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.
