If you’ve read The Sunflower House, you likely found Schwester Ziegler’s nursing rules (and those of Hochland Home) to be harsh and harmful. They were based on a popular Nazi-sanctioned book.

In 1934, a German pulmonologist called Johanna Haarer wrote “The German Mother and Her First Child,” a manual that promoted extreme forms of neglect to encourage toughness in children. Haarer was not a pediatrician, but the Nazis embraced her instruction. They promoted her techniques through a mothers’ training program, which at least three million women undertook by 1943. After the war ended, the book (stripped of the most objectionable Nazi language) was reprinted and used for decades.

Haarer viewed children, especially babies, as nuisances whose wills needed to be broken. She wrote, for instance, that babies should be isolated for 24 hours immediately after birth and not exposed to “baby language.”

According to Haarer: “The best is the child in a separate room, where it then remains alone. Do not start taking the child out of bed, carrying it, weighing it, driving it or keeping it on your lap, even nursing it. Child understands incredibly quickly that it only needs to scream to summon a compassionate soul and become the subject of such care, and after a short while, it demands this occupation with him as a right, gives no rest until it is carried again, rocked or driven will – and the small but relentless pet bully is ready!”

In recent years, German therapists suggested that Haarer’s traumatizing parenting techniques are at least, in part, responsible for emotional problems reported by their adult patients—including depression, an inability to love their children, and insecure attachment styles. Of course, they’d have difficulty forming emotional attachments. Sadly, they might even repeat the behavior with their own children. It should come as no surprise that the Nazis tried to mold children from the cradle, nor that the consequences of neglect continue to affect Germans today.

You can find out more about Haarer’s book and its consequences in the articles below.

Scientific American:
– Harsh Nazi Parenting Guidelines May Still Affect German Children of Today

Big Think:
– How the Nazi’s Inhumane Parenting Guidelines May Still Be Affecting German Children

There’s more info out there if this topic interests you! Google “Johanna Haarer” or “The German Mother and Her First Child” for additional resources. Haarer also wrote a book called “Mother, Tell Me About Adolf Hitler” to lead women to indoctrinate their children in Nazi values.