Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney (review)

With Marriage and Fatherhood in the SS, Amy Carney argues that the SS functioned as a family community designed to propagate a racially elite aristocracy destined to lead the Third Reich into the future. In so doing, she makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the SS and Nazi family politics. Most studies of the SS focus on its organization and the role of its soldiers in the Nazis' devastating war. Carney, however, directs her attention to the family lives of the SS. She demonstrates convincingly that Heinrich Himmler and his men regarded the SS a biologically superior community of husbands, wives, and children. Moreover, unlike most treatments of families in the Nazi era, which concentrate solely on mothers, Carney's work evaluates the role of fathers within the individual family and the larger SS community. She grounds her interpretation in an impressive array of policies and directives but also goes further, using case studies to illustrate how SS men and their partners both embraced and pushed back against official commands. Carney thus demonstrates that SS members and their superiors entered into a complex dialogue as they worked out just what membership in the SS family community entailed.

Carney begins with a detailed analysis of Himmler's 1931 engagement and marriage command. Months before an SS man proposed marriage, he and his prospective bride had to document their racial lineage. Carney situates the command within the context of eugenic principles that predated the Third Reich. By tracing their family genealogy back at least six generations and submitting numerous other documents, the SS man and his fiancée proved their racial qualifications to themselves and to the SS authorities. Those found to be racially compromised with Jewish ancestors or family members suffering from proscribed medical conditions, and those who refused to comply with the command, were dismissed from the SS. Approval, however, represented the couple's entry into the SS family community. Engagement, marriage, and other rituals connected the couple and their offspring to the husband's unit and to the SS community. The SS also offered modest monetary benefits to families with many children, and both marriage and fatherhood helped advance SS men's careers.

Fatherhood, argues Carney, became a key function of the SS man and an expression of his loyalty to his Führer and race. Educational materials explained that the battle for the cradle was part and parcel of the SS mission. Men were repeatedly encouraged to produce large families with at least four children. Engagement, marriage, and birth announcements published in SS newspapers served as constant reminders of men's responsibilities to carry their families' lineage into the future. Yet Carney shows that SS fatherhood meant more than simply producing offspring. Fathers were expected to play an active role in the lives of their children. The author provides photographs taken from SS publications to illustrate SS concepts of fatherhood. They showed SS officers happily embracing their children, diapering babies, pushing prams, and feeding infants. Letters home, while at times formulaic, also reflected fathers' genuine love for their wives and children. Each of these individual families, explained SS literature, belonged to the SS family community. Even at the death of an SS man, the community continued to ensure his widow and children would be cared for and remain part of the larger SS family.

Despite all of its efforts, however, the SS failed to win the battle of the cradle. Carney ends her work with a nuanced consideration of this failure. As she notes, only a small percentage of SS families had more than one or two children. By the end of the war, the age of SS men had declined so much that many were too young to even marry. Although Himmler did provide men with leaves timed to their wives' reproductive cycles, to conceive children, and his Lebensborn program offered childless couples the option to adopt, SS couples...