Status Updates From La Europa Negra

The Fascist government even toyed with the idea of registering all pregnancies; its Laws on Public Safety did turn “impeding the fecundity of the Italian people” into a crime of state, while the 1930 penal code included a chapter headed “crimes against the integrity and health of the race.”

Many of their propaganda ideas were modelled on the efforts of the French, who issued a medal “for the French family” to productive mothers—bronze for five children, gold for ten—who did their patriotic
duty in the aftermath of the Great War’s bloodletting.

Even the highly paternalistic liberalism which Geneva [league of nations] embodied reeked of humanitarian weakness to the Nazis. The stronger race must prevail over the weaker; it would thus win the right to impose its own wishes upon the loser. It followed that legal arrangements were purely matters of convenience, to be followed or repudiated as the interests of the Volk dictated.