‘It Would Be Better to Get Rid of It’: Abortion and the Nazi Past in Weinheim and Garmisch, c.1951

Abstract In 1951, two large-scale investigations into illegal abortions were carried out in Weinheim and Garmisch. The first part of this article draws on the police and judicial sources generated by the investigations to examine gender relations and perceptions of abortion in both southern German towns. Abortion was normalized within the predominantly working-class communities targeted. Moreover, women’s sexual behaviour and men’s and women’s defences attest to the (increasingly recognized) female assertiveness of the late 1940s and early 1950s. While the judicial authorities readily validated women’s resoluteness, this entailed letting their male partners off the hook. However, before defendants faced their verdicts in court, politicians and civil society had judged the investigations themselves to be scandalous. The second section of this article uses media reports, citizens’ letters and parliamentary debates to examine how popular outrage largely bypassed the issue of abortion. Instead, the scandal became a discursive site for coming to terms with Nazism. While the court trials evinced women’s determination, the discourse surrounding the scandal foregrounded female victimization, thus bolstering narratives of national victimization under Nazism and Allied rule. However, betraying genuine anxieties about whether German citizens were fit to be democrats, activists and politicians harnessed the scandal to consolidate West German national identity as a democracy based on the rule of law. The deliberate sidelining of abortion in the public discourse actively privatized reproductive concerns. Together, the investigations and the scandal’s discussion underscore how the consolidation of a democratic Rechtsstaat in West Germany was predicated on the rule of socially conservative law.