More yet on Hitler's program to invigorate his downtrodden "Volk". This excerpt is taken from a sub-chapter titled "Mother and Child":
The winter passed. But the gigantic machinery of its Aid work remained, and Hitler, who could know no rest until he had given every possible demonstration of what National Socialism meant translated into terms of everyday life - Hitler looked round for the next immediate use to which it could be put.
He was already grappling with the problem of unemployment, and now he turned from the consideration of the father of the family to that of the mother. This matter of maternity and infant welfare had long been comprised in the Party programme under the heading "It is the duty of the State to ensure the health of the people through due care bestowed upon mothers and children."
So work was immediately set on food to relieve the terrible burdens weighing so heavily upon the poorer families of the land, and especially upon the toiling housewives. The War and its long subsequent list of privations and bitter hardships had told on this most helpless and defenceless portion of the community as heavily as on every other. This new movement in aid of womankind was at once a recognition of the bravery and suffering of the women of the terrible years gone by, and a beacon of hope for the nameless regiment of brave and struggling women of the present time.
First of all the "Mother-and-Child" Movement undertakes to unearth hidden and secret misery in order to relieve it, to explore special areas of distress, and to do away with red tape and mistaken economies. The whole thing is to turn upon the personal and individual touch. First the mother of the family is to be supported and helped and then every one of those dependent upon her. The Mother-and-Child work sets itself very few limits.
Needless to say, here again the scope of the enterprise is so wide only the briefest description of it can be given.
The greatest necessity - that of nourishment - calls for the first attention. Better food is to be provided, and sufficient milk for the children. Then comes the question of clothing and adequate laundry facilities. Women with big families swarming round them all day are to receive daily outside help.
The work of the "Arbeitsplatzhilfe" - roughly translated "the Job Finding Agency" - concerns itself largely with placing out the elder children of these numerous broods in suitable posts as soon as they are fit to earn, and help themselves. The hitherto earning mothers of these families are to be enabled at once to leave factory or business and return home where their duty and their most important work obviously lies. The man it is who must be enabled to go out and work and keep the home.
Through the "Wohnungshilfe" (Dwelling house Aid) a mighty attempt is to be made to sweep away the slums and miserable areas in great cities. Either such dwellings as already exist are to be improved and repaired, or entirely pulled down and rebuilt. Property owners who allow their houses to fall into bad condition are to be called to account for it. The unsocial attitude of those who decline to let where there are children is to be sharply corrected.
The Mother-And-Child Aid looks to it that poor families should have at least what furniture is barely necessary, especially beds. A special activity has been set on foot all through Germany whose slogan is "To each child his own bed." And these beds are collected from charitable donors in the same way as similar collections were made from house to house in the winter by the truckloads of trumpet-blowing soldiers.
Another branch of this work is to provide at least four weeks' country holiday or convalescence for mothers who stand in special need of rest and recuperation. The children are meantime to be cared for in kindergarten. For that short space, at least, the mother is to be wholly free. The home, during the interval, is to be kept going by means of the "Frauenarbeitsdienst" - the organisation which provides women's work of this kind for just these purposes, so that the husband and father can go on having his meals as usual, without universal domestic upset, just because the main prop and stay of it all - the wife and mother - has had to go away.
Then there are schools for mothers; many of these are run by doctors who make it their business to impart all sorts of essential information about food and health in general to these poor women. They can always resort to medical advice without fear or hesitation, since nothing is more important to a nation than its mothers, its children and its health.
All these measures, these undertakings, these departures and these immediate practicalities spring from the text laid down in Mein Kampf, the text is ruthlessly worked out in the life story of the Führer himself, "Social work must be tackled from below, not from above."
(To be continued September 10)
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Thought for the Day:
"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."
(Willa Cather)