“Childhood in Weimar Germany was a time marked by signi cant social and

economic upheaval”, ww1 and the treaty of Versailles would leave Germany in
economic turmoil leading to wide spread unemployment and poverty. The
hyperin ation of 1923 was particularly devastating making savings worthless and
leaving many families in poverty. Despite these hardships the Weimar Republic
saw e orts to improve child welfareI and in 1924 the Dawes plan would be
introduced that nally brought around the end to economic crisis and children
would be able to enjoy freedom in culture and access to free education. Childhood
had changed signi cantly after the great war and the “birth of a new child was a
joyous event” after the tragic loss during the great war. The freedoms that children
would enjoy in the golden age was being able to express themselves and their
horrors during the war in music, art, culture and literature.

In 1933 and nazis gaining power in Germany their totalitarian regime, “ideologies
and policies would profoundly shape childhood in Germany”. Many people would
gladly join the nazis saying that “there was only a joyous acknowledgement” and
that it would end the chaos that was childhood in Weimar Germany. This was a
stark di erence to weimar as they celebrated children as a “rea- rmation of life
after the great war”. “As a child in Nazi Germany, you might feel slightly alienated
from your parents because they are not as keen on the Nazis as you are”, this was
due in large part to all the control that nazis had and their way of raising kids and
that parents were not so easily controlled by the nazis. Other childhoods like those
that were deemed lesser would be changed forever, the friends that they might
have once had in Weimar had now been changed by the nazis ideology and were
no longer there once friends and would tease them as a result of the nazis
teachings. while childhood in Weimar Germany was marked by economic hardship
and social experimentation/freedom, childhood under the Nazis regime was
characterised by indoctrination, militarisation and total and utter control

The nazis viewed children “as essential to the survival and health of the reich” and
sought to turn them into future soldiers and indoctrinate them. After the weimar
democracy the nazis would overhaul everything and control every part of life so
that their children would grow up loyal to them. One way they did this was with the
hitler youth which replaced all the old youth groups from weimar, which kids didn’t
like all that much. Numbers in Hitler youth would grow from 108, 000 in 1932 to 3.6
million in 1934, Hitler youth would have kids engage in physical activity such as
hiking as well as pledges to the nazi ideology every day. The goal was to 1
brainwash the children into nazis and 2 turn them into future soldiers, both of
which the nazis achieved. The nazis would also take control of education and
would teach based classes to kids about how hitler was their saviour from Weimar
and about racial minorities. They would also control published books and would
put out parenting manuals like a “German mothers rst child” would outline how
you were supposed to raise a child and how you were supposed to raise a child
that was tough, unemotional, unempathetic and who had weak attachments to
others. Johanna Haarer wrote this book and countless others “viewed children,
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especially babies, as nuisances whose wills needed to be broken” which was
outlined in the book. All this would lead to