social policy and practise under the nazis

• nazis promoted traditional family values
• Kinder, Kirche, Kuche

  children, church, kitchen
• needed to increase the birth rate - meant stopping career driven women
• mothers cross - an award for having 4 or more children
• using contraception or having abortions were banned
• the german womens league ran motherhood training classes
• a loan of 1000 marks was given to newlyweds. each child they had 250 marks didnt have to be paid back
• 'eugenics' - taught students about how the aryan race was superior to jews and black people
• indoctrination

  • textbooks were rewritten
  • teachers who refused were sacked
  • physics courses couldn't include einstein's theory of relativity because he was jewish
• the hitler youth

  became compulsory in 1939
• girls learned how to:

  • cook
  • look after babies
  • prepare for motherhood
• church

  • catholics were against hitler
  • 'german christians' - protestants for hitler, they admired his views on marriage and moral values
  • some protestants were against hitler, the Confessing Church was banned
• 'undesirables' weakened germany and had to be removed from society

  • homeless/beggars/alcoholics - worked to death
  • homosexuals - arrested
  • Jehovah Witnesses (pacifists)
  • disabled - forcibly sterilised by the nazis or murdered
• jewish persecution gradually increased during the 1930s

  • jewish lawyers and judges were sacked
  • nuremberg laws
  • banned from owning electrical equipment, typewriters and bicycles
  • jews and non jewish children seperated in schools
  • curfews
• kristallnacht

  a campaign of terror led by goebbels and the SS

  jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked

  jews were killed and sent to concentration camps
• holocaust - final solution

  discussed to kill jews as quickly and as cheap as possible
• propaganda - goebbels

  all films had to be approved by him

  had to have a pro nazi message

  in newspapers negative stories about jews were encouraged
• olympic games were held in berlin 1936

  showed the world how advanced and modern germany was
• chamber of culture - 1933
• SS - hitlers bodyguards at first then started running concentration camps
• gestapo - secret police

  • didnt wear uniforms
  • spied on people
  • targeted the undesirables
• edelweiss pirates

  sang songs banned by nazis
• jewish resistance

  • some jews blew up railway lines
  • was punished ruthlessly
• the white rose group - uni students

  nonviolent resistance

  handed out anti nazi leaflets
• july 1944 bomb plot


  • stauffenberg detonated a bomb in a meeting of officers where hitler was present. he was executed for it along with 5000 other men