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Mother’s Day Observation and the German Reich

Mother’s Day (Muttertag) was first mentioned in the international Mennonitische Rundschau in May 1912. By 1936, the Rundschau published a Mother’s Day poem by Hitler for its largely Canadian Mennonite readership (note 1). Five years later Mennonites in Ukraine were drawn into the cult-like veneration of the German mother.

With falling birth rates in Germany in the 1920s, National Socialism co-opted marriage and motherhood politically. Mother’s Day became a German national holiday in 1934, and any private family purposes of the day were subordinated to the political purposes of Party and nation:

“The German people will acknowledge their indebtedness to the racially pure, biologically sound and fecund German family (zur artreinen, erbgesunden und kinderreichen deutschen Familie) … and will accordingly observe the day as a day of honour to the German mother as the preserver and caregiver of a proud progeny (Hüterin und Pflegerin eines stolzen Nachwuchses). Our schoolchildren should understand the responsible task to which they are called as future bearers of a typical German family life, and learn again to honour the mothers of our people and serve them with gratitude.”—Decree for Mother’s Day Observance (Note 2)

In 1941 Germany invaded the USSR and occupied Ukraine. Some 35,000 Mennonites came under German authority. The mothers and children were explicitly introduced to the Nazified versions of motherhood and teachings in Party-controlled newspapers for ethnic Germans in Ukraine—basically, on women’s role in “protection against the decay of the people: care of race and heredity” (note 3).

Party members deployed in Ukraine organized celebrations in honour of ethnic German mothers. “On this occasion, the meaning and significance of the larger National Socialist community was explained to the ethnic German mothers. The mothers were presented with bouquets of flowers by members of the German youth in Ukraine,” according to the newspaper distributed in the Mennonite villages.

The same newspaper also summarized the official Mother’s Day national radio broadcasts from Berlin that year:

“The German woman in particular knows what Bolshevism means for the family, whose center and soul is the mother. ... After the victory the German woman and mother will be able to devote herself again to her original task. ... Beside those fighting on the front, nothing in a people is stronger than its mothers.” (Note 4)

At district and town celebrations of the German mother in Ukraine, a speaker would normally recite Hitler’s comments on the mother’s role in the German Reich for “up-building of the Volk” and the recovery of the nation:

“What the man gives in heroic-courage on the battlefield, the woman gives in eternally patient devotion, in eternally patient suffering and endurance. Every child that she brings into the world is a battle which she wages for the being or non-being of her Volk. And both must therefore mutually value and respect each other when they recognize that each performs the task that Nature and Providence have ordained.” (Note 5)


In September 1942, the regional weekly Deutsche Post [Ukraine] ran an article on the historical achievements of the German colonies in Ukraine and praised their “amazing racial-biological prowess” and for achieving the highest birth rates of all European peoples. They are “perhaps the strongest and clearest proof of the inexhaustible power of German racial ethnicity which, even detached from the actual mother soil, again and again renewed itself from itself” (note 6).

In predominantly Mennonite Molotschna settlement area no one was made more famous than the 84-year-old Mennonite midwife “Mutter Berg” (Helene Berg). During the visit of Reichsführer-SS Himmler to Halbstadt October 31 to November 1, 1942, Mother Berg was honoured for helping birth some 8,000 ethnic German babies over a lifetime—the midwife and mother of a people! She had opportunity to give hospitality in her home to high-ranking Nazi officials—including SS Obersturmführer Dr. Gerhard Wolfrum (note 7)—and was given a small cameo appearance in a German propaganda film of the Halbstadt area (note 8). Over the next two years, Wolfrum “emphatically” sought to honour her with a secure retirement and through her honour the Black Sea German Mennonites on behalf of the Reichsführer-SS (note 9).

The ostensibly conservative concept of motherhood placed a woman’s highest call in connection to the “motherhood of the people,” that is, above the parenthood of their real, living children. Hand-in-hand with this cult of German motherhood was the growth of eugenic counselling, i.e., the sterilization or killing of those determined to have heritable diseases or “deficiencies” or deformities. Individuals with some of these conditions are noted in Stumpp’s village reports for easy identification and remedial action (note 10). Mennonite physician Dr. Johann J. Klassen of Muntau (Halbstadt) was accused after the war of supporting the liquidation of handicapped children and adults in Orloff, November 1941 (note 11). At the district School for the Deaf in Tiege, near Orloff, a memorial stands today for 131 deaf and mute children who were killed by the Nazis (note 12).

The confusion came not only from official propaganda, but from the new church contacts as well. Mennonite pastors from the Reich also spoke of “racial contamination,” “healthy breeding” (note 13) and of the threats of self-centred, Volk-destructive individualism to a woman’s “highest and holiest determination” (note 14).

After Mennonites and other Black Sea Germans were evacuated from Ukraine in 1943 and planted in German-annexed Poland in 1944, my grandmother Helene Thiessen Bräul was “honoured” at a public event recognizing mothers—in her case for the number of sons she had in the army. She was presented with a large portrait of Hitler. She embodied the pragmatic Nazi view of a Volksdeutsche-woman: a sturdy peasant who bore many strong children, kept the race pure and worked the land. But Helene and her generation were not easily excitable about honours, though she was anxious of the consequences of not hanging up the portrait. She told her daughters “I do not want that portrait; I just want our boys back.” At least that’s how my mother tells the story.

My grandmother was caught up in a worldview not of her own making. She like so many other Mennonite mothers was primarily concerned about two things: the survival of her children, and repatriation and not falling back again into the hands of Stalin.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Pic: Advertisement for Mother's Day event, Deutsche Bug-Zeitung [Ukraine] 2, no. 43 (May 15, 1943), 4, https://libraria.ua/all-titles/group/1/.

Note 1: Mennonitische Rundschau 35, no. 19 (May 8 1912), 2, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1912-05-08_35_19/page/n1/mode/2up; also vol. 59, no. 50 (December 9, 1936), 11, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1936-12-09_59_50/page/n11/.

Note 2: Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister for Science, Art and National Education, “Gedenk- und Ehrentag der Deutschen Mütter,” Zentralblatt für die gesamte Unterrichtsverwaltung in Preußen, no. 8, April 1934; cf. also Adolf Hitler, “Die völkische Sendung der Frau,” in N.S. Frauenbuch, edited by Ellen Semmelroth and Renata von Stieda (Munich: Lehmanns, 1934), 11, https://archive.org/details/SemmelrothEllenUndStiedaRenateVonN.S.Frauenbuch1934287S.ScanFraktur/page/n9/mode/2up.

Note 3: “Schutz vor Volkszerfall: Rassen- und Erbpflege,” Ukraine Post, no. 6 (February 27, 1943), 4, https://libraria.ua/all-titles/group/878/.

Note 4: Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 2, no. 114 (May 18, 1943), 2, 3, https://libraria.ua/all-titles/group/875/; Deutsche Bug-Zeitung 2, no. 46 (June 12, 1943), 3, https://libraria.ua/all-titles/group/1/.

Note 5: Hitler, “Die völkische Sendung der Frau,” 11.

Note 6: “Deutsche Leistung in der Ukraine,” Ukraine Post 1, no. 11 (September 26, 1942), 3f., 

Note 7: Cf. Benjamin H. Unruh to Hans Epp [former Chortitza district mayor], December 5, 1943, Vereinigung Collection 1943, Mennonitische Forschungsstelle Weierhof (MFW); Benjamin H. Unruh to Gustav Reimer, December 5, 1943; and Benjamin H. Unruh to Emil Händiges, November 18, 1943; Vereinigung Collection 1943, MFW.

Note 8: See archival video footage of Helene Berg at Halbstadt in the summer of 1943, http://www.archiv-akh.de/filme?utf-8=%E2%9C%93&q=halbstadt#1.

Note 9: Gustav Reimer to Benjamin H. Unruh, December 20, 1943, Vereinigung Collection 1943, MFW Cf. also Unruh to Epp, December 5, 1943.

Note 10: Maria Fiebrandt, Auslese für die Siedlergesellschaft. Die Einbeziehung Volksdeutscher in die NS-Erbgesundheitspolitik im Kontext der Umsiedlungen 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 51. The “Neu-Chortitza Dorfbericht,” 261, May 1942, in “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp,” Bundesarchiv R6/623, file 184, singles out a Braun family for “marriage among relatives” and where “all three children are intellectually disabled (Idioten).” Nothing is noted about their fate, https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_623+Rayon%3A+Sofijevka%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Pjatichatki%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk+Dorf%3A+Neu-Chortitza%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Nowo-Chortitza+&p=R_6_623%5C%D1%823_510-593%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=21. Similarly a son of Peter Martens in “Gnadental (Rayon Sofiewka) Dorfbericht,” May 1942,” Familienverzeichnis, 480, “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp,” BArch R6/623, Mappe 182, https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_623+Gebiet%3A+Zwischen%0D%0ARayon%3A+Sofievka%0D%0A%5BKreisgebiet%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Pjatichatki%5D%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk+Dorf%3A+Gnadental%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Wodjanaja&p=R_6_623%5C%D1%824_945-1037%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=22.

Note 11: Cf. Dmytro Myeshkov, “Mennonites in Ukraine before, during, and immediately after the Second World War,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, edited by Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 217.

Note 12: After the war, the local townspeople erected a memorial to those who died at the school (Eva Chamberlain Martens, email communication with author, May 20, 2019). When the Nazis arrived at this school, students “were marched to the field behind the school and shot.”

Note 13: Cf. Krefeld Pastor Gustav Kraemer, Wir und unsere Volksgemeinschaft, 1938. Lecture delivered in Heubuden, West Prussia, January 25, 1938 (Krefeld: Consistorium der Mennonitengemeinde Krefeld, 1938), 8, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1938,%20Kraemer%20Wir%20und%20unsere%20Volksgemeinschaft/.

Note 13: Horst Quiring, Grundworte des Glaubens. Achtzig wichtige biblische Begriffe für den Menschen der Gegenwart dargestellt (Berlin: Furche, 1938), 58, 147, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1938,%20Quiring,%20Grundworte%20des%20Glaubens/, 58, 147. This is consistent with themes repeated in the press and in official speeches on “German Women.”

For further reading:

Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: A Study of Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics. London: Routledge, 2013.

Mouton, Michelle. From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Stephenson, Jill. The Nazi Organisation of Women. London: Routledge, 2013.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Mother's Day Observation and the German Reich," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 25, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/mothers-day-observation-and-german-reich.html.

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