This book explores Weimar and Nazi family policy to highlight the disparity between national policy design and its implementation at the local level.

Telling the stories of mothers, fathers and children in their own words, Vaizey recreates the experience of family life in Nazi Germany. From last letters of doomed soldiers at Stalingrad to diaries kept by women trying to keep their families alive in cities under attack, the book vividly describes family life under the most extreme conditions.

About the participation of German women in World War II and in the Holocaust.

Government sponsored breeding programs, medals of motherhood, forced abortions, and surgical sterilization on park benches--all of these policies have come out of government efforts to nationalize sex and harness procreation as a tool of the state. Over 170 countries (or 85% of governments) worldwide have active policies designed to manipulate the fertility of their citizenry with the aim of influencing the rate of growth of their populations. While over 90% of least developed states are trying to combat population growth with policies designed to reduce fertility, over two-thirds of all developed countries are actively crafting legislation to increase their populations. Despite over a hundred years of relative failure and innumerable studies questioning the viability and utility of government attempts to manipulate the fertility rate of the population as a whole, the majority of governments worldwide continue to uphold and develop such policies. What drives government to try to control how many children people will have? Nationalizing Sex traces why population emerged as an object of governance and how natalist policy has changed over time and place, using case studies from France, Germany, Russia, India, and China. It analyzes the origins, growth, and development of fertility as a national and international political issue, the rise and fall of the narratives used to ascribe meaning to natality, and the global proliferation of oddly similar policies adopted by widely dissimilar states. As importantly, it explains why, after hundreds of years, countries continue to pursue natalist policy even though it has been such a widespread failure.

This book is the first comprehensive survey of women in the Weimar Republic, exploring the diversity and multiplicity of women’s experiences in the economy, politics and society. Taking the First World War as a starting point, this book explores the great changes in the lives, expectations, and perceptions of German women, with new opportunities in employment, education and political life and greater freedoms in their private and social life, all played out in the media spotlight. Engaging with the most recent research and debates, this book portrays the Weimar Republic as a period of progressive change for young, urban women, to be stalled in 1933. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of German women in the early twentieth century, and will also appeal to anyone interested in the Weimar Republic and women’s history.

The challenges of post-war recovery from social and political reform to architectural design In the months and years immediately following the First World War, the many (European) countries that had formed its battleground were confronted with daunting challenges. These challenges varied according to the countries' earlier role and degree of involvement in the war but were without exception enormous. The contributors to this book analyse how this was not only a matter of rebuilding ravaged cities and destroyed infrastructure, but also of repairing people’s damaged bodies and upended daily lives, and rethinking and reforming societal, economic and political structures. These processes took place against the backdrop of mass mourning and remembrance, political violence and economic crisis. At the same time, the post-war tabula rasa offered many opportunities for innovation in various areas of society, from social and political reform to architectural design. The wide scope of post-war recovery and revival is reflected in the different sections of this book: rebuild, remember, repair, and reform. It offers insights into post-war revival in Western European countries such as Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, as well as into how their efforts were perceived outside of Europe, for instance in Argentina and the United States.

This text explores Germany's role in the two world wars and the Cold War to analyze the food economy of the twentieth century. It argues that controlling food supply and determining how and what people ate shaped the course of these three wars

No one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust. What was going on in the heads and hearts of the millions of Germans who either participated in or condoned the murder of the Jews? In this provocative book, Thomas Kuhne offers a new answer. A genocidal society was created not only by the hatred of Jews or by coercion, Kuhne contends, but also by the love of Germans for one another, their desire for a united "people's community," the Volksgemeinschaft. During the Third Reich, Germans learned to connect with one another by becoming brother and sisters in mass crime.

How does ideology in some states radicalise to such an extent as to become genocidal? Can the causes of radicalisation be seen as internal or external? Examining the ideological evolution in the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and during the break up of Yugoslavia, Elisabeth Hope Murray seeks to answer these questions in this comparative work.