I have an extra box left over of Spring 2000 issues of The Journal of
Psychohistory with my 92-page article showing German childrearing in 1900
and how their extremely abusive childrearing practices were later inflicted
upon Jews during the Holocaust. If you would like a free copy of this
issue, just email me your postal address and I'll be pleased to send one to
you. A brief excerpt from the article is below.

Lloyd deMause, Editor
The Journal of Psychohistory
[log in to unmask]

"Nineteenth-century doctors condemned the practice of German mothers
refusing to breastfeed their babies, saying the pap made of flour and water
or milk was "usually so thick that it has to be forced into the child and
only becomes digestible when mixed with saliva and stomach fluids. At its
worst it is curdled and sour."  Infants were so commonly hungry that "those
poor worms get their mouths stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed
bread so that they cannot scream."  Ende reports that for centuries "one
rarely encounters a German infant who is fully breastfed...Everywhere they
got their mouths stuffed with Zulp, a small linen bag filled with
bread...Swaddled babies could hardly get rid of these often dirty rags."
Mothers who could afford it sent their newborn to wetnurses-commonly called
Engelmacherin, "angelmakers," because they were so negligent toward the
children. The mothers complained, "Do you think I am a farmer's daughter,
that I should bother myself with little children? That a woman of my age
and standing should allow her very strength to be sucked dry by children?"
While English gentry began to nurse their infants themselves during the
seventeenth century, the mothering revolution had not yet really reached
Germany by the end of the nineteenth century.  Visitors who wrote books on
German home life reported, "It is extremely rare for a German lady to
nourish her own child,"  and "It would have been very astonishing indeed if
a well-to-do mother had suggested suckling her own baby."  Almost all
mothers who refused to breast-feed could have done so if they "seriously
wanted to," according to a 1905 German medical conference.  Those who did
not gave "completely trivial reasons," such as "because it is messy,"
because they "didn't want to ruin their figures" or because breastfeeding
was "inconvenient.  Even after their children returned from wetnurse,
"noble ladies showed not the slightest interest in their offspring"  and
turned them over to nursemaids, governesses and tutors. The result was that
parents were often strangers to their children. When one German father
asked his child whom he loved the most and the child replied, "Hanne [his
nurse]," the father objected, "No! You must love your parents more." "But
it is not true!" the child replied. The father promptly beat him.
        Mothers and other caretakers of newborn German babies were so
frightened of them that they tied them up tightly for from six to nine
months and strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep
out the lurking evils.  Two centuries after swaddling had disappeared in
England and America, two British visitors described it as routine
throughout Germany:

A German baby is a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy
in yards of bandages...it is never bathed...Its head is never touched with
soap and water until it is eight or ten months old, when the fine skull cap
of encrusted dirt which it has by that time obtained is removed...

In Germany, babies are loathsome, foetid things...offensive to the last
degree with the excreta that are kept bound up within their swaddling
clothes...the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the
rind of Stilton cheese...

When the children were finally removed from their swaddling bands after six
to twelve months, other restraint devices such as corsets with steel stays
and backboards continued their tied-up condition to assure the parents they
were still in complete control.  The result of all this early restraint was
the same production of later violence in children as that obtained by
experimenters physically restraining rats and monkeys-marked by depletions
of serotonin, increases in norepinephrine levels, and massive increases in
terror, rage and eventually actual violence.
        The fear of one's own children was so widespread in German families
that for centuries autobiographies told of a tradition of abandonment of
children by their parents to anyone who would take them, using the most
flimsy of excuses.  Children were given away and even sometimes sold  to
relatives, neighbors, courts, priests, foundling homes, schools, friends,
strangers, "traveling scholars" (to be used as beggars)-anyone who would
take them-so that for much of history only a minority of German children
lived their entire childhoods under their family roof. Children were
reported to be sent away to others as servants or as apprentices, "for
disciplinary reasons," "to be drilled for hard work," "to keep them from
idleness," because of a "domestic quarrel," "because it cried as a baby,"
"because his uncle was childless," etc.   Scheck notes from his study of
autobiographies, "When their parents came to take them home, their children
usually didn't recognize them any more."  Peasants gave away their children
so regularly that the only ones who were guaranteed to be kept were the
first-born boys-to get the inheritance-and one of the daughters, who was
sometimes crippled in order to prevent her from marrying and force her to
stay permanently as a cheap helper in the parental household.  After two
children, it was said that "the parental attitude to later offspring
noticeably deteriorated [so that] a farmer would rather lose a young child
than a calf."




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