RACIAL HYGIENE AND DELIBERATE PARENTHOOD: TWO SIDES OF DEMOGRAPHER HANS HARMSEN’S POPULATION POLICY*

Synopsis — The co-founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and president, for many years, of its daughter organization in the Federal Republic of Germany, Pro Familia (the Germany Society for Sexual Counselling and Family Planning), Hans Harmsen developed a concept for a population policy at the peak of the world economic crisis (1928–1932) that was the foundation for the systematic execution of the racial policy in National Socialist Germany. This concept originated from research into hereditary biology and the attempt to develop a qualitative as well as a quantitative demography. It led to demands for a eugenically oriented “differentiated ” welfare policy putting the research findings into praxis. Based on cost-utility calculations and according to criteria of productive capacity, productively capable sections of the population were to be promoted. On the other hand, economies were to be made in the preservation and care of people designated inferior, which meant socially marginal groups. Through institutionalization and sterilization they were to be excluded from procreation. As a member of the world-wide movement for birth control, Harmsen supported family planning and sexual counselling. For eugenic reasons he advocated conscious parenting. He maintained that sexual and genetic counselling should be available with the aim of informing women about birth control, because only a healthy woman within an intact family could rear “healthy ” and “eugenically worthy” children. This concept was applied world-wide after 1945 not only in the rebirth o