THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED. WE WILL ATTEMPT TO RESCHEDULE.
Tuesday, September 12
12 PM - 1:30 PM Eastern
Christopher Thomas Goodwin, "What Difference Does a (Disabled) Husband Make? Disabled Veterans, Women, and the Limits of Population Policy in the Third Reich.
Abstract: The close of 1942 brought a grisly milestone for the Nazi regime: over one million soldiers had died since the war began. Anxieties flared among top leaders who began to weigh war’s supposed rejuvenating effects on the nation against the tremendous loss of valuable genetic material. One group of men survived, however. Over 100,000 strong by December 1942, disabled veterans had proven themselves as the masculine ideal. However, Nazi leaders believed, their missing limbs and maimed faces would drive off potential spouses and their hereditary lines would be lost forever. Marriage mediation arose as the answer to this problem, and as a potential solution to the vexing problem of managing the German population along racial lines. The Nazi regime used state-run marriage mediation of disabled veterans to align women’s marital choices with the Nazi goal of raising the German birthrate. Marriage centers were intended as a gateway to wider acceptance of population policy and to the eventual abandonment of the marriage “free marketplace” in favor of demographic management to create collective outcomes of hereditary fitness. This involved creating new marital and reproductive duties among Germans and channeling this social responsibility to convince Germans to willingly participate in marriage mediation for the greater good. Yet, individual desire and self-reliance in the broader marketplace almost always trumped Nazi policy.
Bio: Christopher Thomas Goodwin is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is currently completing his dissertation on the cultural, ideological, and legal construction of disabled veterans in the Third Reich during the Second World War entitled “Broken Supermen: Disabled Veterans and Soldiers in Nazi Germany, 1939-1951.
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