NAZI VIEW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 270, 13 November 1937, Page 13

NAZI VIEW.

DOMESTIC HELP.

ONLY TO WOMEN WITH FAMILIES.

BERLIN. Women who want to enjoy the servicee of maids must have a number of children before they can employ help, if the plan of Fritz Nonnenbruch, of the official Nazi paper, the "Voelkischer Beobachter," is accepted. The journalist believes that servants should be rationed according to the number of children in a family. The "productive" families would receive preference, the same as metal workers are doled out to factories because of the lack of skilled workers.

For the first time in years a shortage of. servants existed in Germany. No longer can a hausfrau commandeer the services of a hard toiling maid for £1 or £2 a month. She must pay her servants between £4 and £6 a month each.

Maids have become class conscious. They no longer rank as servants, but as "household assistants." A maid in a good Nazi household is regarded as an "older sister" by the children of her employer.

The number of girls available for household jobs is declining partly because many girls enter Nazi "voluntary labour camps" or because, due to the marriage dowries granted them by the Government they get married early. Low Birth Rates. But the primary reason for the shortage is the low war and post-war birth rates, which reduced the number of young persons ready to start work by more than a million. The average birth Tate at the turn of the century wa« more than two million; in the war years it dropped to less than a million. In 1936 it barely reached the 1920-30 average of 1,300,000.

The servant problem should be used to help raise the birth rate, Nonnenbruch suggests. "The increase in birth rate is even more important than the increase in the production of goods," he says. "We honour the mother of many children. But the children do not belong to the mother alone. They belong to the nation."

In order to help the mother to bear and rear children she should be granted special household help, the writer advocates.

Tax concessions were granted to big families in 1933. Now Nonnenbruch says a maid's wage* should be paid by the -"National Community" in cases where the mother of a large family is not able to pay the wages herself.