Nanna Conti

Nanna Laura Helene Conti , nee nanna Pauli (* 24. April 1881 in Uelzen , † thirtieth December 1951 in Bielefeld ) was a German midwife and head of the Reich midwives shaft in the era of National Socialism . At this point, she had a decisive influence on the professional, legal and ethical positioning of midwifery in the years from 1933 to 1945.

Youth and education

Nanna Conti was born in Uelzen on April 24, 1881, the second child of the grammar school teacher and classical scholar Carl Eugen Pauli and his wife Anna Isecke . She was raised in an educated middle class and probably attended school in Leipzig . According to her own statements, as a teenager she assisted her father in securing Etruscan inscriptions. The family moved to Lugano . There she met her husband, the Ticino postmaster Silvio Conti. The couple had three children, including their sons Silvio Conti (1899–1938) - later District Administrator of Prenzlau - and Leonardo (1900–1945) - later Reich Health Leader during the National Socialist era. The 21-year-old Nanna Conti got divorced after four years of marriage and returned to Germany. She regained the Prussian citizenship for herself and her children , which she had given up with her marriage. She completed her training as a midwife at the Provincial Midwifery School Magdeburg and worked as a freelance midwife in Berlin .

Political stance

Nanna Conti was politically close to the spectrum of right-wing parties; her basic stance was anti- liberal , anti-Semitic , anti- republican and shaped by ethnic nationalism . After the party was founded in November 1918, she belonged to the German National People's Party . After the Deutsch-Völkische Freedom Party split off in 1922, it joined this group. During this period she also supported the nationalist movement . According to his own statements, Conti belonged to the NSDAP from 1928 , but membership is only documented from 1930.

She was politically active in the Berlin-Charlottenburg Midwives Association, which was affiliated with the General German Midwives Association (ADHV), and was involved there in questions of professional policy and the organization of the association. In August she became secretary of the New Prussian Midwives Association, which had emerged from the Berlin Association and was still organizationally under the ADHV. Conti was also involved in the International Midwives' Association , today's International Confederation of Midwives , and was its president from 1936 to 1938.

Reich midwife leader

After the National Socialists seized power , the midwives were incorporated into the Reich Working Group for Professions in the Social and Medical Service and the associations were reorganized as the Reich Department of German Midwives . Conti was put in charge of the student council. In 1934, the midwives employed in hospitals and clinics were merged as "institutional midwives" and affiliated to the Reich Student Council under the direction of Lisa Luyken. In this way, Conti gained decisive influence on the conflicts that arose between employed and freelance midwives during the 1920s from the competition between hospital and home births and the National Socialist attitude and preference for home births. At the same time, the qualification of institutional midwives was reduced by the ban on double qualifications as midwives and nurses . Through the reorganization, she had now brought the employed midwives under the control of the NSDAP and was able to further promote the propagation of home births.

Conti took an active part in the amendment of the Midwifery Act , not least thanks to the influence and cooperation of her son, Leonard Conti , the Reich Health Leader. The “Reich Midwives Act” came into force on September 1, 1939. According to the law, the previous Reichsfachschaft was converted into the Reichshebammenschaft, the compulsory membership of all midwives in the Reichshebammenschaft was introduced, without which professional practice was prohibited. At the same time, the involvement of a midwife became compulsory for every birth, even if a doctor was present - a peculiarity of German law that still exists today. Through the obligation, which is also regulated by law, as a midwife to read a specialist magazine once a month , the regime gained further opportunities to influence the professional-political and ethical position of midwives. With the summary of the German and Austrian specialist newspapers on Die deutsche Midamme and the appointment of Conti as editor , National Socialist propaganda was carried into midwifery. Midwives were seen as an important access point to families, they were trained through new training regulations, advanced training courses and the specialist magazine, according to the racial hygiene ideas of the rulers, to differentiate between “racially healthy” and “genetically ill” infants and “racially healthy” Aryan families from an increase in the number Convincing birth rate.

When Luyken gave up the management of the institution midwives in early 1940, Margarete Lungershausen was her successor in May. Together with Conti, she planned to set up a training center for midwives , similar to the Werner School of the German Red Cross for managers in nursing. The Reich School of Midwifery began operating in Berlin on January 3, 1941, under Lungershausen's direction. Lungershausen propagated the expansion of the group of institutional midwives in order to have enough appropriately trained midwives available for use in the newly conquered areas of Greater Germany . She was supported by both Conti and her son.

On December 24, 1939, Conti received the Decoration of Honor for German People's Care and in the spring of 1941 its second stage.

After 1945

When the National Socialist regime collapsed, Conti was 64 years old. She fled to Stocksee in Schleswig-Holstein on April 21, 1945 . She escaped prosecution, presumably because the English officer who was supposed to arrest her could not have imagined that a midwife could have been involved in Nazi crimes. Conti died six years later on December 30, 1951 after a long illness. Your colleague Margarethe Lungershausen became president of the Agnes-Karll-Verband in 1953 .

literature

• Anja Peters: Nanna Conti - border crosser in: Vlastimil Kozon, Elisabeth Seidl, Ilsemarie Walter (eds.): History of care - The view across the border . ÖGVP Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-9502178-4-1 , pp. 91-113.
• Anja Katharina Peters: Nanna Conti (1881-1951). A biography of the Reich midwife leader. (= Series of publications by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 50 scholarship holders ). LIT Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-643-13985-6 .
• Kirsten Tiedemann: Midwives in the Third Reich. About the professional organization for midwives and their professional organization. Mabuse-Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3-933050-69-3 .
• Kirsten Tiedemann: About the professionalization of the midwifery profession by the National Socialist regime in Germany, in: Gabriele Dorffner, Sonja Horn (eds.): Aller Anfang, Geburt, Birth, Naissance. Social history of medicine. Doctors publishing house. Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-901488-50-2 , pp. 93-106.
• Wiebke Lisner: Guardians of the Nation: Midwives in National Socialism. Campus Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-593-38024-2 .
• Brigitte Borrmann, Association of German Midwives (Ed.): Between tutelage and professional autonomy: the history of the Association of German Midwives. Association of German Midwives, 2006, ISBN 3-000-17313-7 .
• Karin Wittneben: Conti, Nanna In: Horst-Peter Wolff (Hrsg.): Biographical lexicon for care history. “Who was who in nursing history.” Urban & Fischer, 2001, Volume 2, ISBN 3-437-26670-5 , pp. 45–48.

Web links

• Literature by and about Nanna Conti in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus-Dietmar Henke: Deadly medicine in National Socialism: from racial hygiene to mass murder. Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2008, ISBN 3-412-23206-8 , p. 105.
2. ↑ Brigitte Borrmann, Association of German Midwives (ed.): Between tutelage and professional autonomy: the history of the Association of German Midwives. Association of German Midwives, 2006, ISBN 3-000-17313-7 , p. 49.
3. ↑ Sabine Major: On the history of out-of-hospital obstetrics in the GDR. Dissertation 2003, Chapter 2.3.
4. ↑ Norbert Moissl: aspects of midwifery in the era of National Socialism from 1933 to 1945 using the example of the First Women's Hospital, University of Munich. Dissertation 2005, p. 18 ( PDF ; 682 kB)
5. ^ Anja Katharina Peters: Nanna Conti (1881-1951). A biography of the Reich midwife leader. LIT Verlag 2018, p. 144.
6. ^ Marion Schumann: From service to mother and child to service according to plan: Midwives in the Federal Republic 1950-1975. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009, ISBN 3-899-71548-9 , p. 217.