Dr. Rober Kaiser was the leader of the RDF, Reichsbund Deutsche Familie (Reich's League for the German Family) after 1940, in the first years of World War II.
The RDF, a branch of the NSDAP, was the pronatalist organization in Nazi Germany. Before Dr. Kaiser's takeover it had been known as Reichsbund der Kinderreichen (RDK) or (RdK), meaning "Reich's Union for Large Families". [1]
Dr. Kaiser took over the pro-natalist cause with fervor during the war years. The death of Germans in the front called for all-embracing measures to promote "kinderreich" families having large numbers of children. Kaiser used the Nazi propaganda machine to advocate the urgency of a "victory of cradles". [2] He encouraged young people to marry and promoted having a minimum of four children per family.
The aims of Dr. Kaiser's organization were hampered by the physical separation of young people and the difficulties of the war years. Owing to the military situation, most men were fighting in the fronts, in distant places. As marriageable young men were far away from German women, the RDF established Letter Centres in order to promote early marriages. This measure helped in some measure to counteract the decrease in marriages of the war years, for many young Germans were wondering whether they should marry or not in the war circumstances. [3] The idea of the promotion of marriages went hand in hand with the promotion of bringing "racially and biologically perfect" couples together, that would breed as many children as possible despite the long periods of separation.
Robert Kaiser used the available media of the time to promote his cause. The German radio, magazines, newspapers and posters extolled the virtues of parents having many children, as worthy Germans having done their duty. Novelists were also encouraged to portray the family according to the requirements of the Nazi Party, promoting the idea of "Volksgemeinschaft" (Common interest of the people). Childless couples were portrayed as "selfish" in the RDF propaganda. [4] Meanwhile, the village of Freisheim was hailed by the same propaganda as the most "kinderreich" in Germany.
The League of German Girls or the Band of German Maidens was the girls' wing of the Nazi Party youth movement, the Hitler Youth. It was the only legal female youth organization in Nazi Germany.
Wilhelm Stuckart was a German Nazi Party lawyer, official, and a State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry during the Nazi era. He was a co-author of the notorious Nuremberg Laws and a participant in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. He also served as Reichsminister of the Interior in the short-lived Flensburg government at the end of the Second World War.
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's community", "folk community", "national community", or "racial community", depending on the translation of its component term Volk. This expression originally became popular during World War I as Germans rallied in support of the war, and many experienced "relief that at one fell swoop all social and political divisions could be solved in the great national equation". The idea of a Volksgemeinschaft was rooted in the notion of uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose, and the hope that national unity would "obliterate all conflicts - between employers and employees, town and countryside, producers and consumers, industry and craft".
Hans von Tschammer und Osten was a German sport official, SA leader and a member of the Reichstag for the Nazi Party of Nazi Germany. He was married to Sophie Margarethe von Carlowitz.
Das Schwarze Korps was the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel (SS). This newspaper was published on Wednesdays and distributed free of charge. All SS members were encouraged to read it. The chief editor was SS leader Gunter d'Alquen; the publisher was Max Amann of the Franz-Eher-Verlag publishing company. The paper was hostile to many groups, with frequent articles condemning the Catholic Church, Jews, Communism, Freemasonry, and others.
Blood and soil is a nationalist slogan expressing Nazi Germany's ideal of a racially defined national body ("blood") united with a settlement area ("soil"). By it, rural and farm life forms are idealized as a counterweight to urban ones. It is tied to the contemporaneous German concept of Lebensraum, the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and displacing the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost.
Rassenschande or Blutschande was an anti-miscegenation concept in Nazi German racial policy, pertaining to sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was put into practice by policies like the Aryan certificate requirement, and later by anti-miscegenation laws such as the Nuremberg Laws, adopted unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. Initially, these laws referred predominantly to relations between ethnic Germans and non-Aryans, regardless of citizenship. In the early stages the culprits were targeted informally; later, they were punished systematically and legally.
The propaganda used by the German Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship of Germany from 1933 to 1945 was a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of Nazi policies.
The Nazi Party adopted and developed several racist Scientific and Philosophical racial classifications as part of its ideology (Nazism) in order to justify the genocide of groups of people which it deemed racially inferior. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race", and they considered black people, mixed-race people, Slavs, Roma, Jews and other ethnic groups racially inferior "sub-humans", whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of 19th-century anthropology, scientific racism and anti-semitism.
The Office of Racial Policy was a department of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) that was founded for "unifying and supervising all indoctrination and propaganda work in the field of population and racial politics". It began in 1933 as the Nazi Party Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare. By 1935, it had been renamed to the Nazi Party Office of Racial Policy.
The Reich Federation of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers was an organization of German-Jewish soldiers founded in February 1919 by Leo Löwenstein in the aftermath of World War I to demonstrate Jewish loyalty to the former German Empire and German nationalism.
The SS Race and Settlement Main Office was the organization responsible for "safeguarding the racial 'purity' of the SS" within Nazi Germany.
The National Socialist League of the Reich for Physical Exercise was the umbrella organization for sports and physical education in Nazi Germany. The NSRL was known as the German League of the Reich for Physical Exercise until 1938. The organization was expanded to Austria after that country's annexation by Nazi Germany.
The Deutsches Turn- und Sportfest was the last big sports event organized by the Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, the Sports governing body of the Third Reich. It took place in Breslau the most important city of Silesia, now in Poland. The venue was staged in July 1938 at the city's Hermann Göring Stadium, later renamed "Stadion Olimpijski", following the trademark grandiose style of the Nazi Sports Body.
Reichsbund der Kinderreichen, Reich's Union of Large Families or literally: Reich's League of those wealthy in children, was one of the most important pronatalist groups founded in Germany after World War I. To qualify as a member of this league a family should have at least four children. Widows were also admitted.
The propaganda of the Nazi regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945 promoted Nazi ideology by demonizing the enemies of the Nazi Party, notably Jews and communists, but also capitalists and intellectuals. It promoted the values asserted by the Nazis, including heroic death, Führerprinzip, Volksgemeinschaft, Blut und Boden and pride in the Germanic Herrenvolk. Propaganda was also used to maintain the cult of personality around Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and to promote campaigns for eugenics and the annexation of German-speaking areas. After the outbreak of World War II, Nazi propaganda vilified Germany's enemies, notably the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States, and in 1943 exhorted the population to total war.
Women in Nazi Germany were subject to doctrines of Nazism by the Nazi Party (NSDAP), which promoted exclusion of women from the political life of Germany as well as its executive body and executive committees. On the other hand, whether through sheer numbers, lack of local organization, or both, many German women did indeed become Nazi Party members. In spite of this, the Nazi regime officially permitted and encouraged women to fill the roles of mother and wife only. Women were excluded from all positions of responsibility, notably in the political and academic spheres.
Marriage loans were part of the promotion of the family in Nazi Germany. Instituted in 1933, they were offered to newlywed couples in the form of vouchers for household goods, initially on the condition that the woman stopped working. Unless the husband's earnings were very low, interest rates on the loans continued to be lower if only he worked; and one-quarter of the principal was forgiven for each child.
The Reich Bride Schools were institutions established in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. They were created to train young women to be "perfect Nazi brides", indoctrinated in Nazi ideology and educated in housekeeping skills. The fiancées of prominent SS members and senior Nazi Party officials were taught skills including cooking, child care, ironing and to how to polish their husbands' uniforms and daggers. They were required to swear oaths of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, to pledge to raise their children as Nazis and to marry in what the Nazis alleged to be ceremonies based on pre-Christian model—ceremonies that Nazi officials presided over, rather than ceremonies in churches.
Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück was the alias of Hans Schmitz was a German painter of sacral, peasant and Nazi propaganda arts. He belonged to the Wiedenbrücker Schule school of arts.