The Prussian Landwehr, the citizen militia improvised in 1813 and placed on an equal footing with the army of the line by the Defense Act of 1814, lasted in its original form for only five years. Its subordination to the regular army in 1819 has usually been seen as the victory of aristocrat over bourgeois, conservative over liberal, Potsdam over Weimar. This approach has been increasingly popular in recent years as scholars tend to study military history in its social and political context. The Landwehr's loss of status, however, reflected the circumstances of its origin as well as the malice of its enemies. The Defense Act of 1814 did not create a new institution; it formalized an existing one. The structure, the image, the character of the Landwehr had already been fixed and tempered by two years of battle. In those two years the Landwehr had established solid impressions of its potential as a military instrument among critics and supporters alike. It had established equally solid impressions of the best means of maintaining that potential.

Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was a relatively simple operation; it took only a few weeks for Prussian armies to rout the French forces. But integrating this prize of war into Imperial Germany proved far more difficult than anyone had imagined. It is indeed a rather pathetic spectacle. While some of the highest civilian officials of the territorial administration sought to integrate the Reichsland into the Reich, the highest military officers sought to impose a military dictatorship; and on the sidelines, powerful German textile, tobacco, and iron and steel interests hoped to minimize competion from Alsace-Lorraine by sabotaging all government efforts at conciliation and integration. It is this latter aspect of the problem, what one might term the economic subversion of political integration, which we shall examine here.

In December 1935, Heinrich Himmler established an SS agency designated as Lebensborn, or the “Well of Life” society, ordering it to perform a twofold task: to administer welfare assistance to SS families having a large number of racially valuable children; and to extend maternity and child-care facilities to expectant mothers, whether they were married or not, if they could prove the biological excellence of their expected children. Even with the emphasis placed on racial value as a criterion for Lebensborn involvement, the agency might appear to have been a curious blend of an SS “fringe benefit” combined with a charitable SS gesture toward unwed mothers. In reality, Lebensborn functioned as one unit within a comprehensive eugenics policy begun earlier in 1931 when the Reichsführer issued his famous “marriage decree” to the SS. The contribution which Lebensborn made to this eugenics program is examined below with emphasis placed on the socio-biological motives that prompted the Reichsführer's concern for childbearing and ultimately lay behind the agency's founding.