"Physical Exercise
Enough free time
But not like this—"
Many German medical professionals began recommending more preventive approaches to health care during the years of the Weimar Republic. New discoveries about the links between nutrition, lifestyle, and overall health led many doctors and public health officials to place greater value on exercise, fresh air, and sunlight.1 Public health professionals in Weimar Germany urged healthy lifestyles and outdoor physical activities to counterbalance the health impacts of daily life in industrial cities.
The featured film, “Born Out of Necessity,” was produced by the Dresden Hygiene Museum in 1930—roughly three years before the Nazi Party rose to power. First established in the years before World War I, the Dresden Hygiene Museum held public exhibitions on new innovations in medical science, public health, and theories of eugenics, or “racial hygiene.”2 These medical and cultural trends heavily influenced the development of Nazi ideology in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the regime adopted a preventive approach to public health that promoted a physically active, “nature-loving lifestyle.”3
Focusing on the health risks of modern urban life, this film foreshadows several major themes that would become closely associated with Nazi public health policies. These include the importance of outdoor activities and healthy foods or campaigns against alcohol and tobacco.4 Coordinated mass exercise became a common feature of Nazi Party rallies, Nazi youth groups, and the regime’s “Strength through Joy” program, but these activities were all informed by pre-existing German traditions of gymnastics and outdoor recreation.5 “Born Out of Necessity” shows how many of the defining aspects of the Nazi regime’s public health policies were actually rooted in longstanding German traditions or the medical and cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic.6