Was sex before marriage allowed in the "Third Reich"?

2024-08-25 16:31:00, Kuriozitete CNA

Was sex before marriage allowed in the "Third Reich"?

Illustrative photo

Hitler and his hierarchs, despite having very traditional ideas about the role of women in society, had nothing against premarital sex.

In this regard, some researchers, including the American historian Dagmar Herzog in her book "Sex after Fascism", memory and morality in twentieth-century Germany, claim that in 1934 the leaders of the League of German Girls (the female wing of the Hitlerian) were given a secret directive that not only did not prohibit, but actually encouraged sex among the youths belonging to the organization (youths between 10 and 18).

Indications that, apparently, were followed.

The British historian Richard Grunberger in his book "The 12-year-old Reich" confesses that in the public opinion at that time the idea that there was a great sexual promiscuity among the youth was very widespread.

For Hitler and the Nazis, increasing the birth of Aryan children was a real obsession.

In 1939 Heinrich Himmler declared:

"Beyond the limits set by laws, customs and bourgeois opinions, perhaps necessary, today it will become a noble mission for women and girls of pure German blood to ask soldiers leaving for the front, whether they are married or not, for to become a mother".

In any case, the ideal woman of Hitler's Germany was a wife and mother. The look was that idealized in propaganda posters, a Junoesque and athletic beauty, with blond hair tied in braids, blue eyes, white skin. Preferably without make-up and in the typical modest Bavarian dress: alpine jacket, white blouse and blue skirt, socks and leather shoes without heels.

It is no longer fashionable. No "eccentric" hairstyles, such as the 1920s bob, pearl pendants, knee-high stockings, short dresses modeled after slender Parisian figures, cigarettes and even jazz music, which came from America and therefore originated "black".

Children, kitchen and home. With no higher education, no university, no career, the only female interests were to be "Kinder, Küche und Kirche", meaning "children, cooking and church".

It was the mantra of young women who aspired to marry a member of the SS, forced to attend the Reich School, a kind of premarital course to transform secretaries into housewives.

The Germans were asked to do nothing but make children and raise them by teaching them the values ??of the regime.

The real Nazi woman had in the first place social and patriotic commitment, denunciation and work in women's organizations.

However, it must be said that no woman of the hierarchy, with the exception of Gerda Bormann, the only one who enthusiastically embraced every aspect of National Socialist ideology, even in her private life, never gave up French fashion, make-up, smoking and luxury. / Adapted from CNA