Were abortions legally permitted or punished in Germany before and during the Third Reich?
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Executive summary
Before 1871 German law criminalized abortion and that prohibition was consolidated into Paragraph 218 of the Reich Criminal Code in 1871, punishable by prison; the Weimar era saw modest liberalisation—a 1926 reduction in penalties and a 1927 court allowance for therapeutic abortion—while Nazi policy (1933–1945) made abortion criminal and more strictly enforced for “Aryan” women but simultaneously expanded, encouraged or forced abortion and sterilisation for groups deemed "undesirable" or occupied populations (e.g. Polish and Soviet forced labourers) under a racial‑hygiene logic [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Postwar legacies—Paragraph 218 and a separate Nazi‑era information ban—remained contested and were only partly repealed in recent decades [6] [7] [8].
1. Legal continuity from empire to Weimar: Paragraph 218 set the baseline
From the foundation of the German Reich the penal code criminalised abortion: earlier state laws were consolidated into sections that became Paragraph 218 in 1871, making procurement and provision punishable by prison and framing abortion as a criminal act rather than an explicitly regulated medical procedure [3] [1]. Reform efforts in the Weimar Republic produced small changes: penalties were softened in 1926 and a 1927 Supreme Court decision permitted abortion to protect a mother's life, creating a narrow therapeutic exception [3] [2].
2. The Third Reich reversed Weimar liberalisation for "Aryans" while weaponising reproduction
When the Nazis came to power they dramatically reframed reproductive law to serve racial policy. Publicly the regime tightened enforcement against abortions among “racially valuable” German women to increase births, restoring severe penalties and, by some accounts, restoring prison terms up to 15 years and from 1943 even death in extreme formulations when “the vitality of the German people” was said to be impaired [9] [10]. At the same time the state established legal definitions for eugenic and medical abortions and encouraged policies—sterilisation, promotion of motherhood, marriages incentives—designed to raise birthrates among those deemed “Aryan” [5] [11].
3. A bifurcated, racialised practice: permitted, coerced, or forced abortions for the “undesirable”
Nazi policy was not uniformly anti‑abortion. Courts and officials made a clear distinction by race and health: abortions were permitted, encouraged, or even forced for Jews, Roma, disabled people, and occupied‑population women because those fetuses were not valued under Nazi racial law, and in occupied Poland the RKFDV decreed abortion in many areas should be “declared free from punishment” [3] [4] [12]. Forced abortions and coercive terminations of forced labourers are documented in official memoranda and survivor testimony; thousands of Eastern European women were estimated to have been compelled to terminate pregnancies while in Germany [4].
4. Institutionalisation of eugenics: law, medicine and the politics of “health”
Under National Socialism medical institutions and legal instruments codified eugenic criteria for when abortion was allowed or required. The regime’s sterilisation law and subsequent regulations created categories—hereditary illness, “life unworthy of life”—that converted reproductive choices into instruments of state selection; some medical staff performed “eugenic” abortions framed as therapeutic or socially necessary [11] [5]. Scholarly reviews show the Nazis both criminalised many abortions and simultaneously established legal grounds for abortions that advanced eugenic goals [5] [13].
5. Postwar hangover: Paragraph 218 and a lingering Nazi information ban
After 1945 the criminal code’s Paragraph 218 remained the basic legal framework and continued to make abortion technically a criminal offence subject to exceptions; the related Paragraph 219a—originating in the interwar/Third Reich period and limiting doctors’ ability to provide information—survived into the 21st century and only began to be removed in recent years amid heated political debate [6] [7] [8]. Contemporary reporting notes doctors’ fear of prosecution under these provisions until their repeal in 2022, underlining how legal remnants of the past shaped access long after the Third Reich [8] [7].
6. Competing interpretations and limits of the record
Historians agree on the racialised double standard but debate details of enforcement, numbers, and local variation: some courts punished illegal abortions vigorously, others did not; illegal “eugenic” abortions occurred inside and outside sanctioned channels [13] [14]. Available sources do not mention precise nationwide quantitative tallies of prosecutions for every year under Nazi rule—scholarship focuses on legal texts, institutional measures (sterilisations, decrees) and archival evidence of forced procedures rather than a single comprehensive prosecution dataset [5] [4].
7. What this means for understanding law and coercion
The legal record shows Germany before and during the Third Reich treated abortion as a criminal act that was progressively politicised: Weimar easing was rolled back and remade into a policy instrument under Nazism that protected and promoted births among the “racially valuable” while permitting, encouraging or forcing termination among populations the regime sought to suppress. Contemporary debates about Paragraphs 218 and 219a, and their eventual reform, reflect the long legal and moral shadow cast by those policies [1] [5] [8].