Infamous Neues Volk poster, c. 1937: "60,000 ℛℳ is what this person with a hereditary illness costs the Volksgemeinschaft in his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read Neues Volk. The monthly magazine of the Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP."[1][2]
Neues Volk (German:[ˈnɔʏ.əsˈfɔlk], "New People") was the monthly publication of the Office of Racial Policy in Nazi Germany.[3] Founded by Walter Gross in 1933, it was a mass-market, illustrated magazine.[4] It aimed at a wide audience, achieving a circulation of 300,000.[3] It appeared in physicians' waiting rooms, libraries, and schools, as well as in private homes.[4]
A calendar published in 1938 showing "pure Aryans"
The subject matter of the magazine was the "excellence" of the Aryan race and the "deficiencies" of Jews, Poles, and other groups.[3] Articles ranged from profiles of Benito Mussolini, reports on Hitler Youth camps, and travel tips, but eugenic and racial propaganda continued throughout it.[5] The first six issues presented solely ethnic pride, before bringing up any topic on "undesirables”.[6] In the next issue, one article presented the types of the "Criminal Jew" surrounded by images of the ideal Aryan, which generally predominated.[6] Such articles continued, displaying such things as demographic charts showing the decline of farmland (with generous Aryan families) and deploring that the Jews were eradicating traditional German peasantry.[6]
Neues Volk included articles defending eugenic sterilization.[7] Photographs of mentally incapacitated children were juxtaposed with those of healthy children.[6] It also presented images of ideal Aryan families[8] and ridiculed childless couples.[9] After the inception of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, it urged that Germans to show no sympathy for Jews and presented articles to show Jewish life still flourishing.[10] By the mid-1930s, it had doubled its pages and greatly increased its discussion of Jews.[11] Other articles described the conditions under which Hitler would be a child's godfather,[12] discussed the importance of giving children Germanic names, answered racial questions from readers—marriage between a Chinese man and a German woman was impossible, despite the woman's pregnancy, and they had seen to it that the man's residence permit was revoked, and even an infertile German woman cannot marry a half-Jew, but a Dutch woman, if she had neither Jewish nor colored blood, was acceptable—praised German farming in contrast to French, declared art was determined by racial world-views, and many other topics.[3] During the war, it published articles about how the foreign workers were welcome but sexual relations with Germans were prohibited.[3]
^Rodenfels, H. (2007) [Published in German in May 1939]. "Frauen, die nicht Mutter werden dürfen" [Women Who May Not Be Allowed to become Mothers]. Neues Volk. Vol. 7. Translated by Bytwerk, Randall. pp. 16–21 – via German Propaganda Archive.
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