe woman’s is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, herchildren, and her home. But what would become of the greater world if there63 For a pioneering study of how the valorization of motherhood helped bolster the goals of theNazi regime, see Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Woman, the Family, and NaziPolitics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).