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| Illustration and caption from Scientific American, December 2003. |
The text below is based on a booklet originally published with official approval of the NSDAP in 1935. Translation by Hadding Scott, 2014.
Already in the very near future that we ourselves shall live to see, if the process continues in the same way, after the initial decline in births a more obvious decline in the total population must necessarily follow, which then in a few decades will inevitably call forth the menace to the weal and woe and the existence of all. History tolerates no empty or weakly populated spaces, and the pressure of Slavdom’s politics of population can become a menace to the existence of the German nation. This menace cannot be escaped even by one who believes that he is acting especially cleverly today when he says, My child should someday have it easier than I. This way of thinking is shortsighted and, if it is not prevented from continuing to influence how the future unfolds, will also ultimately threaten the individual in the security of his existence.
And even if the people or the individual remained unaffected by these political consequences, the economic consequences of the decline in births would still be felt by every individual. Who is supposed to feed him when he himself someday is old and alone and the strength of his hands no longer suffices to earn sustenance? The acquisition of means for the care of the elderly and invalids will be more difficult from year to year, accordingly as the healthy, work-capable, and tax-paying age-groups decline in number. If it is objected here that the decline in births is a consequence of unemployment, this represents a fatal fallacy. The youth of a people makes itself felt in the labor-market always only after the age of 16. Until then it represents in the economic life of a people a so-called class of non-producing consumers that brings work and bread to many hundreds of thousands of persons, given that all manufactured goods that belong to daily life must be produced for them.[1]
Heritage Imparts Duty
It was a materialistic age that made the child into a matter of arithmetic. For the National-Socialist state the congenitally healthy, child-rich family represents the foundation of a healthy people. Therefore it is necessary that every individual understand clearly that his personal destiny as an individual recedes in importance by comparison, that he, regarded in terms of the biology of the people, is only a bearer of the hereditary matter and hereditary substance that has come down to him from his ancestors of several thousand years ago. It is the heritage of the most obscure prehistory that is actuality in us, and all those ancestors about whom no account any longer reaches us, who only once in a while in ancient troves give us a clue about their ancient culture, have not completely vanished; rather a piece of them lives in each of us. This however links the individual to the most distant past and at the same time lets him be the beginning for an unknown future in which he can become a part. Thus the individual is not a detached something that accidentally lives among a number of persons, but is only a link in the chain of life, from which he cannot separate himself. It is the hereditary line of the generations before him that has come down to him and that demands the connection with another hereditary line, so that the chain of life is not broken and the stream of the blood in a people does not run dry, but flows onward into more distant ages.
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[1]. Americans immersed in the simplistic economic ideology promulgated in the USA since the late 1970s may find it paradoxical that a class of non-producing consumers “brings work and bread to many hundreds of thousands of persons.” Of course from a strictly individual perspective, “non-producing consumers” would appear to be simply a drain on wealth, but the verdict from the perspective of society as a whole is different. In an industrial society, because of the way machines multiply the productivity of labor, excess productivity develops, and an ever-diminishing demand for labor results from that. For ordinary people this means a scarcity of well-paid full-time jobs, and this in turn means for the industrialist that not many people have disposable income to buy the goods that he produces. When, however, there are many children in a society, forming a class of non-producing consumers, the added demand for goods and services means less unemployment, and the increased distribution of disposable income then further increases the demand for goods and services. This economic role of a large population of children, and the negative economic effect of having few children, is a point of central importance in Lawrence Dennis’ books The Coming American Fascism (1936) and The Dynamics of War and Revolution (1940). There is a way to reduce the bad economic impact of a deficiency of children — if further increase of population is inadvisable — but it involves large-scale economic intervention by the government, eliminating the mismatch between the supply of labor and the demand for labor. Thus Lawrence Dennis predicted “fascism” for the United States as the eventual solution to the crisis caused by the cessation of large families at the end of the 19th century. (Although different in some other respects, in terms of economic policy, fascism and national-socialism are effectively the same.) In National-Socialist Germany, direct creation of jobs by the government was practiced along with encouragement of child-bearing, and in fact the two measures are synergistic, if it happens to be true that an economically secure couple is more likely to produce children.
