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TV star pays for Nazi 'values'
SHE was Germany's favourite newsreader - a blonde, blue-eyed television star who became a campaigner for old-fashioned femininity.
Now Eva Herman has fallen from her pedestal - she has been sacked for praising Hitler's policies towards women, families and motherhood.
The Nazi years, she said, while presenting her latest book, The Noah's Ark Principle, were a cruel time. They had, though, a redeeming quality: they celebrated family values.
"There were the good things, too, that is to say the values, the children, the mothers, the families, the solidarity ..."
Within hours, Herman, 48, was dismissed from state television. She has lost her talk show with immediate effect and her position as the presenter of the quiz program Did You See ...?
Part of Herman's appeal to viewers was her campaign for a return to old-fashioned femininity. In an earlier book, she pleaded for motherhood to be respected by society.
Feminists accused her of trying to recreate the traditional German values of "children, kitchen and church".
The far Right seemed to agree. An organisation run by the Austrian nationalist Freedom Party invited her as a speaker - she cancelled at the last minute - and she is celebrated by far-right blogs.
This time, Herman seems to have gone too far in blurring the boundaries between traditional German virtues and Nazi policies.
"This is the worst I have heard in a long time," the German Jewish novelist Ralph Giordano said.
"Frau Herman should realise that the distinguishing feature of the Third Reich was not the way it treated mothers who were supposed to produce cannon fodder. The distinguishing feature was the use of the gas chambers."
Herman said: "You have to see my remarks in context. This is not about Hitler's values but about basic human values which were abused in the Third Reich."
Under the Nazis, mothers who bore four healthy children were awarded a medal, the Mother Cross. Pregnant "Aryan" mothers were given generous maternity leave in the 1930s but primarily to free up work for the male unemployed.
Children were encouraged in order to create the army of the future and to populate the captured territories in Eastern Europe.
"Whoever knows me and reads the book will be aware how deeply I reject left- and right-wing extremism," Herman said.
Her central thesis is that women have been forced to deny their true nurturing nature by the social pressure to succeed in the workplace. This in turn has robbed men of their sense of manhood and is contributing to Germany's very low birthrate.
The Times, London, in The Australian
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