This unusual award was introduced to boost the Third Reich’s population, as well as to imprint the warped ideals of National Socialism onto the role of motherhood. Its origins can be found in the Führer’s relationship with his own mother
The Gold Mother’s Cross was bestowed on mothers of eight or more children, for replenishing the population after WWI
The obverse of the Silver award. Note how all the metal elements reflect the category of the award class itself
The top of the cross has a loop to fit the ribbon through. The award was only worn on special occasions
When Klara Hitler died from breast cancer in December 1907, just four days before Christmas, her devoted son Adolf was devastated. The Jewish family doctor, Eduard Bloch, visited the family flat on Blutenstrasse later that morning to sign the death certificate. Some 30 years later he wrote: “In almost 40 years of practice, I have never seen a young man so utterly filled with grief as young Adolf Hitler.” After being given leave to emigrate to the United States in 1940, Bloch was inter viewed by the Office of Strategic Services, where he commented: “While Hitler was not a mother’s boy in the usual sense, I never witnessed a closer attachment. Their love had been mutual. Klara Hitler adored her son. She allowed him his own way whenever possible.”
Hitler himself wrote: “My mother looked after the household and lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children.”
Death was no stranger to the family either; only two of Klara’s six children, including Adolf, survived into adulthood. Both of these factors played a part in some of Hitler’s thinking when he was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison for his part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. While there, he dictated most of the first volume of Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, which contained his extreme and racist theories on saving German society. One of the key elements was the concept of Lebensraum, or living space, with a Greater German Reich expanding eastwards. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “Looked at purely from the territorial point of view, the area comprised in the German Reich is insignificant in comparison with the other States that are called World Powers… Only a sufficiently large space on this earth can assure the independent existence of a people.”
To expand the Reich and, crucially, to recover manpower lost in the First World War, Germany needed more children. The oppor tunity to encourage that came after the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpar tei (NSDAP) became the largest party in the Reichstag, with Hitler appointed chancellor on 30 Januar y 1933. On 7 April 1933 he declared his intention to create and issue new German orders and decorations and, with the banning of all other polit
