The (Literal) Seduction of the Masses

 The (Literal) Seduction of the Masses

For Aldous Huxley and David Bowie

How, exactly, does a radical party not only gain control over a country but command the admiration and adoration of large amounts of the public? This is a question that has been asked many times by historians, especially with regards to the rise of the Nazis. But I would like to approach the appeal of the Nazis to many Germans (and some Western Europeans more broadly) in a way I believe has been ignored. I would like to show the way that the Nazis used sex appeal and the promise of sexual pleasure as a way of encouraging compliance. This argument may seem absurd, but I would encourage the reader to keep an open mind. For any readers who think my argument is a pointlessly contrarian attempt at shock, I have provided a bibliography to prove the validity of my assertions. 

It’s important to realize that the Nazis were no traditionalists. They fully embraced modernity - a perverse modernity, to be sure, but modernity none the less. The German traditionalists wanted the return of the kaiser. They wanted to set things back to the way they were before World War One. The Nazis’ plan was different. They embraced modernity as the path to power. The modernizing impulse can be seen in many parts of the Nazi agenda. That includes direct government support for technological innovation, heavy use of new media (particularly film), economic and industrial development deliberately copied from the United States, construction of public works and roadways, city planning, aggressive health improvement campaigns, pushes to remove distinctions between economic classes, paid vacations for workers, and working to limit the power of institutional Christianity. 

The Nazi Party openly feuded with the Roman Catholic Church, for it was a threat to unilateral state power, and they held up Frederich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin as their intellectual heroes. This is not to say that the Nazis accurately interpreted the writings of Nietzsche and Darwin, but that they used those men’s writings as justification for their own beliefs and actions. The Nazis were theists, but they preferred a sort of vague and malleable pantheism to traditional Christianity. Note that the buckles of soldiers’ belts said “Gott mit Uns”, “God with us”, not “Christ with us” or “The Holy Trinity with us” - and, indeed, the human-centric spirituality implied by “God with us” instead of “us with God” (as the Western Allies would position themselves in their propaganda). 

The Nazis fiercely pursued scientific advancement; and they were successful enough in that after World War Two ended, the Americans spared many German scientists, even those who were true Nazis, so they could have those scientists work on their own projects. They worshipped youth, health, and beauty; and criticized the bourgeoisie for standing in the way of those things. Even the aesthetics of Nazism - the statues and buildings designed by Hitler’s favorite designers (Arno Breker and Albert Speer) all had a decidedly Art Deco styling to them. This was a regime that embraced modernity as the path to power. This can even been seen in the Nazis’ whole-hearted embrace of eugenics - though now widely despised and discredited, in the first part of the Twentieth Century eugenics was seen as an exciting ideology of human progress.

A strong illustration of this is Joseph Goebbels in his article “More Morality, Less Moralism!” (the exclamation point is Joseph Goebbels’s, not mine). In this article, Joseph Goebbels charges that traditionalist moralists were enemies of “life-affirming National Socialism”. He describes them as “hypocritical creatures who have no genuine strong conception of life” who “hide behind a screen of contemptible hypocrisy and dishonest prudery”. He also writes that “moral trumpeters” who “think that the German woman should not go out alone, she should not sit alone in a restaurant, she should not go out with a boy or even an SA man without a chaperone for a Sunday afternoon excursion, she should not smoke, she should not drink, she should not wash up and maker herself pretty, in short she should do everything to keep the evil interest of a man away from her”, stating that they “slander and demoralize millions of German women with their preaching, women who bravely and honestly do their duty in life and on the job, who are good comrades to their men and sacrificing mothers to their children” and that “these moralists should not sit in judgment over women, whether they are enemies or even if like all real men they wish women happiness, relaxation, and domestic peace, though their stuffy superiority would keep women from it”. He summarizes this all at the end of the article, and I’ll quote it as a block because of how telling it is - “We do not want to abolish pleasure, but rather to let as many as possible share in it. That is why we encourage people to attend the theater, that is why we give workers the opportunity to dress well for festive occasions. That is the reason behind Kraft Dutch Freude [Strength through Joy]. That is why we shake off the agents of a prudish hypocrisy, why we do not allow decent, hard-working people who have every reason to need relief from their hard daily labors, who need to reaffirm life, to recover from the weariness, cares, and burdens of every day, to have their necessary pleasures ruined by the eternal chicanery of these pedants. We need more affirmation of life and less complaining! More morality, but less moralism!”. 

The key to understanding Nazi sexual ideology is realizing that the Nazis did not think about sex in terms of “moral” and “immoral”, but in terms of “healthy” and “unhealthy”. The Nazis aimed to annihilate “unhealthy” sexuality. That was their justification for murdering homosexuals and for forcibly sterilizing disabled people. But the reverse side of that belief was a belief that “healthy” sexuality should be encouraged as it would increase the flourishing of the Aryan race. They embraced sensuality for those they deemed “desirable”; straight, physically-well Northern Europeans. This belief was frequently expressed in Das Schwarze Korps [The Black Guard], the official paper of the SS. Das Schwarze Korps praised what it called “beautiful and pure” sensual encounters between “racially fit” young men and women as “the pure and the beautiful were for the uncorrupted German never a sin”. It attacked a conservative morality “that sees in the body something to be despised, and wants to interpret what are natural processes as sinful drives”. It charged that the Catholic Church’s “overt rejection of ‘fleshly communion’” was biologically destructive because glorifying celibacy blocked the “right kind” of people from reproducing freely. It celebrated “healthy drive-forces” of sexuality as embodying “vibrant” and “life-affirming” Aryan flourishing. Such attitudes were echoed in a widely-discussed essay by the Nazi doctor Walter Gmelin. Walter Gmelin stated that in a study he had conducted while evaluating couples to see if they were “racially acceptable” for marriage, he had observed that premarital intercourse was common among young people. Instead of worrying as a traditionalist would, he cheerily noted that “in spite of everything - people at the age of sexual maturity satisfy the drive given them by nature!” and that this was “a healthy reaction against the social inhibitions and against morality preachers”. 

The reaction of institutional Christian leaders to Nazi views on sexuality is telling. Chillingly, churchmen in Germany were often far more disturbed by Nazi Germany’s sexual looseness for the “socially desirable” than its cruelty towards the “socially undesirable”. A good example would be the Catholic priest Mathias Laros, who wrote in his book The Relations of the Sexes that while he admired the Nazis’ racial standards, he was deeply unnerved by the loosening of sexual mores the Nazis encouraged. He complained that “The era [of Nazi rule] has succumbed to a horrifying barbarism and overstimulation of the sexual drive, especially since all inhibiting barriers of tradition have been trampled”. He opposed the Nazis’ encouragement of mixed-gender exercises in a near-naked state, claiming that “All talk of naturalness and the beauty of the body cannot do away with the consequence, that on the male side an intensified sex drive results, and on the female side, if she has retained her true femininity, the most delicate bodily shame has been damaged and moral feeling deadened”.  Another would be the Evangelical missionary Ernst Krupka, who voiced his approval for the Nazi Party’s racial philosophy but objected to what he saw as “fleshly lust” and a “spirit of uncleanness” in Nazi Germany. The Catholic jurist Johannes Ehwalt accused the Nazi Party of having an “ever more destructive effect” on traditional marriage by encouraging an “animalistic” attitude towards sexual intercourse as “in the first instance a controllable process for racial breeding” and glorifying “good figure, physical racial advantages, athletic ability and youthful exuberance” as ideals for young people to aspire to. This attitude only grew after the downfall of Nazi Germany, when in West Germany a culture of strict sexual mores developed as part of the desire to get away from Nazism. The sexual conservatism of West German culture in the mid-Twentieth-Century was a direct reaction against the limited liberation of the Nazi era. Christian leaders, empowered by the Western Allies who wished to use traditional Christianity an ideological alternative to both Nazism and Communism, presented an embracing of restrictive attitudes towards sex as the cure to Germany’s moral crisis. Just as during the Nazi Party’s rule, some churchmen showed a disturbing conviction that hedonism and sensuality, not oppression or mass murder, was the real problem with Nazi Germany. A good example would be the Catholic doctor Anton Hofmann, who in the sex advice book he wrote to give advice on how Germany should rebuild, gave equal moral weight to “NS- [National Socialist, that is, Nazi] schools and the like” encouraging “premature sexual contact” among young people as “‘natural-free experiencing’ of the erotic event” with Nazi violence and cruelty.             

The Western Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse critiqued the Nazi culture of sensuality as well, from a radically different ideological standpoint. After fleeing from Nazi Germany to America to avoid persecution for being a Marxist, Herbert Marcuse took up a job with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] conducting reports to inform the American government on the culture of Nazi Germany. In these reports, he concluded that part of the allure of Nazism was its “emancipation of sexual life” for the “racially desirable”. He carefully noted that “the new individual liberties are by their very nature exclusive liberties, the privilege of the healthy and approved” and that “the liberty or license implied in this abolition [of sexual taboos]” was a way of binding “individuals into the National Socialist system”. He pointed to “the license granted to the racial elite, to the facilitation of marriage and divorce, to the sectioning of illegitimate children” as further evidence. He argued that this policy of limited liberation “tends to make this realm of satisfaction an official political domain. … The individual recognizes his private satisfaction as a patriotic service to the regime, and he receives his reward for performing it”. Thus, private pleasures being honored as being in service to an ideological ideal made people more likely to support a regime - in this case, Nazi Germany.

Nazi ideals of sensuality and sexual pleasures were inextricable from eugenics, as they desired for the “right” people to reproduce. The eugenic implications of this limited liberation were blatantly stated by Robert Ley. Though extremely obscure today (I only learned who he was while researching for this paper), Robert Ley was one of Adolf Hitler’s oldest and closest allies. He was the man in charge of the German Labor Front and who was responsible for running much of the organization of the Nazi Party. He also ordered the imprisoning and torture of anti-Nazi trade unionists and managed Nazi Germany’s slave system of wartime production; and for these atrocities he was tried at the Nuremberg trials, though he managed to kill himself before the Allied judges could sentence him for his crimes. In one public speech, Robert Ley declared that “racially fit” women becoming pregnant outside of marriage was a good thing because it forwarded the flourishing of the Aryan race. In his words, “We must grant the unmarried mother, who bears a child as a result of natural healthy instincts, the same respect and the same protection as we grant married mothers”. Robert Ley reasserted such eugenicist beliefs in a later speech from the beginning phase of the Second World War, when he praised the war for its eugenic potential because it would make German men more sexually desirable to women. He claimed that “In this war lies the rebirth of our nation” because “In nations living in ‘eternal peace’ manhood dries up and all the virtues that make man lovable to woman degenerate” and thus, “war is not the wrath of God, but a blessing of God”. Such attitudes were also reflected in the advice given to members the BDM [Bund Deutscher Madel, Federation of German Girls, the female counterpart of the Hitler Youth]. Organization leaders were instructed to encourage young women to pursue premarital affairs, and to provide protection and plausible deniability to girls who became pregnant. Similarly, a study after the Nazi Party Rally in Nineteen Thirty-Six found that a large number of young women in the BDM had become pregnant during the rally celebrations. This was considered a desirable outcome.

The Nazis also used sex appeal to gain compliance in occupied Western European countries. They encouraged their soldiers to pursue intimate relations with local women as a way of binding those women to the Nazi regime. While this may not have resulted in ideological conversion, it did succeed in persuading local women to cooperate with them. A strikingly high number of Western European women (estimates are somewhere in the high ten-thousands) took up sexual relationships with German soldiers. Numerous studies by postwar anthropologists revealed that these women entered such affairs not out of self-preservation but because they found the German soldiers to be attractive and handsome. This is supported by the many personal writings of women who described their desire for the bodies of the occupying Germans. Even women who were actively anti-Nazi blushingly confessed to finding the Germans sexually alluring. Benoite Groult (who later became an author and a feminist activist) described her reaction to seeing German soldiers undressed this way: “And yet I can’t seem to forget that they are men and I am a woman. When they are in their underwear, I have to hold myself back so that I don’t smile at them”. Genevieve De Gaulle referred to the German soldiers as “smartly uniformed ‘young war gods’”. Other young women privately expressed the same attraction, writing of “devastatingly good-looking, suntanned, blue-eyed soldiers” and of “soldiers [who] were very tall - almost six feet - and dressed entirely in black with skull-and-crossbones insignias. … [S]uperb, like angels of death”. It’s worth noting that after the Allied liberation of Western Europe, many women who had slept with German soldiers were harshly punished by the people in their communities. Whether this hostility was anti-fascist vengeance or aggressive misogyny is a topic beyond the scope of this paper, and I will leave it to people who are wiser than me.

If there is an overarching point to this essay, it’s that we should not to ignore the role of reward as a tool of persuasion. The idea that evil people and movements are anti-pleasure is a comforting one, but it isn’t a universal truth. There are evil people who are austere and ascetic, such as many extremist religious terrorists, but there are others who are not. There are evil people who love enjoyment and indulgence, and if they are clever they may use those things to get their way. The Nazis were master manipulators, and they knew how to get their way. They knew how to use fear and force, but also how to charm and convince. Topics like persuasion through sex appeal might seem trivial next to things such as war and mass murder, but people are more likely to accept evil being done around them if they can have their own pleasures. This may not be an agreeable conclusion, but it is true. It may be uncomfortable to realize pleasure and evil can be tightly bound together, but sometimes discomfort allows us to reach a greater understanding.

Thank you.

Bibliography: 

Adamson, Goran. “Was National Socialism Anti-Sex? On Left-Wing Fantasies and Sex as the Dark Matter of Politics”. Society, volume 54, issue 1. 2017.

Dimsdale, Joel. Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals. Yale University Press. 2017.

Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Palgrave Macmillan Publishing. 2010.

Goebbels, Joseph. “More Morality, Less Moralism!”. Volkischer Beobachter. 1934.

Harrison, Victoria Louise. “Face to the Face with the Enemy: The Reactions of Young Girls and Young Women to the Nazi Occupation of France”. University of Birmingham Research Archive. 2011.

Harrison, Victoria Louise. “Little Women: Adolescent Angst and Wartime Woes in World War Two France”. Women’s History Magazine, issue 67. 2011.

Herzog, Dagmar. “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, volume 11, number 1/2. 2002.

Herzog, Dagmar. “Sex and Secularization in Nazi Germany”. Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan Publishing. 2004.

Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality and German Fascism. Berghahn Books. 2005.

Lowe, Keith. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War Two. St Martin’s Press. 2012.

Rosbottom, Ronald. When Paris Went Dark. Little, Brown, and Company. 2014.

Stolzfus, Nathan. Hitler’s Compromises. Yale University Press. 2016. 

Unnamed Journalist. “Germany: ’Natural, Healthy Instincts’”. Time. 1937.

Unnamed Journalist. “War Is a Blessing, Says Nazi; Ley Holds Women Love Fighters”. The New York Times. 1940.