Johanna Haarer

Johanna Haarer (3 October 1900 – 30 April 1988) was a German-Austrian physician and author.

Haarer obtained her doctorate in medicine in 1925, but gave up her career as a doctor in 1932 after she married and had children. She began writing articles on parenting and baby care for , the weekly supplement of the Nazi Party newspaper . The popularity of her articles led to the publication of her first book, (The German Mother and Her First Child), in 1934, which became the best-selling parenting guide in Nazi Germany. During the Third Reich, she was the most successful author of educational literature within the Nazi ideology.

After the Second World War, she was imprisoned for a year in American-run internment camps because of her involvement in the NSDAP and her party membership. In the post-war years, her involvement in the Nazi regime prevented her from opening her own medical practice, and for that reason she worked as a pulmonologist for the West-German government until 1965.

Until the 1970s, she was considered an influential figure in the field of child rearing. Her debut book was reprinted, in a modified form, until 1987. A total of 1.2 million copies of the book were sold. The towns of Podmokly and Děčín with the river Elbe running through the middle.

Childhood Johanna "Hanni" Haarer was born on 3 October 1900 in Podmokly, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today part of Děčín in the Czech Republic) as Johanna Barsch. She was the daughter of Alois Barsch and Anna Fremrová. She had a brother, Georg, who was two years older than her, who died of meningitis when he was ten years old. However, his excessive alcohol consumption dominated his daily life. As an eight-year-old child, Haarer regularly had to pick up her father from pubs when he had drunk too much. Nevertheless, she preferred him to her mother, whom she perceived as a strict woman who treated her with contempt when she disobeyed. She then went to boarding school in Bieberstein in Hesse, where she graduated in 1920. During her studies, she developed a keen interest in psychiatry, but disliked the unpredictability of psychiatric patients. For this reason, she chose a topic from pathology for her thesis.

Despite paper shortages and austerity measures during the war years, the book continued to be reprinted, with new editions adapted as new territories were occupied by Nazi Germany. It was translated into Dutch by Steven Barends, who also translated .

Post-war years At the end of the war, Munich was heavily bombed and the family was evacuated to a guesthouse in Haag, in Upper Bavaria. In 1962, her last book, (Being a Woman and Staying Healthy), was published, and Haarer gradually faded into the background as an author.

Research into the effects Research into the effects of Haarer's parenting methods began in the 1980s, fifty years after the book was first published. The first critical study was conducted by psychologist Ute Benz, who published her findings in 1988. German psychiatrist Hartmut Radebold conducted extensive research on children from the war generation. He argued that parents who strongly identified with the Nazi regime and women who came from broken families were particularly susceptible to Haarer's educational propaganda. (1937) (1939) (1949), revised edition of (1950) (1950) (1952) (1954), with Esther von Reichlin (1957) (1957) (1959), as co-author (1959) (1962)