Otto M was a solid citizen of Nazi-era Germany, a stormtrooper whose research on plant-based medicine at Kiel University was of great interest to the regime. At a time when half the university’s staff were removed for their race or political views, he received numerous research grants and promotions. And, as historian Elissa Mailänder writes, he was also an open and enthusiastic bigamist. The story of M and his two wives (whom Mailänder keeps semi-anonymous due to German data privacy law) reflects some surprising impacts of Nazi notions of racial purity.
M and his original wife married in 1933, and Mailänder writes that they probably benefited from financial support that the Nazi government offered to married couples expected to produce “racially pure” children. Mrs. M was also a scientific researcher, but she gave up her career to raise the kids.
In 1937, with two children at home, M began a romantic relationship with his research assistant, Miss D. While this wasn’t unexpected for a man in his position, what was unusual was the decision he and his wife made to invite Miss D to join their household. Mrs. M wrote that “as a biologist” she supported this arrangement.
Declining birth rates were a major concern in Weimar Germany that became even more of a panic under Hitler. Mailänder writes that, as a university student in the 1920s, Mrs. M would likely have taken classes promoting the acceleration of white German births. And so, while pregnant again in 1939, Mrs. M took Miss D to a fertility specialist to help her with difficulties she was having conceiving a child with their mutual husband.
Of course, whether they were both married to M was an interesting question. When Miss D finally gave birth in 1941, the professor successfully insisted the baby should be recognized as legitimate, the result of a “community marriage.” This was significant for the family’s receipt of social benefits and inheritance rights. He told government officials that the relationship was based on the three parties’ collective work to produce and raise healthy, “pure” children.
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Mailänder writes that this was not a unique argument. Heinrich Himmler’s pronatalist policies included support for children of SS officers’ extramarital relationships. He claimed that Germanic tradition included the possibility of men taking a second wife—and he did so himself, having children with his secretary as well as his official wife.
Although M’s neighbors and friends in the city of Kiel accepted the “community marriage,” when the family moved to the rural town of Steinfeld in 1941 many in the area were horrified.
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“It seems the de-stigmatization of extramarital sex advocated by Nazism failed to change the views of a rural Protestant population,” Mailänder writes.
And, in the years following the war, the new West German authorities took the villagers’ side. While they allowed M’s Nazi affiliations to go unpunished, they were more committed to bourgeois relationship norms and less devoted to pronatalism than Hitler’s regime. M’s unusual family ended up dissolved.
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