Nazi Bride School in the ’30s: “Women must be the spiritual caregivers and the secret queens of our…

Nazi Bride School in the ’30s: “Women must be the spiritual caregivers and the secret queens of our people”

Hairpin superpal Emily Greenhouse has a fascinating piece up at the New Yorker about the “Reichsbräuteschule, or Reich Bride School, set up by the Nazis ‘to mould housewives out of office girls.’”

A villa was erected in 1937 on Schwanenwerder Island, on Berlin’s Wannsee Lake. In this pretend model household, young women — many of them teen-agers — would live in groups of twenty, spending six weeks, “preferably two months before their wedding day, to recuperate spiritually and physically, to forget the daily worries associated with their previous professions, to find the way and to feel the joy for their new lives as wives.” Scholtz-Klink further barred any woman with Jewish or gypsy heritage, physical disability, or mental illness from taking part. The course cost a hundred and thirty-five reichsmarks (six hundred and twenty-five dollars, in today’s cash), and covered everything from shopping and cooking to gardening and cocktail conversation, from home decorating to boot, dagger, and uniform scrubbing.

But expertise in craftsmanship and the culinary arts was not the essence of the school; it existed to drill Nazi dogma into “sustainers of the race,” those women who, under the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, would be effectively bribed to produce babies. The course insisted that women “acquire special knowledge of race and genetics” and only when a woman had acquired such knowledge could she gain certificates of accomplishment (which were also found in the archive, embellished with the Germanic ‘Tree of Life’; a woman who did not comply was refused not only this certificate but also permission to marry). The course also entailed a commitment to Nazi doctrine until death, and a placement of faith in the Führer over religious faith: marriages had to be neo-pagan rituals officiated by party members, not in a church ordained by a cleric. Children had to be raised to worship not Jesus, but Hitler.

By 1940, there were nine bride schools in Berlin, and more throughout the country; they were operational until as late as 1944. (Photos from one Reichsbräuteschule are up here, and are fascinating: the pictures look like Pollyanna and the captions are all like, “The domestic homeliness of the school provides many hints for their own future households,” ahhhh!) There are many more strangely juicy details in Greenhouse’s piece, like the Nazi party’s medals for German mothers: “Bronze went to eligible mothers with four or five children, silver for those with six or seven, and gold to those with eight or more Kinder.”

Photo via whatsthatpicture/Flickr

[TNY]