Common Characteristics

We share a lot in common with the 1930s more than we know. Back then Germany just came out of a disastrous war, the results was there was a shortage of Aryan men and as a result the Nazis were on a campaign for more Aryan babies!

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum writes...

Nazi Motherhood Medals

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Nazi leaders were obsessed with increasing the size and health of the so-called "national community" ("Volksgemeinschaft") so that the German nation could dominate Europe. During the years of Nazi rule, Nazi authorities and German medical professionals tried different policies and initiatives to increase the sinking German birth rate.1

Shortly after the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, the new regime enacted legislation that increased existing criminal penalties for abortion among so-called “Aryan” Germans.2 The Lebensborn (“Fount of Life”) program was designed to discourage abortions by providing discreet maternity homes and adoption services to single “Aryan” women.3 Although Nazi policies encouraged these births outside of marriage, Nazi propaganda urged young “Aryan” Germans to marry early and have many children. Large families were the Nazi ideal, and they were promoted through written articles, visual propaganda, and the introduction of military-style awards for motherhood.4

The featured photograph shows examples of the Honor Cross of the German Mother—an award first introduced by the Nazi regime in 1938 to encourage married German women to give birth to many children.5 Women were awarded bronze for four children, silver for six children, and gold for eight children. The medals were supposedly made from these precious metals, but were actually mass-produced from cheap imitation materials instead. The awards feature black swastikas in the center of an elongated blue and white enamel cross that resembles a Christian cross. The words "DER DEUTSCHEN MUTTER" (“the German mother”) appear around the swastika, and rays of light fashioned in metal appear to shoot out from behind the cross. Though they were typically kept or displayed in a small case, the medals included a blue and white ribbon for wearing around the neck. These colors signified loyalty in other Nazi-era service awards.

Beside the Motherhood Medals they also had: Marriage loans (1933), The Lebensborn Program (1935) for maternity homes for unwed "Aryan" single mothers, financial incentives, anti-abortion measures, and propaganda -- give births for the motherland for "racially pure" family , with the slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church) to emphasize a woman's domestic role.

Fast Forward 92 years...

From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home

Fascist regimes pushed narratives of domestic bliss, yet relied on women’s unpaid labor. In the US today, ‘womanosphere’ influencers promote the same fantasies

The Guardian

By Adrienne Matei

Sun 21 Sep 2025

In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women’s bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as “influencing women in their daily lives”.

To her audience – approximately 4 million girls in the Nazi youth movement, 8 million women in Nazi associations under her jurisdiction, and 1.9 million subscribers to her women’s magazine, Frauen Warte, according to Koonz – Scholtz-Klink promoted what she called “the cradle and the ladle”, or reproductive and household duties as essential to national strength.

“There was a whole array of women’s magazines that glorified housewives” in Nazi Germany, says Koonz, a professor emerita of history at Duke University. “It would be the equivalent of social media today.” Frauen Warte contained nothing too political – just broadly appealing lifestyle content about keeping a clean and well-provisioned home while raising a healthy family, with occasional debates about how much makeup one should wear. A barefaced look was preferred – much like the “clean girl” trend of today. “In a censored society everyone needs debates about harmless topics,” says Koonz.

Do you see any corollaries between then and now?

“There’s been a reluctance to name this moment as fascism,” says cultural historian Tiffany Florvil, yet extreme authoritarian dynamics can be clearly seen in the American right today. (Indeed, Trump supporters can’t seem to stop calling him “Daddy”.)

The government’s unprecedented deportations of immigrants; use of Ice to unjustly detain people in detention centers fraught with human rights abuses; intimidation of judges, law firms and universities; and assaults on the fundamental principles of liberal democracy are prompting historians who specialize in fascism to leave the country.

And significant backlash against gender equality is under way. The idea that women’s bodies are state resources for sustaining population appears to be re-emerging; the Trump administration is encouraging traditional roles by rolling back workplace equity, restricting reproductive rights and policing gender identity.

Then also Trump has proposed according to Ms. Magazine,

The Trump administration is using one of the oldest tools of patriarchy—promising rewards for compliance—through a wave of proposed pronatalist policies designed to push women into motherhood and encourage them to give birth to more children. Among these proposals are $5,000 “baby bonuses” and a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children. The administration is considering offering fertility tracking classes to teach women how to monitor ovulation and time conception, and has even proposed reserving 30 percent of the prestigious international Fulbright fellowships for applicants who are married or have children, sidelining those who are not.

A recent report by the National Women’s Law Center warns that these proposals are not random: They stem from an “obscure, dangerous, and increasingly influential movement of ‘pronatalists’” that are now dictating the Trump administration’s family policy. 

How about now do you see any corollaries between then and now?

The Feminist writes;

This agenda closely aligns with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy blueprint that calls for restoring the traditional nuclear family as the “cornerstone” of American society. While some conservatives see this push as a necessary response to falling fertility rates, the movement’s underlying assumptions often conflict with the principles of reproductive justice. The Trump administration is promoting a specific family ideal centered on heterosexual marriage and large families, rather than supporting people’s rights to make informed decisions about if, when, and how to parent.

Let us have look at a bit of reality... unlike the 1950s it now takes both working parents to make end meets! 

Trump's policies also share other traits with the 1930s,

• Emphasis on Traditional Family Structure (That means single mothers and LGBTQ+ families need not apply.)
• Symbolic Recognition (It has been rumored or floated that Trump has proposed a National Medal of Motherhood")
• Protection of Women's Rights (By attacking trans people.)
• "Family First" Approach (Plaid Family Leave programs like the Democratic states have.)

Now lets look at rhetoric verse reality. At the same time Trump is proposing these ideas on increasing the birth rate and families. He has...

• Cut WIC
• Cut SNAP
• Cut Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8)
• Cut Medicaid

And also...

• Eliminated the Estate Tax
• The tariffs hit the lower income people the most.

 Whose families is he supporting?

I propose that he is really only supporting White, upper class families and I will go even farther and say White Christian families. Welcome to the world of the "Handmaid's Tale"