Reich Bride Schools

The Reich Bride Schools (German: Reichsbräuteschule) were institutions established in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. They were created to train young women to be "perfect Nazi brides",^[1] indoctrinated in Nazi ideology and educated in housekeeping skills. The fiancées of prominent SS members and senior Nazi Party officials (and later a wider range of German women) were taught skills including cooking, child care, ironing and to how to polish their husbands' uniforms and daggers. They were required to swear oaths of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, to pledge to raise their children as Nazis and to marry in what the Nazis alleged to be ceremonies based on pre-Christian model—ceremonies that Nazi officials presided over, rather than ceremonies in churches.

Although a number of bride schools were established in locations across Germany, the demands of the

Women in the Nazi worldview

Women had a clearly defined position in the Nazi worldview. They were not deemed suitable for professions such as medicine, the law or the civil service, from which they were banned. They were instead expected to stay at home, maintain the household and have as many children as possible.

Hitler told a conference of the National Socialist Women's League (NS-Frauenschaft) in September 1938, "The slogan 'Emancipation of women' was invented by Jewish intellectuals and its content was formed by the same spirit. In the really good times of German life the German woman had no need to emancipate herself ... If the man's world is said to be the State, his struggle, his readiness to devote his powers to the service of the community, then it may perhaps be said that the woman's is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home."^[3] The Nazi viewpoint was summed up by Hermann Göring in his Nine Commandments for the Workers’ Struggle, published in 1934, in which he exhorted women to "take hold of the frying pan, dust pan, and broom, and marry a man."^[1] Young girls were compelled to join the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel) while older women became members of the NS-Frauenschaft. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the NS-Frauenschaft, told a Nazi party conference in 1935 that "women must be the spiritual caregivers and the secret queens of our people, called upon by fate for this special task."^[4]

Establishment

In 1936, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler came to an agreement with Scholtz-Klink to put her views into practice, with Himmler issuing a decree ordering women engaged to SS members to undergo training in how to become brides who would conform to the Nazi ideal of how women should live.^[1] They were also to undergo training to provide them with "special knowledge of race and genetics."^[5] A newspaper article published at the time stated that the schools they would attend would aim "to mould housewives out of office girls."^[2]

Schools for mothers (Mütterschulen) were not a new phenomenon in Germany; the first had been established in

The first Reich Bride School was established in 1937 on Schwanenwerder, an island in the Havel river in the Berlin locality of Nikolassee. It occupied a villa which served as a model household, in which groups of up to twenty young women would live for a six-week course.^[1] An official pamphlet stated: "In circles of 20 students, young girls should attend courses at the institute, 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." They were charged 135 reichsmarks (equivalent to about €470 at today's prices) for the course.^[2] Other Reich Bride Schools were soon established; by 1940 there were nine in Berlin alone, and schools were also established in other German cities such as Oldenburg and Tübingen.^[2]

Training and indoctrination

The training given at the schools included a variety of household skills such as cooking, ironing, gardening, child care and animal husbandry.

The schools were initially aimed at educating the future wives of the Nazi elite – prominent members of the SS and the Nazi Party. Eventually they were opened to all "racially suitable" German women, thus excluding anyone with Jewish or gypsy heritage, physical disability, or a history of mental illness.[2] Nazi propaganda publicised the schools' activities in articles such as one covering the Oldenburg Reich Bride School, published in May 1940 in the Frauen Warte, the Nazi Party's bi-weekly illustrated magazine for women. It showed in a series of photographs how the brides were taught how to use gardening tools, practising cooking and animal husbandry, picking and arranging flowers, and undergoing courses in cooking, sewing, and baby care, knitting and weaving.^[7] The accompanying text, written from the point of view of a mother recalling her time at the Reich Bride School, says:

The days were full, the training thorough, and the evenings of reading, singing, and games were delightful. The future families they would have as wives and mothers were always at the center of the programme. That gave the six weeks [of the course] the unity and organization that so pleased the brides, creating that atmosphere of community that would last past the course. The fact that most of the girls were engaged to soldiers at the front strengthened the sense of togetherness, both in good and bad times. How happy the young woman is that she can still be with her husband. She wants to use weeks until he may be called up to build a comfortable home for him and make the few weekend hours he has at home warm and treasured.^[8]

According to Dr Marius Turda of

The Reich Bride Schools continued their activities until at least May 1944, but the pressures of war appear to have curtailed them before the final collapse of Nazi Germany the following year.[2] Women took up new roles on the "home front", working in munitions factories or assisting the military. Although this contradicted the original idea of women being confined to the home, Scholtz-Klink justified it on the grounds that they now had a "higher obligation" that demanded their contributions to the war effort.^[5] After the war, the bride schools fell into obscurity and information about them is still scarce; as Marius Turda puts it, "It is possible that, after the war, former Nazis and their spouses who had graduated were rather reluctant to talk about these schools." However, in 2013, Nazi-era documentation about the schools was discovered in the German federal archives in Koblenz, including a rule book containing details of the oaths that brides had to swear and the certificates awarded to them at the end of their courses.^[2]

References

Further reading

• Deutsche Mutter, bist du bereit...: Alltag im Lebensborn, Verlag, Berlin 1997,
  ISBN 3-7466-8094-8
  .