Emily Greenhouse studies the “Reich Bride Schools,” designed to prepare women for their role in Hitler’s empire:
To train women within their lesser sphere, 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 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.
The Dish 