Neues Volk

Neues Volk
"60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow Germans, that is your money, too. Read 'New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the Nazi Party."

Neues Volk was the monthly publication of the Office of Racial Policy in Nazi Germany.[1] Founded by Walter Gross in 1933, it was a mass-market, illustrated magazine.[2] It aimed at a wide audience, achieving a circulation of 300,000.[1] It appeared in physicians' waiting rooms, libraries, and schools, as well as in private homes.[2]

Its subject matter was the "excellence" of the Aryan race and the "deficiencies" of Jews, Poles, and other groups.[1] Articles ranged from profiles of Mussolini, reports on Hitler Youth camps, and travel tips, but eugenic and racial propaganda continued throughout it.[3] The first six issues presented solely ethnic pride, before bringing up any topic on "undesirables."[4] In the next issue, one article presented the types of the "Criminal Jew" surrounded by images of the ideal Aryan, which generally predominated.[4] Such articles continued, showing such things as demographic charts showing the decline of farmland (with generous Aryan families) and deploring that the Jews were eradicating traditional German peasantry.[4]

It included articles defending eugenic sterilization.[5] Photographs of mentally incapicated children were juxtaposed with those of healthy children.[4] It also presented images of ideal Aryan families[6] and ridiculed childless couples.[7] After the inception of the Nuremburg Laws it urged that Germans show no sympathy for Jews and presented articles to show Jewish life still flourishing.[8] By the mid-1930's, it had doubled its pages and greatly increased its discussion of Jews.[9] Other articles described the conditions under which Hitler would be a child's godfather,[10] discussed the importance of giving children Germanic names, answered racial questions from readers — marriage between a Chinese man and a German woman was impossible, despite the woman's pregnancy, and they had seen to it that the man's residence permit was revoked, and even an infertile German woman can not marry a half-Jew, but a Dutch woman, if she had neither Jewish nor colored blood, was acceptable — praised German farming in contrast to French, declared art was determined by racial world-views, and many other topics.[1]

See also

Notes and References

  1. ^ a b c d "Neues Volk"
  2. ^ a b Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p. 117. ISBN 0-674-01172-4.
  3. ^ Koonz, p. 117-9.
  4. ^ a b c d Koonz, p. 119.
  5. ^ "Women Who May Not Be Allowed to become Mothers"
  6. ^ "Fascism and the Cult of the Nation"
  7. ^ Koonz, p. 117.
  8. ^ Koonz, p. 121.
  9. ^ Koonz, p. 198.
  10. ^ "The Führer as Godfather"
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