What Difference Does a (Disabled) Husband Make? Disabled Veterans,Women,and the Limits of Population Policy in the Third Reich

In 1942, Nazi leaders began to ask the question “What difference does a disabled husband make?” By 1943, they had an answer: the future of the German race, the prosperity of Germany, and the happiness of its people. Mounting losses during World War II—over 1 million by the end of 1942—intensely stoked fears that the killing fields had culled the best and bravest men, their hereditary material forever forfeited. Yet, war had strewn the ideal men, millions of soldiers, across Europe, hundreds or thousands of kilometers from the women they should meet, marry, and start a “child-rich” family with. Soldiers could hardly manage such an extensive agenda on their short periods of leave from the front. Essential workers and government employees not called up to the Wehrmacht could marry and procreate, but many had never proven themselves in battle. Then there were men deemed unfit for military duty from the outset; they clearly did not possess the hereditary fitness the regime wanted. For, while Nazi leaders envisioned a swelling, burgeoning German population, the quality of that future population weighed heavily on their minds as war took its toll. The dead were gone, the soldiers busy, and the bulk of the remaining men in Germany had not proven their quality. But one group—well over 100,000 strong by December 1942 and growing ever larger as the war turned against Germany—had proven themselves and, vitally, still lived but could no longer fight. ¹ Disabled veterans released from active service to the home front, their proof of bravery in their scars and wounds, their amputations and disfigurements, represented to the regime a second chance to capture valuable genetic material. But Nazi leaders considered disabled veterans’ procreative prospects low. Doubts that women could ever love maimed and wrecked bodies plagued disabled veterans, and few women desired an esthetically impaired husband requiring extensive care and with questionable employability. How would disabled veterans find those few women? Could the state convince more women of their marital and childbearing duties toward the ever-increasing number of disabled veterans?

This article argues that the Nazi regime used the marriage mediation (Ehevermittlung) of disabled veterans and war widows as a tool to more broadly align women's sexual behavior and moral beliefs with Nazi population policy's goal of raising the birthrate of valued sections of the German population. The regime created Ehevermittlung centers that were intended to serve as a gateway to wider acceptance of Nazi population policy (Bevölkerungspolitik), as a means to make marriage mediation appear normal, to overcome German women's hesitancy to accept such invasive intrusions into their love lives, and to expand mediation to the entirety of the able-bodied German population. The regime hoped eventually to entirely do away with the marriage “marketplace” in favor of demographic management to create collective outcomes of hereditary fitness. This involved creating feelings of marital and reproductive duties among Germans and then channeling this newly created social responsibility to convince Germans to willingly and conscientiously perform marriage mediation for the greater good. Yet, individual desire and self-reliance in the broader marketplace almost always trumped Nazi policy.

Historians have focused almost exclusively on the propaganda value of honoring disabled veterans, pension schemes, and public recognition to stymie veterans’ discontent, and the regime's attempts to harness their labor power during a period of total war. ² But the “problem” of the wounded war veteran was not limited simply to social reintegration or fiscal management, the primary concerns during the Weimar era. Rather, Nazi leaders regarded disabled veterans as crucial sources of valuable hereditary material, their wounds physical proof of brave, German character. However, the veterans’ wounds and esthetic disfigurements placed the men in vulnerable positions on the marriage market; the regime expected wide support for and participation in Ehevermittlung from these men.

In contrast, authorities assumed that women would spurn marrying disabled veterans on their own and they harbored skepticism that women could overcome their inner moral inhibitions to and cultural stigmas toward Ehevermittlung. Historians such as Tyler Carrington have examined how lonely Germans in the burgeoning metropolis of fin-de-siècle Berlin used new technologies such as commercial marriage brokers to discover “the right partner” and love in an overwhelming sea of humanity. ³ But the combination of profit-seeking and love invoked an image of mediators as swindlers and scam artists in the minds of many Germans. State authorities policing morality shuttered the doors of many mediation offices, adding an illicit air to Ehevermittlung. The Nazis’ new effort in marriage policy ran up against several decades of social and cultural disapproval, most of which focused on women who had begun to more actively manage their reproductive life cycles and love lives. ⁴ One experiment in 1917, a mediation center in Magdeburg, provided a precedent to sidestep the impasse; war widows, bereft over the loss of their soldier husbands, appeared to Nazi leaders as a natural complement to disabled veterans that would generate understanding and acceptance among the German population. The regime hoped their Ehevermittlung centers for war widows and disabled veterans would normalize mediation and animate women to answer the Nazi appeal that Germans employ racial-mindedness when selecting for marriage.

Much more so than any previous government, the Nazi regime collected the strands of previous decades’ social theories of Bevölkerungspolitik to bring to fruition demographic management of the population along racial lines. The fears of population decline stoked after World War I found an outlet under the Nazis. Yet, historians have mostly dismissed the results of the Nazis’ “positive” policy measures that actively promoted the births of those whom the Nazis wished to multiply. Marriage loans and the Cross of Honor of the German Mother hardly influenced Germans to produce “child-rich” families. ⁵ For the past several decades, Nazi family policy, viewed as mostly ineffective, has taken a backseat to questions of gender and sexuality. ⁶ One important exception has been in studies of the Schutzstaffel (SS), an organization ever cognizant of racial hygiene and that “recognized that biological reproduction was linked to personal fulfillment.” ⁷ Marriages in which husbands avoided extramarital affairs, respected women's household work, and helped parent children contributed to rewarding—and productive—sex lives. ⁸ The SS strived to overcome traditional marital divisions within German society and create an organization—and families—that cut across class and religion. The history of Ehevermittlung shows how gender norms, Nazi sexual morality, and fertility policies were eventually meant to expand beyond the elite SS and encompass fundamental changes throughout German society with the end goal of racially enhancing the People's Community (Volksgemeinschaft) and ensuring its longevity. ⁹

While the SS stopped short of marriage mediation, the regime, alarmed about the appalling losses at the front during 1942, drove ahead with its plans to demographically manage the German population rather than waiting until the war's victorious conclusion. And unlike the SS's measures to alter the masculine behavior of their men to better conform to family ideals, the regime's plans centered on changing women's beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. This article's first section discusses early attempts and theories at marriage mediation after the Great War that proved fundamental in the Nazis’ design for Ehevermittlung. Population theorists identified women as the source of potential problems in transforming marriage mediation into reality. The next section covers the late 1930s when the regime dipped its toes into marriage mediation with a program for the victims of the sterilization program, an endeavor that provided useful administrative experience to better gauge how to advertise marriage mediation to veterans and widows and design a process that applicants felt comfortable using. Next, I discuss the bureaucratic wrangling of top Nazi leaders who designed and implemented marriage mediation between World War II disabled veterans and widows and authorities’ consternation and adaptation when their preconceived notions of gender and disability ran up against women's matchmaking preferences that did not conform with the ideals of the Volksgemeinschaft. Finally, I turn to the regime's attempt to bring marriage mediation to the entire German population late in the war when love seemed in far shorter supply than loss.

Theorizing State-Run Ehevermittlung

The Nazis’ project to mediate veterans’ marriages drew heavily on an obscure experiment in Magdeburg that began in June 1917. Concern for the war's half million war widows prompted merchant Benno Basch to establish a marriage counseling center to help them find companionship and financial stability. ¹⁰ Basch obtained lists of particularly destitute war widows, and unlike traditional profit-driven commercial marriage brokers, he charged nothing to applicants. The National Foundation for the Surviving Dependents of Those Killed in the War (Nationalstiftung für die Hinterbliebenen der im Kriege Gefallenen) bankrolled the operation. Cognizant of worries over anonymity, he assigned each applicant a number and never revealed identifying information without both parties’ approval. Although the ostensible purpose of the center was to find partners for war widows, Basch assumed disabled veterans would make the most natural partners for women who had lost a soldier husband. Special attention was paid to providing information to military hospitals where disabled men completed their initial recovery before release from the army. ¹¹ After successfully brokering approximately 200 marriages, a significant achievement compared to commercial mediators’ more modest numbers, Basch's center doors shuttered after only two years, though the reason is unclear. ¹² Some attributed it to local authorities revoking their tolerance, perhaps over concerns of morality, while others believed that financial support had been unable to meet demand and the center could no longer maintain solvency. ¹³ The combination of official intolerance and the difficulties of independent financial solvency created a bind for the development of marriage mediation; commercial brokers appeared disreputable, but a center eschewing profits remained dependent upon the whims of government and private aid.

The center almost immediately garnered attention from population policy theorists throughout Germany and Austria. Some posited a broader use for marriage mediation extending beyond pitiable groups. Basch's center especially impressed the Austrian physician Robert Stigler, an early advocate of marriage mediation and a later faithful servant of the Nazi regime as a racial hygienics researcher. In an academic article in 1918 published in the Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift, he compared Austrian policy unfavorably to Germany's practical implementation of marriage mediation in Magdeburg. ¹⁴ Stigler pondered how the behavior of emancipated women eschewing marriage, the spread of venereal disease from extramarital affairs, and the dysgenic effects of racially hygienic inferiors breeding could fail to convince people of marriage's communal importance. ¹⁵ He assumed the socially and sexually promiscuous were uninterested in marriage mediation, so it fell on the racially fit, often synonymous with the middle class to the Weimar-era population theorists, to become more communally minded regarding marriage. Public opinion, and especially the “majority of academically educated individuals,” reduced marriage to “a mere private matter of the individual, while it has a fundamental sociohygienic significance for the nation and the state.” ¹⁶ Stigler had little to say on how to change their minds and instead focused on the goals of marriage mediation: “as many people as possible, as healthy and capable as possible, should marry as early as possible.” ¹⁷

Clearly, he argued, marriage mediation would only work under the auspices of the state as only the state could forgo profit in pursuit of population policy. Unlike many other eugenicists, however, Stigler took a cue from commercial mediators’ advertising practices with his emphasis on happy marriages, noting “the influence that married life itself has on the physical and mental performance of the spouses and, indirectly, of the whole family.” ¹⁸ Physical satisfaction contributed to happy marriages, but psychological compatibility played at least an equal role in advanced cultures where the “psychological differentiation of individuals” multiplied. ¹⁹ Unhappy marriages produced fewer children, and thus ensuring happy marriages necessitated not just the help of expert mediators, but also the participants’ growing attraction toward each other through a period of acquaintance. Allowing partners to choose each other, if still under the guidance of mediators, removed the discomforts of an otherwise clinical approach to love. Although Stigler was not the first to posit state-run marriage mediation centers, his emphases on happy marriages and spousal choice became hallmarks of most later theories and implementations.

The Nazi ascension to power and the regime's dedication to transforming fundamental aspects of society appeared to light the way for men like Robert Stigler to finally confront the paralyzing hesitancy of women. Since his initial article on marriage mediation in 1919, Stigler had drifted ever further toward authoritarian thinking. Fascinated with the Nazis, in 1931, he became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party's (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) division of racial hygiene medical group in Vienna. In 1935 he presented at the International Congress for Population Science and argued that the time was ripe for state-run marriage bureaus. He lambasted anyone who ridiculed those seeking marriage mediation as people with a “happy marriage and [who] cannot understand that others might not so easily attain a happy marriage.” ²⁰ Having established the embattled position of the concept, he turned to the “woman problem.” The influence of Social Darwinist Nazism decidedly shifted his thinking on the matter away from attributing hesitancy on the part of women to simple bourgeois shyness. Rather, women balked at marriage mediation because it signified their failure to find a mate, that they had showed an “inferiority in the competition for the happiness of love.” ²¹ Stigler took a magnanimous tact, however, for the competition had not been fair. Once again he raised the specter of the dangerous “egoistic and unscrupulous woman” who was “always out and about” while the “modest, domestic, industrious, and sensitive” had appropriately turned away from the public eye. ²² It hardly surprised Stigler that dangerous women, during the extensive course of their unseemliness, had learned how best to “conquer a man.” ²³

The language of competition and combat fell in line with the Nazi worldview and urged Stigler's listeners to understand the threat unfit women posed to men and to population policy, but also to virtuous women. Stigler articulated not just a militaristic battleground of love, but also the victimhood of men, chaste women, and the Volk. The authoritarian state, however, provided the answer: “the shyness toward… marriage mediation could only be eliminated if all unmarried women were required by the state to register” themselves on a state list. ²⁴ It is noticeable that, although the larger aim of marriage mediation remained improving the racial hygiene of the population and he argued for mutual spousal choice (though men retained the right of choosing first) during the actual process of mediation, Stigler did not envision compulsory male registration. Perhaps he assumed unmarried men would flock to centers to choose a mate from a long list of young women. Indeed, he mentioned no instances of male misgivings toward marriage bureaus. The onus of population policy's marriage mediation had fallen squarely upon women—dangerous, hereditarily suspect women that lured men away from valuable women who shied away from their duty to the Volk. The authoritarian state, Stigler advanced, could remove stigma, embarrassment, and moral reservations through compulsion; it could revolutionize the way marriages and families formed.

While public feeling still prevented the regime from enacting compulsion in such a personal area affecting over half of all Germans, the ideological underpinnings for Ehevermittlung had developed and played an important role in its future iterations. The Magdeburg center loomed as a viable historical precedent for success and symbolically linked disabled veterans, war widows, and marriage mediation. And, although theorists identified women as the main impediment to mediation's acceptance, Magdeburg also presented a group of women apparently amenable to mediation: war widows. Population theorists of the 1920s and 1930s and Nazi officials in the 1940s repeatedly narrated the Magdeburg story as a great success for the care of disabled veterans that the Weimar system failed to support; Basch's original purpose to alleviate the misery of war widows was only mentioned in passing, if at all, and the narrative was reversed to highlight widows caring for disabled veterans. The supposed travails of lonely war widows and neglected disabled veterans played on fears that, while the modern, free marriage marketplace provided coveted individual freedom, it was also an uncertain, volatile space, even for ordinary Germans. Mediation could make up for its unpredictability by ensuring compatibility between prospective matches. In theorists’ thinking, compatibility, both psychological and physical, generated happiness, happiness would sustain marriages, and durable marriages encouraged greater fertility. Nevertheless, however powerful Stigler and the like envisioned the new authoritarian state as nearly omnipotent in the realm of family policy, the regime needed to proceed carefully. Practical experience in mediating marriages came from an unlikely source: the need to keep the victims of the Nazi sterilization program quiescent.

Gaining Practical Mediation Experience

“Positive” population policy measures remained restricted to relatively unsuccessful marriage loans, awards for prolific mothers, bans on abortion, and divorce laws providing an out for partners stranded in childless marriages. ²⁵ The regime found greater success in its “negative” eugenic measures, especially against specifically targeted groups, such as the 1933 sterilization law. The law also prohibited sterilized individuals from marrying fertile partners. Afflicted persons sometimes placed advertisements in newspapers soliciting marriage partners, but the Reich Interior Ministry instructed the Gestapo to track down and identify the advertisements’ subversive authors. ²⁶ Protestant churches set up marriage agencies for the sterilized, and both the Protestant and Catholic Churches married pairs of sterilized individuals, though in the Catholic case, performing a marriage for a sterilized man contravened Church law. ²⁷ The regime quickly snuffed out these unapproved practices. ²⁸

Despite the regime policing sterilized Germans’ attempts to find marriage partners, some continued to use newspaper advertisements. Doctor Herbert Weinert, a teacher of deaf children and passionate advocate of the 1933 sterilization law, argued hyperbolically that the proliferation of sterilized deaf Germans’ newspaper ads constituted a “state of emergency.” ²⁹ The appeal, however, worked. In 1936 the Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) tasked Weinert with opening a marriage mediation center in Dresden, which opened in August. ³⁰ Publicly, the center provided mediation only for Germans sterilized for deafness. This purpose struck a careful balance with public opinion. Hereditary deafness was not a desirable trait to pass on, but the deaf looked and acted nothing like the Nazi caricatures of the deranged. Though the regime subjected the hereditarily deaf to the sterilization law, the deaf appeared to many Germans as unfortunate rather than dangerous and it seemed overly punitive to prohibit the deaf from finding some happiness in life.

In secret, however, Weinert provided mediation for many others including schizophrenics, severe alcoholics, the hereditarily deformed, and epileptics—people also affected by the sterilization law. ³¹ Although Weinert wrote of the “happiness” of the sterilized and that a marriage center might disarm those “embittered” sterilized individuals who “resent the state for having interfered so deeply with their personal freedom,” he worked to capture all who could “use their strength fully in the service of the national community.” ³² Though Weinert sought to make productive those considered ineducable and useless to the Volksgemeinschaft, gender norms played a powerful role in deciding eligibility for marriage mediation. In selecting applicants for mediation, Weinert reasoned that blind men could find useful employment, but they needed a wife to aid them at home and in everyday tasks. Blind women, however, could hardly be expected to “manage the household themselves” and were ineligible for mediation unless they could prove their ability to “run a household independently” or had the means to hire domestic help. ³³

Weinert published the outcomes of his experiment in 1941 after the results convinced him of the program's efficacy. By May 1940, marriage mediators had established 24 “permanent connections” between the 533 men and 438 women in the program. ³⁴ Weinert acknowledged that the mediocre numbers would not dazzle his eugenicist peers, but commercial marriage brokers only managed eight to ten marriages per year and failed to match applicants in ways that contributed to the Volksgemeinschaft. ³⁵ To successfully compete with the commercial brokers, Weinert suggested charging applicants a nominal fee due to the prevailing feeling that “a thing is worth nothing if it costs nothing.” ³⁶ He also stressed the need for a large pool of applicants. ³⁷ By 1941, marriage mediation for sterilized Germans, both the deaf and others, had expanded to nine cities with Berlin as the largest, apart from Weinert's center in Dresden. Charlotte Aumann, a marriage mediator in Berlin, attributed the success in her district to higher numbers of applicants. With few applicants, men and women with different hereditary diseases or afflictions were paired together, which raised compatibility issues almost immediately. A couple with one major disability between themselves constituted a challenging relationship; the tribulations of two separate afflictions became almost insurmountable. Larger pools of applicants allowed for the pairing of men and women with the same disability. Aumann reported that pairing those with the same disabilities rapidly increased the eagerness of applicants and led to more marriages. ³⁸ The Berlin office counted 69 successful marriages since 1939, with half that number coming just in the past year and a half. Pairing via disease groups appeared to establish “a link from the outset” between the applicants, and Nazi experts drew the conclusion that differentiating groups into discrete units, almost like taxonomic classifications, provided better mediation results. ³⁹

The marriage centers for the sterilized provided the regime with practical experience in facilitating marriages, but it also differed fundamentally from the regime's plans for “valuable” members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Mediation for the sterilized decoupled marriage and reproduction, precisely the opposite intent for hereditarily healthy Germans. But it was nevertheless crucial in two ways. First, the regime believed the program found empathetic support among a German population that valued companionship, even for society's most unfortunate people. The future program for disabled veterans and war widows also latched on to the unfortunate life circumstances of applicants as justification for mediation. Second, administrators gained experience in practical implementation. Specifically, the notion that a broad pool of applicants was necessary to help ensure companionable relationships took on a special significance. The low number of successful brokerages for the sterilized tempered expectations of what constituted success and the relative population sizes of the sterilized and disabled veterans remained, at least through early 1944, comparable. Administrators also gained crucial information on how to design centers to not appear too clinical and impersonal, as well as apparently noninvasive mediation procedures that would not frighten off applicants—of obvious importance to the apprehensive sterilized who had already suffered state-based violation, but also disabled veterans and war widows, whom the regime consistently suspected of harboring fragile or sensitive mental states.

And as more men fell on the battlefield, Nazi racial experts had little trouble believing in the growing female demand for mediation. It seemed self-evident to experts like Dr. W. Hilsinger that privately “every mother wants to marry off her daughter as soon and as safely as possible,” even if women would not countenance marriage mediation publicly. ⁴⁰ Their inhibitions clearly showed their desirable qualities. What really mattered was that “when it comes down to it,” they “join in.” ⁴¹ Hilsinger's telling words, published in 1943, appeared just as anxieties mounted in Nazi leaders that their costly war had eliminated the vital bloodlines of Germany's best men.

Capturing Hereditary Material

Learning of the successful mediation of the sterilized and distressed over the immense losses on the Eastern front, Maria Trautwein of Frankfurt am Main and G. Schneider, a postal director, proposed a method to save some of the genetic material before it was lost forever. The pair tapped into fears among some in the Nazi leadership that, with every month of the war, Germany hemorrhaged valuable genetic material and the children it would beget, spurring concerns that Germany might win the war militarily, but lose the birth war against racially foreign peoples of the east. In June 1943, Trautwein's and Schneider's pamphlet “Should Our Girls Also Become Victims of This War?” arrived at the desk of Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers. ⁴² The pamphlet, saturated with statistics, graphs, and figures, impressed Lammers, especially considering that Trautwein and Schneider were two private individuals enthusiastic about eugenics with no direct connection to the regime. ⁴³ The authors argued that precedent for Ehevermittlung existed in the form of mediation centers for the sterilized and infertile population and proposed a solution that instead targeted the fit population: classify each German on a scale of racial value and establish marriage mediation centers that brought together the men and women with the highest classifications. ⁴⁴ Trautwein and Schneider noted that the Great War had not culled “the sick, the physically degenerated, the feeble-minded” that the army had deemed unfit to serve, but rather “the bravest and most capable men,” whose “highest quality genetic material was lost forever.” ⁴⁵ They painted a dismal future where the genetically best men had died in combat and a surfeit of hereditarily fit women remained lonely and fallow. ⁴⁶ As long as the war dragged on, Germany continued to bleed the best material, condemning millions of above-average women to spinsterhood. Coupled with the existing gender imbalance precipitated by the Great War, Germany faced demographic and racial catastrophe.

Unfortunately, few Germans understood the precariousness of the situation or the science behind biological heredity. The party, Trautwein and Schneider advised, could not leave marriage up to “the whims and desires of the individual nor to chance.” Private initiatives such as newspaper advertisements and commercial marriage agencies had failed. The party's more organic methods, such as events hosted by Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude), the National Socialist Women's League (NS-Frauenschaft), and the Sturmabteilung (SA), failed to attract the “reserved men and girls with a sensitive sense of honor” and who refrained from “reveal[ing] their intentions and feelings to the public.” ⁴⁷ Only marriage mediation ensured that men and women of comparable hereditary fitness found each other in sufficient numbers to win the birth war. To overcome the skittishness of participants, Trautwein and Schneider argued for the centrality of trust during the entire process. Throughout mediation, employees would emphasize the voluntary nature of the program. Mediators must avoid “[i]ndirect pressure” and at no point must the participant feel “obligated to the brokerage” or that mediators coaxed them into “finally taking action.” ⁴⁸ The authors envisioned a fleet of recruiters drawn from all walks of life and professions who could relate to and muster up future participants from all segments of the population. These racial talent scouts, bound to secrecy about the participants and the process itself, would advertise only through word-of-mouth. Even the name of the proposed centers occluded the mediation function to draw in more reserved Germans; they posited “Biological Letter Center” (Biologische Briefzentrale) rather than the more honest “Biological Marriage Mediation Center” (Biologische Ehevermittlungszentrale). ⁴⁹ Centers would overcome aversion or hesitancy toward marriage mediation not through education, a slow and often futile method, but through the initial trickle of participants. Once the war claimed enough men's lives, women would see the centers’ success and flood in to avoid a long, lonely life.

Lammers quickly sent the pamphlet to Martin Bormann, Chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler's private secretary, who circulated it to various Reich offices for consultation. ⁵⁰ While Nazi leaders agreed with the pamphlet in theory, they temporarily shelved discussion of drawing the entire female population into a marriage mediation scheme. It seemed unlikely that population-wide marriage mediation would resonate positively with women. The regime found a more circumscribed, sympathetic population, and here the precedent of Magdeburg played a powerful role. The death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers likewise produced a mass of war widows, “most of whom are of prime fertility age.” ⁵¹ Nazi leaders believed the widow would retreat into herself during “the most difficult moment” in her life and that a new marriage as soon as possible would ease her passage into the next marital and, it was hoped, reproductive phase of her life. ⁵² Economic concerns occupied some officials’ minds. Widows wallowing in despair tended to abandon their husband's business or improperly manage it; a quick remarriage and transfer of the property to the new husband ensured no danger to the economy. ⁵³ More worrisome was the specter of a woman not just uselessly “living off her pension for the rest of her life,” but also one who besmirched the memory of her husband and the institution of marriage, “as happened after the last war,” when avaricious women co-habited with new men and refused to get married in order to retain their pensions. ⁵⁴ Most advocates of Ehevermittlung, however, raised no tactless economic considerations, though the issue remained that pensions fortified women's financial situations and thus their positions in the marriage marketplace. The regime essentially ignored or misattributed this deeper, more fundamental issue. It was not the last time the regime completely misread the situation of war widows. They pressed on with pairing disabled veterans with war widows under the influence of the Magdeburg precedent, ideological paternalism for a deserving group, and tactical political considerations to disarm public concern about mediation.

Disabled veterans occupied a similar role as war widows as a group uniquely in need of mediation. After Germany's war fortunes turned, disabled veterans returned to the Reich in droves—approximately 10,000 each month in 1943. ⁵⁵ Eventually, over 600,000 “severely disabled” men returned home, which included total blindness, double amputations, extensive disfigurement, severe head injuries, and extensive or total paralysis. ⁵⁶ The Wehrmacht High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW), Nazi officials, and the National Socialist War Victim's Care (Nationalsozialistische Kriegsopferversorgung, NSKOV), the party organ for disabled veterans, foresaw extreme difficulties for severely disabled veterans to make their “desire for a happy family life in marriage come true.” ⁵⁷ A further 800,000 men suffered “light disablement.” ⁵⁸ But “light” was misleading nomenclature and included missing an eye or a limb.

Not only did their physical impairments hamper veterans’ efforts to find companions, but officials believed there existed few women who could rise to the task and “meet particularly high demands with regard to her physical and mental abilities, her character, will and disposition.” ⁵⁹ The demands of the disabled veteran's wife included not just the “best knowledge of domestic economy and management but [she] should also find time for the nursing and humane [menschlichen] care of the disabled veteran.” ⁶⁰ While the regime claimed to provide the healthcare and economic security of the “nation's honorary citizens,” the onus of actual care fell on women as an additional burden compounded onto their household management. Disabled veterans found women willing to bear these burdens in short supply. War widows, however, “had already proven themselves as wives, housekeepers, and, in some cases, mothers.” ⁶¹ Whatever veterans’ protestations that they searched for love rather than a caretaker, the regime saw war widows as the ideal companions for them as fertile spouses, maids, and mothers.

Nevertheless, the main impetus for mediation for disabled veterans was not the welfare of the veteran, nor was it a tactical maneuver to keep the potentially bitter men quiescent. Rather, mounting losses in the east prompted anxieties in Nazi leaders that the war was extinguishing at an ever more furious pace the bravest and best men's hereditary lines. Disabled veterans had shown their bravery and commitment, and “the valuable genetic material of war-disabled persons must not be foregone.” ⁶² What never arose was the need to capture the war widows’ genetic material if she retreated into a solitary life. Again and again, high-ranking Nazi leaders such as Lammers and Bormann spoke and wrote of saving only disabled veterans’ genetic material. Ostensibly marriage mediation would select a hereditarily suitable partner for the disabled veteran, à la Trautwein, but war widows (and women in general) appeared merely as potential vessels of fertility. Lack of hereditary disease, proper housewife character traits, and a compatible personality with the disabled veteran marked a woman suitable. In terms of selling the idea to the German people, disabled veterans and war widows conveniently occupied sympathetic positions for plausibly pushing forward population policy in a positive eugenic direction and normalizing marriage mediation as a socially and culturally acceptable form of family policy.

But theoretical tracts from racial hygienists or Trautwein's and Schneider's pamphlet alone did not finally push the regime into pursuing more vigorous pronatalist programs. Since 1942, a marriage mediation center for severely disabled veterans had run under Leipzig's top doctor Walter Vetzberger. Like many Nazi policies, the centers began as local measures, with Leipzig's under the auspices of the mayor. ⁶³ Around 150 women and 10 severely disabled veterans applied and, after a year of operation, it succeeded in one marriage with seven pending. ⁶⁴ While the absolute numbers seemed modest, the results deviated little from commercial marriage brokers or the mediation centers for sterilized Germans. Nazi leaders expected hesitancy until the population witnessed mediation's benefits. Furthermore, the circle of war widows and severely disabled veterans amounted to a relatively small percentage of the population; from that perspective, the state-run centers had been more successful than commercial centers that theoretically drew from the entire population. The Leipzig center caught the attention of Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, and discussions proceeded with the NSKOV, OKW, German Municipalities Council (Deutscher Gemeindetag), the SS, and the propaganda ministry. All organizations expressed enthusiasm for opening further centers. The OKW was particularly excited to promote the centers to soldiers in hospitals as a further means of showing their care for troops. ⁶⁵

On May 12, 1943, Frick tasked the Deutscher Gemeindetag, the local and regional administrations of the Nazi state, with setting up mediation centers in Berlin, Breslau, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna, Danzig, Frankfurt am Main, Königsberg, and Cologne. ⁶⁶ He couched the order in terms of severely disabled veterans’ vulnerability, especially the disfigured, blind, and deaf, and war widows who would struggle in life to find partners. The Magdeburg center of 1917 assumed the role of precedent, and Frick harped on its success. The order laid out the case for harvesting veterans’ genetic material and administratively attaching Ehevermittlung centers to existing municipal health centers where staff had the records and expertise to successfully pair hereditarily fit individuals. Commercial marriage centers should be abolished. It was of utmost importance, the minister dictated, that there be “full voluntariness of use,” the “safeguarding of personal interests” of applicants, and “truly objective” mediation to “protect [them] against exploitation.” ⁶⁷ As each district differed in resources and sensitivities of the population, the minister requested that, prior to taking any applications, the municipalities should submit their procedural plans to the Deutscher Gemeindetag head office in Berlin, and then leading Reich officials would decide upon uniform standards of operation. ⁶⁸

Marriage bureaus in the cities sprang up in the next three months and local authorities relayed their experiences and concerns to Berlin. Leaders in Danzig were most enthusiastic as Dr. Möbius, the head of the city health office, had watched Leipzig's efforts with growing interest throughout 1942. He had already created a marriage center for the sterilized and infertile at the beginning of the year, but he bemoaned the focus on hereditary dead-ends while those of high hereditary value like the war-disabled languished. He mused about the prospects of extending the service to all Germans of high hereditary value. ⁶⁹ In spite of Möbius's glowing enthusiasm, he expected that few marriages would meet population policy goals due to the women themselves. Although he believed women vetted by doctors and mediators desired companionship with severely disabled veterans “under quite ideal motives and out of fullest conviction,” women under 30—the preferred demographic due to prime fertility—would eventually find the marriage “unbearable” due to “sexual, esthetic and other impulses.” ⁷⁰ Women over 30 were more mature and thus more likely to withstand the strains of marriage to the severely disabled, but their fertility prospects were much lower. Möbius proposed that, in the interests of gaining a significant pool of female applicants, the process should not be limited to war widows, but be open to all women.

Others emphasized varying levels of caution depending upon local conditions. Munich authorities saw little more than trouble brewing, especially if the NSKOV and NS-Frauenschaft involved themselves in the process, because men and women would shy away from sharing their medical and financial information with too many agencies. ⁷¹ They dismissed unequivocally the mediator's guiding hand present during the applicants’ meeting; entirely free agreement “should be left to the…two persons willing to marry.” ⁷² In Munich, Nazi population policy plans ran up against Bavarians’ conservative values and distrust of the federal state. Some authorities, such as those in Frankfurt, did not share the privacy concerns of Munich officials and successfully collaborated with the NSKOV, NS-Frauenschaft, and local propaganda departments. ⁷³ Königsberg opted for “quiet” propaganda displays. ⁷⁴ Breslau authorities eschewed the term marriage mediation (Ehevermittlung) in favor of marriage counseling (Eheberatung), while Vienna stressed the importance of having a physician “fully committed” to marriage mediation and population policy, but all such men were currently embroiled in the war effort. ⁷⁵ Caution applied not only to engaging with the German population, but also finding suitable staff willing to express an air of genuine empathy for the applicants’ love lives when meeting with them, all the while continuing to adhere to the regime's requirements for hereditary fitness and reproductive policy.

The wide variety of plans proved fertile ground for laying out basic guidelines. By September 1943, centers existed in Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, and Königsberg. The Minister of the Interior convened a meeting on October 12 to lay out the results and provide guidance. ⁷⁶ Close working relationships between municipal authorities, the NSKOV, and the NS-Frauenschaft proved fraught throughout the Reich, even if collaboration succeeded in some cases. Frick clarified the lines of authority and granted local Deutscher Gemeindetag offices sole administrative control over the project's implementation in their geographic areas and left future collaboration with other organizations to their discretion. ⁷⁷ For public appearance purposes, any disabled veteran or war widow could make use of mediation, regardless of age. However, the veterans needed protection. Blind men suffered the worst prospects for marriage and “must leave the [military] hospital married, if possible.” ⁷⁸ Möbius' report had raised the prospect of young men marrying older women, and Reich-level authorities present at the meeting interpreted this as a potential threat. They reiterated that population policy goals were the primary purpose of marriage mediation; while there were to be no age restrictions per se, centers should strive to lower the “marriage age of women… as much as possible” because the “war-disabled person is easily inclined to marry an older woman.” ⁷⁹ In this line of reasoning, the veteran occupied a vulnerable position and craved a mother-like figure who would care for him; or, he felt that his disability lowered his marital prospects so comprehensively that he should accept any willing partner. The meeting disregarded the report from Breslau's authorities that stated that war widows tended to remarry quickly and plowed ahead under the assumption that the “war widow must be married as soon as possible, so that she can more easily get over the most difficult moment for her, when all the men return home from the field, except hers.” ⁸⁰ The alleged plight of widows remained an important justification to the public for establishing mediation.

Reich authorities took seriously, however, the numerous notes for caution. Propaganda stories should convey the triumphs of the severely disabled finding love and heavily downplay the population policy angle—though never eliminate it. In one example, in October 1943, reporter A. Schulze recounted his trip to the Racial-Hygienic Marriage Mediation Center in Leipzig. There he met a disabled veteran who claimed to be “completely healthy, except for my physical war damage,” and that he was “dominated only by the desire to have my own family as soon as possible.” ⁸¹ He was “not interested in being provided for” by a companion, but rather “through her, to give life its true content in healthy children.” ⁸² The veteran maintained his masculine dignity; reversing the assumption that his disability rendered him less of a man, less of a husband, he would provide for his wife a meaningful life of motherhood. The center might one day have matched the veteran with a young war widow that Schulze also encountered who asked her marriage mediator, “Would it be possible for you to put me in touch by letter with a very disfigured war invalid? I am a war widow myself and would like to return a soldier suffering from his severe wounding to the happiness and beauty of life." ⁸³ Schulze's interviewees’ statements may have sounded like artificial propaganda statements, but they also set forth a proposition believable to many Germans: disfigured and disabled war veterans and suffering war widows could not find each other in the free marriage marketplace. Such propaganda attempted to lure veterans and widows to the centers, but the German population figured as a key audience.

Authorities also carefully outlined key considerations of the spaces and places of centers so as not to drive off veterans, women, or public opinion. Though the state, in the form of municipal authorities, ran the centers and thus provided legitimacy in a way that commercial brokerages could not, the “official character” must not appear “too strongly, so that… the impression is not given that the people are treated like files.” ⁸⁴ Even more importantly, the marriage mediation offices needed to be separated spatially from welfare offices, health offices, and especially the marriage mediation centers for the sterilized. ⁸⁵ Separation from the welfare office removed the association of disabled veterans with charity cases, a remnant of Weimar-era veterans’ complaints of shame. Proximity to the health office brought the true purpose of mediation, population policy, too far into the light. Though combining the marriage bureaus for the sterilized with the new function for disabled veterans consolidated scarce resources, as had been done in Thuringia, the association was exceptionally undesirable. ⁸⁶ Marriage mediation would never catch on if it were symbolically linked with negative cultural or political associations.

Although the committee refrained from explicitly standardizing the process, most centers more or less followed a general mediation procedure similar to the suggestions in Trautwein's and Schneider's well-known and well-regarded pamphlet, which had been distributed throughout the Deutscher Gemeindetag. After opening a center, local organizations such as the NS-Frauenschaft, NSKOV, or the municipal health office conducted a propaganda campaign with flyers, newspaper articles, and advertisements. Publicity never failed to mention the Bevölkerungspolitik aspects of marriage mediation and the need to replace lost German blood caused by the war, but the focus remained squarely on identifying disabled veterans and, to a lesser extent, war widows as groups in need of the state's helping hand. These two deserving groups merited the understanding of society, for they had few other options to find the love advertisements promised awaited them at the centers. To increase support for the program, most advertisements also mentioned and exaggerated the success of the original Magdeburg center from 1917 to anchor in readers’ minds that marriage mediation, off-putting as it might seem, represented no break from the past and had already proved successful. ⁸⁷ Although propaganda distinguished war widows as the particular group of women the centers existed to support, most centers broadened their call to all women. In contrast, only a handful widened the male applicant search beyond disabled veterans. War widows were a sympathetic vehicle to provide women with a model of dutiful behavior; disabled veterans, basins of valuable genetic material, needed a larger pool of women to choose from.

Interested applicants received a questionnaire soliciting detailed information on race, religion, previous and current employment, cash and fixed property assets to weed out applicants looking to profit from love, and past marriage history and the children resulting from it. Applications for males required information on the nature and extent of the veteran's disability. Both male and female applications asked what they expected from a partner, but with in-built assumptions of gender. Women supplied extensive information on their appearance, whereas men did not, and the male application solicited much more information on the physical attributes he expected from a partner; the female application inquired merely about her preferences of age, height, and religion. ⁸⁸ Applications for women amounted to their first audition, an initial presentation to consider whether she was worthy. Centers could cut women from the process across a number of dimensions such as criminal records, having several illegitimate children from multiple men, or conveying an aversion to traditional gender roles like housework. At the application stage, centers generally presumed veterans acceptable for mediation. Neither party ever received the other's original questionnaire as the center retained this privileged information for privacy concerns, but also to occlude the center's primary directive, population policy and demographic management. Information on class and religion was not always used to align applicants along these dimensions as might be assumed, but rather to cross them to cement together cracks in the Volksgemeinschaft formed from class and religious divides. Because applicants never saw the questionnaires, the relationship might flourish before either applicant became aware of these dissimilarities.

Many centers also requested personal narratives that prospective partners could read to learn more about the applicant's personality and to alleviate the idea that the entire process of finding love was formulaic. Both men and women supplied pictures of themselves, usually a headshot. While centers informed applicants that these pictures would be used once matches were made to gauge each applicant's interest in physical appearance, they also used women's pictures to deny them entrance into the program based on disreputable appearance. The centers promised that extensive questionnaires, personal narratives, and photographs reduced the element of chance in finding a long-lasting marriage by allowing mediators to align men and women physically and temperamentally.

Applicants selected for the next round then faced a racial examination performed by, almost exclusively, a politically reliable male doctor under the assumption that male doctors garnered more trust than their female counterparts. Unsurprisingly, the doctor held the power to declare someone unfit or racially undesirable for the program; also unsurprisingly, the axe most often fell on women as only extraordinary cases of unsuitability removed the assumption that the veteran was racially valuable. Successful applicants moved on to the actual marriage mediation center, which, again for trust reasons, consisted of a nearly exclusively female staff. Center staff took pains to furnish and design an inviting and comfortable space rather than a sterile and bureaucratic office. Here, women could feel comfortable discussing their desires. Mediators trained in National Socialist hereditary principles could assuage fears such as the heritability of acquired disabilities; some women feared that veterans’ disabilities, such as amputations or disfigurements, might pass on to their children. Mediators denied this as biologically impossible, though numerous texts for laypeople existed to combat this popular Lamarckian belief. ⁸⁹

Once mediators matched a man with, ideally, several women across the host of questionnaire answers and the results of the racial examination, they notified him of his matches. The man then viewed pictures of the women and read their personal narratives, though names and addresses were omitted. The man selected one woman to initially proceed with, because, after all, “as nature wants it, the man should remain the wooing and choosing member” of a budding relationship; that the man might be disabled mattered not at all, for “the choice should lie with him… This feeling strengthens self-confidence and thus provides a valuable psychological basis for building up the young marriage.” ⁹⁰ Only after a man selected the woman did the center inform her of the match. She did, however, retain the right to accept or reject the match after the center provided her some basic information about the man and after reading his personal narrative. If she assented, mediation then proceeded through letters until the applicants felt comfortable enough to meet in person, which could take place at the mediation center if the pair wished. The centers premised the entire process on comfortability and caution to never provoke a feeling in applicants that they were mere “files” or, even worse, breeders in the Nazis’ Bevölkerungspolitik. Applicants were to feel that every step was voluntary and that mediators never intruded too far or pressured them to continue with the process. It all broadly mirrored Trautwein's and Schneider's suggestions, down to the emphases on talents and preferences for potential partners in the application itself. Notably, the process for disabled veterans and war widows took a less cautious route than the pamphlet's authors suggested, due to the regime targeting specific segments of the population with a greater justification for mediation than for the population as a whole.

Results were mixed over the final months of 1943 and the first half of 1944. 50% of severely disabled veterans in the Danzig region applied for marriage mediation, though the potential pool amounted to only 100 veterans. ⁹¹ Propaganda directed toward men recovering in military hospitals proved particularly effective in Stuttgart where 87 men applied, compared to only 26 disabled men already released from the Wehrmacht. ⁹² Königsberg scraped up ten men, while Breslau edged them out with thirteen. ⁹³ The surprise, given supposed female hesitancy, was that more women applied than men in nearly every district. Stuttgart's female applicants posted a large three to one ratio, while Königsberg's female applicants dwarfed male applicants by a ratio of ten to one. ⁹⁴ Although reports and propaganda loudly proclaimed that the women hailed from all social classes and professions, in reality middle-class women applied far more often than working class women. Fewer middle-class men remained on the homefront compared to essential workers in vital war industries. In contrast, disabled veterans with working class or rural origins were more likely to opt for mediation, whereas middle-class men took their chances in society. Furthermore, many mediation centers opened their doors to all women rather than just widows, while primarily the severely disabled men, men who felt they had little chance of finding a partner on their own, applied while lightly disabled men felt greater confidence in their marriage prospects. Absolute applicant numbers paint a picture of abysmal failure, especially in the first half of 1944 when more than 100,000 disabled soldiers had already been released from service and military hospitals filled up with more each day. The benchmark, however, remained the low success rate of commercial marriage brokers and centers for sterilized Germans, coupled with the belief that disabled veterans would be difficult to marry off in any case.

The overall numbers thus pleased officials, but applicant quality disappointed municipal authorities. Though the regime strove to uphold the right of men to choose women, Königsberg officials speculated with dismay that men preferred to skip the mediation process entirely and simply acquire lists of women. ⁹⁵ Nor were war widows highly represented among applicants; Breslau officials snidely remarked that, in contrast to the disabled veterans, “it has been noted time and again that war widows in large numbers quickly remarry.” ⁹⁶ Some believed the dearth of widows could be accounted for by “widows’ attractiveness on the marriage market: widows had already proven themselves as wives, housekeepers, and, in some cases, mothers.” ⁹⁷ Furthermore, younger women seemingly confirmed the lack of caring that some had feared when the “girl's desires are predominantly for a secure position, good looks, and in some cases even for the most elevated professions [of the men] possible.” ⁹⁸ It is indicative that the official used “girl” (Mädchen) rather than “woman” (Frau); a German woman knew and accepted her duty to care for veterans and pledge her reproductive capacity to the Volk, but girls were materialistic and flippant. Men seemingly conformed to Nazi ideals with their strong preference for “farmer's daughters,” but these women were in short supply. ⁹⁹ Conversely, women rejected most of the male applicants employed as farmers or craftsmen. Most female applicants stemmed from the social, teaching, or commercial professions—the middle-class women that population policy theorists had hoped to woo all along. But the cleavages between applicants’ social classes prevented matches. Even when the female applicant hailed from an agricultural background, the pull of urban life on young women prompted the rejection of men from similar backgrounds and prospects. ¹⁰⁰ The Nazis’ pursuit of a Volksgemeinschaft free from class tensions did not find a resolution in mediated marriages where applicants still retained the final choice of a spouse. Preferences remained starkly at odds along the rural–urban and working class–middle class divides.

Unsurprisingly, disability loomed large in the minds of officials and applicants. Lightly disabled veterans did not repel women, but these men preferred to find their own spouses. War widows proved more psychologically resilient than expected. But in spite of female applicant numbers that overwhelmed the number of male applicants, offices reported and commented on pervasive female hesitancy; they had applied, but they wavered in selecting a disabled man. The Königsberg office was baffled and chalked it up to women simply wanting to ignore disability and suggested that matching them with a lightly disabled man would encourage this avoidance. ¹⁰¹ Stuttgart's office managed to successfully pair four men with women, but none were disabled; apparently they had begun to accept applicants from currently serving soldiers who were wounded and recovering, but not disabled. ¹⁰² Breslau departed entirely from the standard operating model and implemented an insidious plan to surreptitiously pair female care-givers such as nurses with severely disabled veterans with the expectation of love naturally blossoming. The NS-Frauenschaft rotated thirty women around thirteen veterans, men with eye injuries, disfigured faces, paraplegia, brain injuries, and double amputations. After a period of care, the marriage mediators approached the women about marriage. Most tactfully hedged and claimed that they were unready to make a decision. Every woman starkly refused considering the blind men, a nearly universal response across marriage centers to the prospect of marrying the blind. Although Breslau authorities noted that the lower-class men and educated middle-class women found little common ground between their class differences, the issue persisted that few women wanted a “more or less helpless man.” ¹⁰³ Nazi concerns for the severely disabled had been well-founded as few women, widows or not, preferred them, and few women would settle for one, whatever the lopsided population statistics indicated about the glut of single women. Lightly disabled men fared better than officials had expected, but also applied for mediation more rarely than hoped.

Greater success was found in Munich, which diverged from most other agencies in a significant way. While other centers (with the exception of Stuttgart) limited themselves to disabled veterans and soon-to-be released disabled soldiers, Munich opened marriage mediation to the entire population, including soldiers at the front who originated from the area. Six hundred applications flooded in, 200 from men and 400 from women, and the Munich office's only complaint concerned the need for more staff if mediation took off even more. ¹⁰⁴ The hands-off approach also contributed to its success. Hereditary health exams remained a requirement, but the marriage bureau only selected partners and handled letters so that participants never knew each other's addresses unless they mutually agreed to share information. The center did not facilitate in-person meetings either, but rather left this to the initiative of the participants. ¹⁰⁵ Officials were also pleased with the applicants themselves, finding most to be hereditarily above average and not interested in “a cheap flirt in a movie theater, cafe, or on the street.” ¹⁰⁶ They had even arranged social events for soldiers on leave to meet potential spouses and planned informal events for the future, such as hikes and theater visits. The disabled veterans, however, became somewhat bitter with the Munich center's lack of focus and women's lack of attention for them. One complained that “[i]t is not we who are inhibited, but the women we want to marry, and every disabled person must come to this conclusion.” ¹⁰⁷ On the one hand, the Munich office experienced much more success than any other, but had lost sight of disabled veterans. On the other hand, it had lost sight of disabled veterans. Its open-door policy indicated that Germans might supplement the ordinary marriage marketplace in favor of biologically and socially responsible mediation—if only those notions of responsibility hovered imperceptibly in the background. The relatively large number of applications indicated a need for at least some Germans, though their desire for love and marriage was probably misaligned with the regime's population policy goals.

The marriage centers’ results revealed an uncomfortable fact. State-run marriage mediation was not particularly popular among disabled veterans and war widows. Though planners strived to implement the lessons of population theorists from the 1920s and the practical experience gained with the sterilization marriage mediation centers, their endeavors mattered little if Germans did not apply. Veterans with less noticeable or easily concealable disabilities took their chances in the free marriage marketplace. War widows likewise eschewed the centers and apparently often desired remarriage and had little trouble remarrying, both contrary to Nazi leaders’ expectations. The high percentage of middle-class and educated women who applied for marriage mediation perhaps indicated the role of the “female surplus” that Trautwein and others had warned about. But among the disabled, most middle-class men avoided the centers, while lower-class men applied and found their hopes dashed by personality incompatibilities or women's reluctance to leap into a marriage requiring constant care for their husbands and abandonment of their careers or social status. Nazi leaders had attempted to preserve disabled veterans’ genetic material by establishing compatible marriages in which love might flourish into children or, at the very least, some women would enthusiastically undertake their reproductive duties. Neither had happened in great numbers, but for the first time in the history of German marriage mediation, women applied for Ehevermittlung in greater numbers than men, and most of these women hailed from desirable middle-class stock. It was time to test the limits of the population's tolerance with a more extensive, though less visibly intrusive, family and reproductive policy.

Marriage Mediation for the Masses

More so than ever before, the birthrate was on the mind of Hitler in January 1944. A secret memorandum of his views, written by Martin Bormann, indicated the Führer's anxiety for the postwar period and his belief that, even with the death of so many men, “increased procreation… is only desirable by a certain part of these men.” ¹⁰⁸ On the part of women, commandments to procreate would never work, and “enlightenment will be necessary” because “women will illogically—and lack of logic is inborn in women—approve the validity of the general proposition, but in their own personal case they will fanatically reject it.” ¹⁰⁹ Hitler assumed the many, less hereditarily valuable, but apparently very logical men forgoing procreation would accept their duty of celibacy or nonreproductive sex without quibbling. Enlightenment for women would have to wait for the end of the war and Hitler's sentiment found its echo in “a very lively discussion” at the Führer's Headquarters in February 1944. ¹¹⁰ Trautwein's pamphlet had become the center of discussion and the possibility of advancing her extensive plan that encompassed the entire German population. Top Nazi leaders supported the plan but nevertheless still felt it unwise to move forward with it at the present time. Bormann directed Karl Fiehler, mayor of Munich, to re-align his marriage mediation center with the guidance from the original orders and to restrict patronage to the intended populations of disabled veterans and widows, as the population was not ready for such an invasive population policy. ¹¹¹ This directive reflected the decision at the February meeting that the regime leadership would have to “be content for the time being” with moves recently made at the center in Dresden. ¹¹²

Early in 1944, the city opened a letter center offering all Germans an opportunity to correspond with potential spouses. The rationale once again called for the preservation of male genetics rather than female, but this time emphasizing soldiers at the front rather than disabled veterans. The Reich League for German Families established the framework for spreading this model throughout the Reich while the Racial Policy Office supervised its deployment. ¹¹³ The Dresden center met with wide-scale success and could not cope with the 26,000 letters it received in the first three months. ¹¹⁴ The application process was nearly as lengthy as those in the disabled veterans’ centers, and the scope of the applicant pool had grown beyond the bounds of a single center to manage. Medical examinations once again played a crucial role in the process to ensure hereditary fitness, and the application solicited “proof of German blood,” disclosure of any known defects, party affiliations, and “information about the applicant's home life, education, and siblings.” ¹¹⁵ Now, however, the Reich League for German Families exhibited less caution in revealing the population policy motives and required a character reference that the “applicant accorded with the principles of hereditary fitness, had the desire to have children, and came from an orderly family.” ¹¹⁶ After acceptance, participants exchanged letters, but mediators and mediation offices played no role in the budding relationships.

On July 12, 1944, an announcement circulated throughout the Reich that “the idea of preserving the vitality of the German people is becoming more and more central to party work.” ¹¹⁷ The falling birthrate was directly linked to the war itself and population policy finally took centerstage; love or companionship figured nowhere in the letter writing centers’ motivation. The designation as a marriage agency was flatly denied. ¹¹⁸ Letter centers would be established in many of the same cities as the marriage mediation centers, with the addition of Graz, Strasbourg, and Augsburg, while the existing centers for disabled veterans and infertile and sterilized Germans remained unaffected. In the typical Nazi fashion of probing the limits of the population's tolerance for potentially controversial policies, a variety of local experiments had yielded the limit. The marriage centers for disabled veterans indicated that mediation remained largely unpalatable to Germans, but low-stakes correspondence through letters with men at the front proved much more acceptable, even after the publicly stated purpose had shifted from finding love to explicit population policy. It is impossible to pin down Germans’ motivations for using the letter centers, though five years of separation between the vast majority of young women and men likely engendered longing for companionship, especially as both soldiers at the front and women on the home front suffered setbacks and losses. Perhaps some Germans truthfully answered the application's requirement for desiring to have a child. The breadth of the responses, however, indicates that the letter centers fulfilled some need.

One month later, Heinrich Himmler, who had replaced Frick as Minister of the Interior a year prior, clarified mediation and letter center policy. ¹¹⁹ Although propaganda had carefully spread the word about the disabled veterans’ mediation centers, the letter centers would garner even more attention and likely outshine the mediation centers. Henceforth, all women applying to the letter centers would be asked whether they would consider marrying a disabled veteran. ¹²⁰ Willing women would then be directed toward Ehevermittlung centers. The marriage centers would now restrict themselves to the severely disabled veterans who “require special care.” ¹²¹ Additionally, Ehevermittlung would cover any disabled veteran for whom “assistance in the choice of a spouse seems appropriate,” such as men who were disfigured, even if the degree of disability required little or no care. ¹²² This policy prevented agencies from stepping on each other's toes, but also attempted to siphon off women to severely disabled veterans whose genetic material remained more elusive than the lightly disabled. Himmler ordered that lightly disabled men be directed to the letter centers; there they would have a better chance of finding a woman. Thus, the only women applying to the marriage mediation centers would be those who especially wanted to care for a severely disabled man, avoiding the many false-starts experienced during 1943 and early 1944. The reality of marrying war widows also finally sunk in. Himmler noted that war widows had been seen as a “corresponding group available for the severely war-damaged.” ¹²³ Their general unwillingness to fulfill this role finally dispelled belief in the widows’ presumed marital and sexual availability. Widows would be redirected to the letter centers if they expressed no desire to marry a severely disabled man and steered toward the mediation centers from the letter centers if they did.

The letter centers thus completed a process of pragmatically differentiating groups within Nazi population policy, much as had happened when the regime teased out the proper method of mediation for sterilized Germans, by matching them according to disease type. Severely disabled veterans joined them as a group requiring special attention and policies and the lightly disabled moved on to the general population. The protracted war had ensured Nazi leaders’ fears of a catastrophic “female surplus,” but it also provided the regime with justification for promoting a watered-down version of marriage mediation to the entire German population. The attempt to capture severely disabled veterans’ hereditary material had proven frustratingly difficult in the face of class distinctions, the pressure on women to fulfill reproductive duties, the immense physical and emotional care required for disabled veterans, and Germans’ reluctance to countenance invasive forms of marriage mediation. Germans still more often turned to the classic form of impersonally finding a spouse, the newspaper advertisement, even when they desired or would settle for a widow or a disabled veteran. ¹²⁴ As late as March 1945, a blonde 41-year-old nurse with a “young appearance,” but too old by Nazi fertility standards and thus likely to be shunted out from marriage mediation, sought a severely disabled veteran or even a widower with a child. ¹²⁵ That same month, a 24-year-old disabled veteran sought a “nice young lass” or a war widow. ¹²⁶

While the mediation centers found some success, the vast majority of the population preferred finding companionship, finding love, and finding a spouse through their own devices. As military defeats piled on and the home front suffered disastrous aerial attacks, tens of thousands of women and soldiers turned to letter centers. Ironically, whereas the regime had earlier been concerned that Germans were forgoing marriage due to the war, near the end, it was the war itself that propelled some Germans to apply to marriage centers. ¹²⁷ Trying times and bleak futures had done what Nazi cajoling and propaganda had failed to accomplish. But as Allied bombs destroyed mediation centers and Soviet tanks rolled into Germany, it was too little and too late.

Conclusion

The matchmaking projects delivered limited, but nevertheless damaging evidence that the regime had not smoothed over or abolished class distinctions in the minds of Germans. Class incompatibility was the reason women and men most often gave for rejecting potential matches. The religious dimension was likely important as well, but soldiers often returned to their home provinces; confessional differences never appear in the sources. Officials were aware, however, of the regime's ineffective attempts to paper over such differences in other policy areas. Men and women supplied their religious affiliations in their applications, and it is possible that the centers refrained from making these matches in the first place. Centers apparently pushed first for bridging class differences as well as the rural–urban divide, always an emphasis of Nazi ideology. Here, propaganda may have been more successful for men, some of whom appeared enchanted with the idea of a dirndl-clad farmer's daughter. But women undoubtedly preferred an escape from rural life. Marriage mediation clearly demonstrated the persistence of divisions in the Volksgemeinschaft along class lines and the rural–urban divide that, even after a decade, the regime could not overcome.

The history of marriage mediation also complicates the notion of Nazi Germany as a racial state with a coherent ideology of race. ¹²⁸ The pressure for matchmaking undoubtedly stemmed from racial and eugenic considerations, notably the fear of racial decline through the bloodletting on the Eastern front in 1942. Yet the actual application and selection process maintained only a veneer of “racial science,” and gender conformity as a proxy for race had been baked into the policy from the beginning. Apart from physicians’ examinations for hereditary afflictions, nearly every attribute doctors and interviewers examined as a racial characteristic registered as adhering to traditionally German or Nazi-inflected gender roles to sufficiently prove racial membership. The hegemonic form of masculinity in Nazi Germany resided in the soldier; however, it became difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in a conscript army. The disabled veteran had proven the ideal masculinity prima facie through the bravery and aggression that earned him his disability. Likewise, officials initially latched onto war widows on the assumption that a woman could never recover from the death of the ideal soldier husband on her own. Nevertheless, officials never placed the same emphasis on women's racial worthiness as they did on veterans’ racial quality. Veterans’ superior genetic material must live on; the exact quality of the women's genes never figured into the equation. It proved sufficient for the woman to confirm German descent and display to interviewers a clean, organized household and a convincing demeanor of caring. In contrast to the stated emphasis on race, the practical implementation availed itself of cultural identity markers and middle-class gender norms as stand-ins for race. Biological precision—impossible anyway—took a backseat to culture and gender.

The matchmaking policy likewise showed the limits of Nazi attempts to inculcate a sense of racial awareness in Germans and then, crucially, to act upon it. In decisive ways during its twelve years of existence, the regime successfully persuaded “individual Germans to see the world through the lenses of racial comradeship and racial struggle.” ¹²⁹ The war convinced many Germans that they formed an embattled, imperiled community and tens of millions of Germans fought on the front lines and worked exhaustively on the home front until the end. But the history of marriage mediation highlights very real boundaries to Germans’ willingness to act upon the racial awareness the regime struggled to instill in them. Perhaps women appreciated disabled veterans as the “Honored Citizens of the Nation” as the regime hoped they would, but the ascription did not incite women to seek out and marry veterans. Occupation and class status surfaced as crucial determinants of partner selection, even when the severity of the disability did not take precedence. Nor did appeals to falling birthrates and the precarious position of the German race drive women or veterans to employ race as the overriding category in selecting a marriage partner. Marriage mediation as a component of Bevölkerungspolitik remained largely aspirational, unable to fundamentally reshape the private family lives of German citizens who preferred individual choice in the marriage marketplace over communal racial-mindedness.