WOMEN OF GERMANY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 October 1939, Page 8

WOMEN OF GERMANY

FAMILIES AND FASHIONS. POPULATION POLICY. Herr R. Hess, the Deputy-Leader of the Nazi Party, in his broadcast message of consolation to “all mothers of Germany" who had given their children to the nation in the first campaign of National Socialism. calls on them for renewed fortitude and sacrifice.

The Nazi population policy was formulated in 1933. On June 28, 1933, Dr W. Frick, the German Minister of the Interior, announced the Government s programme and said, inter alia, that “the greatest task before the Government of the national revolution is to ensure • the racial regeneration of our people, and to preserve its numerical strength in the centre of Europe.” Not only has Nazi Germany demanded larger and still larger families from its womenfolk, but as time has gone on the Nazi leaders have become dictatorial as to what women are to wear. Leader in a recent campaign of condemnation of- fashions because they wasted materials, “which is not in the least in accordance with the present economic policy,” was the Labour Front leader, Dr Robert Ley, who as recently as July this year said that German women should learn "to abandon a dress when it is used up. and not when it becomes unfashionable.”

Das Schwarze Korps, the official organ of the Storm Troopers, supported Dr Ley by remarking that while other nations elected queens with beautiful figures, Germany “honoured women with many children and therewith honoured a beauty that was uninfluenced by any fashions.” How the anti-fashion campaign is progressing is not known. The population policy, however, succeeded only in raising the total number of births in Germany from 999,598 in 1933, to 1.310,320 in 1936. There were 50,000 divorces in Germany in 1936, as compared with 42,000-odd in 1933, and nearly 30,000 fewer marriages.