Why did the Nazis recruit little girls to distribute porn in Austria?

by AnnalsPornographie

From A Life of Erwin Schrödinger page 236.

Early in 1938, portents of disaster appeared in Austria. AN intense auora lit up the sky so that in many districts fire alarms were sounded. The plague birds appeared in Vienna, albino sparrows with russet splotches like dried blood on their wings, and little girls were recruited by Nazis to distribute pornographic broadsheets to passers-by.

No citation.

commiespaceinvader

Dude... This is somewhat hyperbolic in the sense that I don't know about and couldn't find anything about an intense aurora in 1938 Vienna nor about plague birds. Also, I'm pretty sure the albino sparrow with blood on their wings thing is not meant in a literal sense but rather referring to Schrödinger, who was an anti-Nazi, seeing signs for the Anschluss, i.e. the annexation of Austria into the German Reich coming, and interpretating them in a literary instead of literal way.

What the part about little girls distributing pornographic broadhseets refers to is children being recruited by the illegal Nazi party to hand-out the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. The Nazi party had been illegal in Austria since their attempted coup d'etat in 1933 and so people distributing their publications in public were usually arrested by the police force of the Schuschnigg regime. Hence, it was a common tactic for them as well as for the also illegal socialists to pay children a small sum of money to distribute their literature and newspapers. Worst came to worst the pamphlets and materials were confiscated but the children always went free because they couldn't be arrested and could – rightfully – claim they didn't know any better.

The pornography that is referred to here is not porn in our sense of the word, meaning not illustrations of naked people or of intercourse but refers to the nature of the articles in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. In the tradition of Weimar "sex and crime" newspapers, large swaths of Der Stürmer was dedicated to the voyeristic description of alleged crimes committed by Jews against Germans of a sexual nature: Jewish men lusting after and sexually violating Aryan women; Jewish women seduzcing upstanding German men and having their way with thus spoiling them etc. pp.

These articles were often illustrated with pictures such as this one which should give an impression of the kind of stuff they contained. It's mostly in that tradition of racist literature that is suppopsed to serve to condemn a group but is so voyeristic in its descriptions that it also supposed to be titillating for the reader. Also, Der Stürmer often reported on cases of alleged and real child molestation usually trotting out every small detail they could find into the open, thus including often somewhat graphic descriptions of intercourse etc.

There are a lot of historic references to Der Stürmer as pornographic but this is often meant to mean that the newspaper was obsecne resp. featured graphic descriptions of cases of so-called "race defilement" and not that it was illustrated pornography.

Further reading:

  • Friedrich Koch: Sexuelle Denunziation. Die Sexualität in der politischen Auseinandersetzung, Hamburg 1995.

  • Laura Bensow: „Frauen und Mädchen, die Juden sind Euer Verderben!“ - Eine Untersuchung antisemitischer NS-Propaganda unter Anwendung der Analysekategorie Geschlecht, Hamburg 2016.

  • Daniel Roos: Julius Streicher und „Der Stürmer“ 1923–1945. Paderborn 2014.