Thanks to the concerted effort put forth by Olga Gebauer and others, the last decades of the nineteenth and the first three decades of the twentieth century saw German midwifery make the transition from a vocation in crisis to an organized profession complete with associations, journals and regular meetings. However, the practice was not entirely problem free. Educational curricula were still developed regionally, course length had not yet been standardized and there was discord among the ranks as some midwives grew disillusioned with the sheer number of independent collectives that had re-emerged early in the new century. There was also still a perceived overabundance of midwives at a time when falling birth rates did not provide adequate work. Answers for many of these problems soon came from a surprising source: Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists. A regime rightly known more for its overwhelmingly destructive ideology than for positive contributions, the Third Reich nevertheless proved to be of great assistance in the modernization of German midwifery. The Nazi era saw midwives realize many of the goals they had first articulated during that initial meeting in the Berlin café.