Abstract
Reviewed by: Lisa Pine, London South Bank University, UK
This book offers a valuable new perspective on the history of marriage, the family and the SS in the Third Reich. Amy Carney presents an ably written analysis of primary sources pertaining to the SS from key German archives. This is an important work, in which Carney has added to the existing scholarship in the field of family life in the Third Reich by looking beyond mothers and motherhood, to examine fathers and fatherhood. This fits well with recent and current developments in the study of masculinity in the Third Reich and the Holocaust, as well as providing a different angle on the SS itself. Carney certainly achieves her objective ‘to provide a more nuanced understanding of the SS’ (13).
Carney examines marriage and family policies in the SS, as well as the place of the SS family community in its ambitions to turn itself into a racial aristocracy. Each SS man was encouraged to marry a racially suitable wife and to father hereditarily healthy children. The process was managed by the Race and Settlement Main Office, which inspected marriage applications and became the primary authority on family policies. Himmler’s engagement and marriage command of 31 December 1931 provided the foundation for securing the elite position of the SS. In order to wed, an SS man and his proposed wife had to submit four different forms: a race and settlement questionnaire; a genealogical tree; a hereditary health form; and a medical examination form. Carney describes in detail the complicated arrangements and procedures. She carefully explains the criteria as well as the various grounds for the rejection of an application to marry. She notes that despite the complex process, most SS men were not deterred from applying and that by ‘the mid- to late 1930s, approximately 1,700 to 2,000 requests were filed each month’ (38).
Furthermore, the SS put into place a variety of measures designed to encourage its members to understand that having children was a crucial obligation. To this end, Himmler wrote to all SS officers in June 1935, stating that SS families had to be ‘child-rich’. The SS ideal was for its members to have a minimum of four hereditarily healthy children. Articles in its newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, as well as a variety of educational initiatives, encouraged the father both to take an active role in rearing and educating his offspring and to take pride in his ability to fulfil his racial obligations to the Volk. During the war, the SS revised its policies relating to marriage and implemented some new initiatives, as Himmler remained convinced that the fate of the Third Reich depended not only on military victory, but also on a victory in the cradle. Procreation continued to be encouraged by a variety of measures, including an order from Himmler in August 1942 to remove childless SS men from the front for one year in order to secure their families’ lineage. Carney argues that by treating fatherhood as an obligation, ‘Himmler had eroded any boundary between an SS man’s private life and his service to the organization and the state’ (126). Ultimately, however, the SS did not succeed in making its men fulfil their marital and reproductive duties. Its marriage rates were ‘well below 100 per cent’ and ‘the average number of children per family was less than two’ (163). In the last chapter, the author examines the social, economic and educational factors that contributed to this failure.
Carney argues that for the SS, the family community was ‘crucial to the organization’s self-identity as an elite racial order’ (14). In addition, she analyses more controversial aspects of SS policy, including the Lebensborn and Himmler’s views on illegitimacy. In the end though, she notes that ‘many SS men did not abandon conventional morality when it came to marriage and children’ (69). Carney also treats a number of other topics from infertility to SS marriage rituals and child-naming ceremonies.
The introduction to the book could have been structured more clearly in places. In particular, the part of it that outlines the content of the book is rather squashed into a single small paragraph at the end of the introduction. In addition, some of the conceptual framework at the start was not especially convincing. However, these small points notwithstanding, this is a very useful addition to the historiography of the Third Reich, offering important new perspectives to our knowledge and understanding. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Nazi Germany, as well those interested in modern German history and modern European history more widely.