Three weeks after Kurt had returned to Army Group North, Liselotte began to hope for a baby and started thinking of children’s names. She was unpleasantly struck, on a shopping expedition with her friend Hada in Prague, by ‘the extraordinary fertility of the Czech women’: even the 19- and 20-year-olds all seemed to be pregnant – just ‘like rabbits’. It was a eugenics propagandist’s bad dream and Liselotte duly fell back on well-worn nationalist expressions, writing to her husband that ‘the best of our nation are being lost without producing any progeny or only one while in the East the
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