Was Adolph Hitler & The Third Reich "Pro-Life"?

[Leo 9]

From The Global Library of Women's Medicine

History of Contraception


INTERNATIONAL INTEREST AND NATIONAL POLICIES

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Tragically, the rise of Hitler extinguished these few sparks of national and international awareness of the need for family planning services. Authoritarian regimes always seem to find it particularly difficult to accept the individual need for family planning, and Hitler's Third Reich invaded the bedrooms of its citizens before it moved its troops into Sudetenland and Poland. Within months of coming to power in 1933, the Nazis forbade the display of contraceptives and all birth control clinics were closed.88 Contraception was labeled the “by-product of the asphalt civilization,” and Hitler himself described it as “violation of nature, as degradation of womanhood, motherhood and love.” Abortions were termed “acts of sabotage against Germany's racial future,” and prosecutions of abortion providers jumped 50% between 1934 and 1938. Attempts were made to register pregnancies, and in 1943, Germany at war across the world still found time to pass legislation introducing the death penalty for abortion providers whom “continually impaired the vitality of the German people by such deeds.” The regime that produced the concentration camps also sent a French laundress to the guillotine in February 1942 for performing abortions.32 Yet despite these ferocious measures, the number of illegal abortions seems to have risen.

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http://www.glowm.com/index.html?p=glowm.cml/section_view&articleid=375

[baldguy]

1. In the same sense that Bush & the GOP are "pro-life".

[Leo 9]

4. From WomensStudies/ReadingRoom

"Nazi ideals demand that the practice of abortion ... shall be
exterminated with a strong hand. Women inflamed by Marxist
propaganda claim the right to bear children ONLY WHEN THEY DESIRE.
First furs, radio, new furniture, then perhaps one child....
"The use of contraceptives (by Aryan women) means a violation of
nature, a degradation of womanhood, motherhood, and love."
-- Adolph Hitler, dictator of Germany, who instituted the "Honor
Cross of the German Mother."

In Italy, dictator Mussolini proclaimed Christmas Day, 1933 as "Day
of the Mother and Child," and mothers who had borne 14 to 19 children
were given the opportunity to meet the dictator and be given a medal
and a copy of Pope Pius XI's encyclical which condemned
contraceptives, abortion, sex in marriage that didn't have procreation
as its aim, and the employment of married women.

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/History/WOAH/95-02/02-07-95

[fascisthunter]

2. is the Right Wing Pro-Life?

because they don't act like it... instead they seem to love death and destruction just as the Nazis did.

[Leo 9]

9. In some ways they could also be called very "Pro-Family".

PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS IN THE THIRD REICH

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The destruction of the Institute was a first step toward eradicating an openly gay or lesbian culture from Germany. Police closed bars and clubs such as the "Eldorado" and banned publications such as Die Freundschaft (Friendship). In this early stage the Nazis drove homosexuals underground, destroying their networks of support. In 1934, the Gestapo (secret state police) instructed local police forces to keep lists of all men engaged in homosexual activities. Police in many parts of Germany had in fact been doing this for years. The Nazis used these "pink lists" to hunt down individual homosexuals during police actions.


On June 28, 1935, the Ministry of Justice revised Paragraph 175. The revisions provided a legal basis for extending Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Ministry officials expanded the category of "criminally indecent activities between men" to include any act that could be construed as homosexual. The courts later decided that even intent or thought sufficed. On October 26, 1936, Himmler formed within the Security Police the Reich Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. Josef Meisinger, executed in 1947 for his brutality in occupied Poland, led the new office. The police had powers to hold in protective custody or preventive arrest those deemed dangerous to Germany's moral fiber, jailing indefinitely--without trial--anyone they chose. In addition, homosexual prisoners just released from jail were immediately re-arrested and sent to concentration camps if the police thought it likely that they would continue to engage in homosexual acts.

From 1937 to 1939, the peak years of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the police increasingly raided homosexual meeting places, seized address books, and created networks of informers and undercover agents to identify and arrest suspected homosexuals. On April 4, 1938, the Gestapo issued a directive indicating that men convicted of homosexuality could be incarcerated in concentration camps. Between 1933 and 1945 the police arrested an estimated 100,000 men as homosexuals. Most of the 50,000 men sentenced by the courts spent time in regular prisons, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were interned in concentration camps.

The Nazis interned some homosexuals in concentration camps immediately after the seizure of power in January 1933. Those interned came from all areas of German society, and often had only the cause of their imprisonment in common. Some homosexuals were interned under other categories by mistake, and the Nazis purposefully miscategorized some political prisoners as homosexuals. Prisoners marked by pink triangles to signify homosexuality were treated harshly in the camps. According to many survivor accounts, homosexuals were among the most abused groups in the camps.

Because some Nazis believed homosexuality was a sickness that could be cured, they designed policies to "cure" homosexuals of their "disease" through humiliation and hard work. Guards ridiculed and beat homosexual prisoners upon arrival, often separating them from other inmates. Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in his memoirs that homosexuals were segregated in order to prevent homosexuality from spreading to other inmates and guards. Personnel in charge of work details in the Dora-Mittelbau underground rocket factory or in the stone quarries at Flossenbürg and Buchenwald often gave deadly assignments to homosexuals.

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http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?ModuleId=10005261

[Taverner]

3. For Germans, yes. For others, NO.

[Leo 9]

5. Of course if you were not favored by them...

Doctors, Pregnancy, Childbirth and Abortion during the Third Reich
Tessa Chelouche MD

Clalit Health Services, Shomron District, Israel
Affiliated to Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel

Program for the Study of Medicine and the Holocaust, Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology; and
Department for Healthcare, Ethics and the Holocaust, International Center for Health, Law and Ethics, Haifa University, Israel

This paper does not attempt to deal with the legitimate ethical or
moral debate on abortion. Utilizing abortion as a subject I will show
how science and medicine in general, and abortion in particular,
were used as weapons of mass destruction by Nazi physicians in
their zeal to comply with the political climate of the time. Nazi policy
on abortion and childbirth was just one of the methods devised and
designed to ensure the extermination of those whom the Nazis
deemed had “lives not worth living.” Physicians implemented
these policies, not with the fate of their patients in mind, but rather
in the name of the “state.” When discussing pregnancy, abortion
and childbirth during the Holocaust it is imperative to include an
essay of how these issues affected the Jewish prisoner doctors in
the ghettos and camps. Nazi policy dictated their actions too. From
an extensive search of their testimonies, I conclude that for these
doctors ethical discourse comprised a fundamental component of
their functioning. I do not propose to judge them in any way and
one should not, in my opinion, argue whether their behavior was
or was not morally acceptable under such duress; nevertheless,
unlike their Nazi counterparts, a key theme in their testimonies was
to “keep their medical values.”
IMAJ 2007;9:202–206

snip

http://www.ima.org.il/imaj/ar07mar-23.pdf

[Leo 9]

7. In the words of the historian Myrna Goldberg:

In the words of the historian Myrna Goldberg: “For men and women
who suffered during the long years of the Holocaust, the hell was
the same, but the horrors were different.” Under the Nazi regime
certain women, those considered racially and hereditarily pure,
counted merely as mothers who should bear and rear as many
children as possible. On the other side of the scale was the
Nazis’ determination to exclude other women, those considered
of “inferior stock,” from bearing and raising children. Nazi sexism
was irrevocably intertwined with Nazi racism, and all women
were subjected to the Nazis’ double-edged policy.

http://www.ima.org.il/imaj/ar07mar-23.pdf

[Jeeskah]

6. I've got the right word

Pro-death.

[Leo 9]

8. Yet they were decidedly anti-abortion, anti contraception "pro-lifers"

when it came to their own.

They'd fit right in with the save the fertilized egg wackos of today.