Social Policy and Practice

To further incentivize motherhood, the Mother's Cross was awarded annually on August 12, giving gold to mothers of eight or more children. Meanwhile, the German Women’s Enterprise (DFW) absorbed all Weimar-era women's groups to centralize state control. Heinrich Himmler also launched the Lebensborn program in 1935, pairing SS men with single Aryan women to create "genetically pure" children.

Initially, policies appeared successful as live births rose from under 1 million in 1933 to 1.4 million in 1939. However, the economic reality of rearmament forced a reversal. By 1937, the "no-work" rule for marriage loans was scrapped, and by 1943, women aged 17–45 had to register for work. Ultimately, ideology was sacrificed for wartime needs, with female employment rising from 11.6 million in 1933 to 14.6 million in 1939.

Control Over Young People and Education

If you want to control the future of a country, you start by controlling what its children learn.

The Nazis used Gleichschaltung to align schools completely with Nazi ideology. The 1933 Civil Service Law purged Jewish or "politically unreliable" teachers, and remaining staff had to swear an oath to Hitler and join the National Socialist Teachers' League. Education Minister Bernhard Rust ensured the curriculum was entirely focused on indoctrination. PE was increased to 15% of school time to build physical strength, while Biology became a vehicle for Race Studies (Rassenkunde) to classify the Aryan race. Elite boarding schools called Napolas were established by the SS to train future leaders.

Outside school, the state mandated participation in specific gendered organizations. Boys joined the Deutsches Jungvolk (DJ) (ages 10–14) and the Hitler Youth (ages 14–18), focusing on military preparation like rifle practice and 12-mile marches. Girls joined the League of German Maidens (BDM), focusing on health, needlework, and physical fitness to prepare for motherhood.

The 1936 Hitler Youth Law and a strict 1939 order made membership mandatory, pushing numbers to 8.8 million by 1939. However, youth resistance still emerged. The working-class Edelweiss Pirates physically attacked Hitler Youth members, while the middle-class Swing Youth rebelled by embracing American jazz culture.

Churches and Religion

A totalitarian state demands complete loyalty from its citizens. The Nazis faced a major obstacle because 95% of Germans already gave their ultimate loyalty to God.

Hitler initially sought cooperation with the Catholic Church, signing the Concordat with the Pope in July 1933. The Catholic Church agreed to stay out of politics, disbanding the Centre Party, while Hitler promised to protect Catholic schools. However, the Nazis soon violated this by arresting priests and closing schools. In 1937, the Pope issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge to criticize Nazi racial ideology. Catholic resistance continued, notably when Bishop Galen's 1941 sermons forced the state to temporarily hide the T4 Euthanasia program.

The Nazis centralized Protestant groups into the Reich Church, promoting Positive Christianity—a sanitized version of faith blending religion with racial purity. In response, Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer formed the breakaway Confessional Church in 1934 to oppose state interference. While the Nazis pushed their own pagan German Faith Movement, it remained a small minority, capturing only 3.5% of the population. Ultimately, the Nazis neutralized the churches politically but failed to destroy personal religious identity.

Aryan Ideas, Racial Policy, and Persecution

Genocide does not begin with gas chambers; it begins with words, laws, and the gradual exclusion of a targeted group from society.

The foundation of Nazi policy was the belief in a Herrenvolk of Aryans, superior to Untermenschen like Jews, Roma, and Slavs. The goal was to create a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft. Persecution began in 1933 with a national boycott of Jewish businesses and the sacking of Jewish civil servants.

The legal turning point was the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of their citizenship, turning them into "subjects" without voting rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour banned marriage and intercourse between Jews and Germans.

The shift from legal discrimination to state-sanctioned violence culminated in Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938). Coordinated by Goebbels, this pogrom resulted in up to 100 murdered Jews, 7,500 destroyed businesses, over 200 burned synagogues, and 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps.

The state also targeted non-Jewish minorities. The Roma and Sinti were interned in camps from 1936. Homosexuals were persecuted under Paragraph 175, with 15,000 sent to camps wearing a pink triangle. Disabled people faced forced sterilization under 1933 laws, and those deemed Asocial were rounded up and imprisoned.

The Final Solution

By 1942, the Nazi state transformed its policy of persecution into a systematic, industrialized mechanism of mass murder.

Initially, the Nazis used mobile death squads (Einsatzgruppen) for mass shootings in Eastern Europe. However, to increase "efficiency" and reduce the psychological toll on SS soldiers, policy shifted toward the Final Solution. On 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference. This meeting did not make the initial decision to commit genocide, but it coordinated the state bureaucracy to systematically murder an estimated 11 million European Jews.

Under Operation Reinhardt, the Nazis built dedicated Extermination camps in occupied Poland, such as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The state industrialised murder using Zyklon B gas (which was tested at Auschwitz in 1941) and coordinated the railway network to transport victims from across Europe to their deaths.