Attached Paper In-person November Annual Meeting 2026

(Re)producing “Aryans” for a Redemptive Future: The Strategic Ambivalences of Family in Nazi Germany

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

While the Nazi’s eugenic program in both its genocidal and natalist forms has long been acknowledged as a centerpiece of the regime, the theological resonances of this future-orientation are often subordinated to explanations citing social, biological frameworks. Using Hitler Youth “Home Evening” training booklets and ego-documents, this paper interrogates the function of family for the Nazi project and its relationship to a religiously-coded future, particularly as messaged to and experienced by so-called “Aryan” children in Nazi Germany, but also as withheld from those labeled enemies. Ultimately, I argue that family as discursive concept and as practice played an essential––if ambivalent––role in Nazi Germany: we find simultaneously a strategic, exclusionary mobilization of family for reproductive ends and a fracturing of the family as social unit, all in the name of a redemptive future purity undergirded by an ontological network of sacrality.