Sex Dolls für Schicklgruber: Hitler’s Non-Existent “Nazi Love Doll” Project

A bogus story about Nazi sex dolls from 2005 or before has surfaced again…and it’s ladling out the dopamine with lots of croutons. And, dopamine-drunk, the blogosphere keeps reposting it.

A report in the New York Daily News references as fact the urban legend that during the Nazi occupation of France, The high command sent sex dolls to keep German soldiers away from French prostitutes. Unfortunately, the story’s been debunked in German sources several times — not definitively, maybe, but the story smells like bullshit in the first place. There was never any good indication that iwas true; the evidence for it was so sketchy as to be laughable to begin with. Plus, in net terms it’s as old as the hills. And the burden of proof is really on the people claiming that the Nazis did create military sex dolls…not those of us suggesting that maybe they didn’t.  That hasn’t stopped the news from being reported by every military nerd site out there, with, apparently, nobody expressing any skepticism.

The story is supposedly included by author Graeme Donald in his book Mussolini’s Barber, which was published in October, 2010. Why is it we’re all just finding out about it now? Good question, since it’s been floating around the web since at least 2005.

Donald claims he “uncovered” this story while researching a book on Barbie, which he claims was based on a post-World War II German sex doll…another oft-repeated legend that is at best a one-quarter truth. Barbie was based on Bild Lilli, which was originally marketed in immediate postwar Germany to G.I.’s and adults as an adult novelty, and only later marketed to children. But Lilli was not a “sex doll” in the sense that a blow-up doll or a Realdoll is. The myth that Lilli was a sex doll per se seems to have originated with Eve Ensler, who has called her a “sex toy” repeatedly in interviews, and she was referred to by Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs as a “sex doll.” Lilli was neither. She may have been an adult novelty, but she was not a sex toy or a sex doll.

Anyway, the current Nazi Sex Toy story goes like this: In 1940, Heinrich Himmler was just as concerned about sexually transmitted diseases as was the U.S. military. Hitler personally approved “The Borghild Project,” a program to create sex dolls for the Western front, and Himmler “ordered 50” for his troops.

The dolls were — of course — blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and were (presumably deflated) small enough to fit in a backpack. The program was supposedly 86’ed because soldiers were afraid they would “face enormous embarrassment if caught by the enemy with the dolls.”

Incidentally, for future dictators: that is one of the first signs that the war is not going your way — if your personnel are making plans to hide their sex toys before they surrender. I’m told by reliable sources that Sadaam Hussein finally decided to go into hiding when his Revolutionary Guard was spotted stashing their Big Bertha Butt Plugs under the bathroom sink alongside the sarin shells for the Project Babylon supercannon. And when Castro entered Havana gleefully waving Fulgencio Batista’s captured Doc Johnson Super Ballsy? That’s when the world knew it was all over.

Anyway, this story stinks like phthalates. Here are a few reasons:

For one thing, The Sun report puts the term “gynoid” in quotes, along with the term “synthetic comforters,” implying that German sources use those terms. But gynoid is a term unlikely to be used in German in that era, and I find it highly unlikely that the kind of people designing sex toys for the military in 1940s Germany would come up with that coinage — especially since it’s really not a gynoid at all.

If they were going to go that route, I find it far more likely that they would call it a “robotess,” a term which originated with Karl Capek’s Czech play R.U.R.. That 1920s play coined the term “robot” and “robotess,” whereas the term “android,” from which “gynoid” is derived, first appeared in a French novel of the 1880s. Or why wouldn’t they call them something in German…say, Liebespuppen, which means “love dolls”? That would have been the habit of the Nazi hierarchy, which tended, explicitly, not to be highly-educated enough to be throwing Latin and Greek terms around without thinking about it. Unlike German scientists and the non-Nazi German military structure, Hitler and Himmler were not the types who knew the languages used in science and the arts.

And here’s what The Sun says about the non-existent Aryan Liebespuppen of Herr Schicklgruber:

The [sexually transmitted disease] problem was so bad it was keeping many of the troops from their frontline duties. The World War Two project began in 1940 after SS chief Heinrich Himmler wrote: “The greatest danger in Paris is the widespread and uncontrolled presence of whores, picking up clients in bars, dance halls and other places….”It is our duty to prevent soldiers from risking their health for the sake of a quick adventure.”

Hitler personally apporoved the plan for the blonde and blue-eyed “gynoid” dolls, which were small enough to fit into a backpack….They were tested by soldiers in Nazi-occupied Jersey…Himmler was so impressed he ordered 50 for his own troops.

Author Graeme Donald uncovered Hitler’s secretive “Borghild Project” while researching the history of Barbie – which was based on a post-war German sex doll…He said: “In the end the idea fizzled out and the place where they were made and all the dolls were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.”

[Link.]

Can I restate, this is garbage; it was debunked in 2005 in German right here and again right here (here are the Google Translate versions of the first and the second; they’re a little sketchy, but get the point across.)

It may not be absolutely certain that there were no Nazi sex dolls, but there is absolutely no reliable evidence that there were any. The sources quoted then and now are complete shit from a historian’s perspective — less than unreliable. They’re non-sources, and that’s probably because they appear to have been made up.

As to why Graeme Donald is reporting it now, and having it repeated in news sources, I don’t know. His book came out last year, and the story was ill-referenced when BlogCritics posted it in the middle of last decade. It appears to have originated with this German story, though the German debunkers linked above claim they tried to track the guy down and nobody at the magazine where teh story supposedly originally appeared

The 2005 BlogCritics post, incidentally, makes another conspiracy-theory faux pas, and a common one…though not usually made in German, which makes it pretty hillarious.  BlogCritics makes this claim:

The project was considered “Geheime Reichssache”, which meant “more secret than top secret”.

It is a running joke among skeptics that conspiracy freaks or UFO nuts love to classify stuff as “Above Top Secret.” But in the real world of spies, “Top Secret” is just what it sounds like…Top. There is no “Above Top Secret.”

And in any event, that’s not what “Geheime Reichssache” means in the first place. It translates literally as “Secret Reich Matter,” or more liberally, “Matter of State Security.” It’s not “Above Top Secret” at all, ba-da-bing.

One of the clearest telltale signs that a story is bullshit? Irrelevant details that are totally wrong.

The Daily Mail piece on the subject even shamelessly admits that this is nothing more than hearsay from a non-source, while considering that fact to establish its veracity:

The story came from German sculptor Arthur Rink, one of the men on the team which designed the doll at the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit.

Here’s what The Daily Mail says. (I’ve removed the Daily Mail’s insane number of paragraph breaks, as I did with the Sun…is that, like, a British thing?). Check it:

Smaller than life-size, the so-called ‘gynoids’ were to be targeted at the men most at temptation from a ‘quick adventure’ with a French prostitute…Initially, the Hungarian actress Kathe von Nagy was asked if the doll could be modelled on her, but she refused…Instead the look of the Aryan doll with blonde bob hair and blue eyes was left bland so soldiers could apply their own fantasy.

[Author Graeme] Donald said: ‘I was actually researching the history of the Barbie doll that was based on a German sex doll of the 1950s…Ruth and Elliot Handler from America visited Germany in 1956 and saw the Lilli dolls that were sold in barbers’ shops and nightclubs – and were not for children…Ruth didn’t realise this and bought one and realised later they were not toys…But Ruth and her husband used the doll as a foundation for what became Barbie. ..While I was researching this I came across references to Nazi sex dolls and found out that Hitler had ordered them to be made…There was debate about whether the dolls should have the hair-style with side-plaits spiralled into circles, but in the end a boyish bob won the day…They were made from highly tensile and elastic polymers and the first ones were trialled in Jersey.”

[Link.]

That’s Jersey in Normandy, France, incidentally, not the Jersey where, at night, we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines.

Please take note that the only direct quotations from Nazi sources here are unrelated to sex dolls specifically; they could be found in any archive and concern STDs, not sex dolls.

And “The evidence was destroyed in Dresden!” sounds like a kind of neat excuse for not having any. Especially since Dresden was not a military manufacturing center or an administrative center, as anyone who’s read Slaughter-House Five knows…that’s why its complete destruction near the end of World War II was claimed by some to be a war crime. And frankly, I find it pretty unlikely that Dresden specifically (in the south of the Eastern “shoulder” of Germany, near today’s Czech border and not far from what is now Poland) would be where they’d keep all the dolls intended to be shipped to German troops in France, every last one of them…and would just happen to be the city widely known to be utterly destroyed in the very last part of the war. That sounds like something I’d cook up for a science fiction story.

Or is it not, in fact, that the evidence was destroyed in Dresden, as the Sun story claims, but was thought to have been destroyed in Dresden? ‘Cause the latter version is what The Daily Mail says. The Sun quotes Donald directly this way:

“In the end the idea fizzled out and the place where they were made and all the dolls were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.”

…while the Daily Mail quotes Donald saying this:

‘In the end the idea fizzled out and the place where they were made and all the other dolls are thought to have been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.’

I have not omitted any ellipses from the first quote, so it sounds like someone’s playing it pretty fast and loose with history. Maybe Graeme played it medium-loose, and the press is playing it extra-loose, and now every military blog is playing it mega-loose. “were destroyed” and “are thought to have been destroyed” are not the same thing, at least not to a cautious reader…or a real historian.

Sifting through bullshit about the Nazis is part and parcel of being even a half-assed conspiracy skeptic. There’s very little weirdness that hasn’t been said about the Third Reich over the years, and plenty of it has to do with sex. Of course, even the weirdest stuff, — Nazi UFOs spring to mind — doesn’t compare to the fact that Hitler had a French-Greek Spiritualist Hindu clairvoyant as part of his inner circle, or many other things about the Nazi regime.

The stories are riddled by other minor assumptions that don’t gibe with reality…for instance, the Daily Mail‘s dummkopf assertion that the dolls were “smaller than life size.” I can’t be sure, but I think they may have extrapolated that from the fact that the dolls could fit in a backpack.

I think it’s far more likely that they could fit in a backpack because they were inflatable love dolls.

Or were they? If the Nazis were developing Realdoll technology in secret…then the danger of German soldiers’ sexual satisfaction was greater than Eisenhower ever dreamed. Thank Providence that the U.S. had its ultra-secret early version of the Fleshlight!

Image: photo of a woman with two realistic sex dolls by Stacy Leigh.