At the end of the day, the Nazi party leadership were politicians, and like politicians today, they often preached one rule for the masses and one rule for themselves. The Nazis were officially, at least, traditionalist and conservatively minded regarding women’s rights, marriage, and the family. They championed a severely restrictive vision of womanhood that was deeply rooted in the biological destiny of motherhood and domestic service.
The Nazis truly believed that German women existed to be mothers and housewives foremost, their primary duty to the ethnic community and the state being the production of children to fuel the Reich’s future ambitions.
They even handed out medals to mothers who produced large broods of children for the Führer’s future armies. This natalist frenzy was a central plank of Nazi population policy. However, the regime’s rhetoric could not align with its practical needs.
Germany lagged way behind its enemies in the mobilization and employment of women for war work or for service in the armed forces. The need to send millions of men to the front brought this conservative idealism into sharp conflict with the operational necessities of total war, requiring a balancing act that the regime’s propaganda machines could barely manage. Marriage was championed by the state and divorce was frowned upon, theoretically at least.
Therefore, it is perhaps no surprise to us today to learn that the leaders who shouted the loudest about marriage, family, and women’s roles failed to uphold their own rules. Hypocrisy was rife at the higher echelons of the Nazi Reich. Almost all of the Nazi leaders chased women, cheated on their wives, or engaged in illicit relationships, including producing illegitimate children.
The private conduct of the men who ran the Third Reich often stood in direct assertion to the moral decree they imposed on the German public. Hitler, of course, never legally married during his entire time in power, but, to use the parlance of the period, he did live in sin with his secret girlfriend Eva Braun for well over a decade. Their relationship was kept from the public eye, yet Eva was present at the Berghof and known to the inner circle.
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, who espoused such strong opinions on marriage and family, separated from his wife Margarete for his secretary and proceeded to produce two illegitimate children. Himmler, the architect of the SS’s cold-blooded racial engineering, created a secret life hidden from his official family to pursue his private desires. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, had no fewer than ten children with his devoted wife and still had the energy and desire to have a string of affairs with various actresses.
The only one who seemed to remain a faithful husband was the Reich Marshal, Herman Göring, Hitler’s nominated successor and commander-in-chief of the Air Force, who also conquered an empire of fame and collectionism. Göring only married again after a considerable time had passed following his first wife’s death, and he seemed to be devoted to his second wife, an actress named Emmy, and their young daughter, at least in conventional terms. Yet the worst offender of them all.
Was probably Hitler’s propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. His affairs have a somewhat sinister and very destructive manipulative tinge to them, standing apart from the mere indiscretions of his colleagues.
It can be argued that Goebbels abused his position in order to fulfill his sexual desires, weaponizing his absolute control over the media and the arts to satisfy his brutal hedonism.
On the face of it, Goebbels was already punching well above his weight with his choice of wife. Many wondered how he managed to land such a desirable partner, and his marriage and his engagements drew considerable public attention. The attractive blonde divorcée Magda Goebbels, who was often referred to as the unofficial first lady of the Third Reich due to her very close relationship with Hitler, was a woman of considerable beauty and fierce loyalty to Hitler.
She herself was a divorced single mother when she married Dr. Goebbels in 1931. Magda was drawn to Goebbels, and it was his brains and drive that captured her.
She had become naturally impressed with his oratorical skills, his wit, and his charisma when she first heard him speak. Magda also had the social contacts and the upper-class bearing that Goebbels desperately desired to elevate his own social status and escape the middle class and his own identity. Together.
The couple was jealous boyfriend please. They felt socially ambitious. They would go on to have six children together, painting a public portrait of a perfect German family.
But Goebbels remained serially unfaithful throughout his marriage. It was the very foundation of his entire adult life. He was, by any account, 𝒔𝒆𝒙-mad and he had access to the most desirable women in Nazi Germany.
He was actively pursued by great cinematic women, famous film actresses, because as propaganda minister he controlled the entire German film Industry and the theaters with massive power. He could quite literally make or break a star. Woe betide any young actress who tried to resist the doctor’s misleading charm.
The consequences for any woman who said no could be swift, career-ending and brutal, while the women who said yes could be rewarded with the most script choices, starring roles, and plumb opportunities.
Why Goebbels behaved in this manner has been explained by psychiatrists and all that describe him. He was short in all proportions, standing only 1. 65 m or 5 feet 5 inches, which made him among the shorter political figures.
That was statistically well below the average for a male of Caucasian descent during the period, a fact that likely influenced his sense of physical inferiority. He was also disabled, having an inward-turning deformed right foot that required him to wear a correct affect and that actually caused him to visibly limp when he walked. This was a condition he had to contend with every single day, affecting his mobility and his confidence.
This disability had, of course, automatically kept him out of the Army during World War I. Again, that set him apart from almost all the other Nazi leaders who had chests full of medals and often quite heroic or extinguish war records that fed their masculine self-image. The one great European war that he lived through passed him by entirely, and in a culture built on military triumph and warrior ethos, this was a psychological disadvantage for him.
He also possessed a sickly thin rat-like countenance that marked him out in unforgettable ways. The only things he had going for him were his mind, his charismatic oratory skills, his razor-sharp witty dialogue, and his powerful position within the highest circles of state power. Goebbels was not actually well-liked by the other leaders or by his own personal staff.
He had a very abrasive manner. He was incredibly difficult to work with, demanding the utmost at all times. One of his titles given his nickname “The Poison Dwarf” was actually quite apt, for he was thin-skinned, cold, deeply dispassionate, and he Hell.
He held grudges difficultly. He misused the NSDAP party funds to ensure his luxury lifestyle, filling his villa and his needs, but he made himself absolutely indispensable to Adolf Hitler, who protected the propaganda minister endlessly. Hitler was dependent on Goebbels’s effectiveness at crafting the public image that sustained the regime, and also due partly to the loyalty of his increasingly neglected wife.
In other words, his inferiority complexes due to his looks and his disability manifested themselves as an exaggerated of masculinity. That saw him constantly bragging to other men about his sexual conquests, something his fellow leaders noted with distaste and disgusting. At the heart of Goebbels’s objectionable behavior was clearly a strong feeling that he didn’t measure up.
He was brutal and career addled and Luciferian, believing that his way could solve anything. He was about as far removed as it was possible to be from the popular image the Aryan, an Aryan Superman that his own relentless propaganda machine constantly 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 and projected to the world. The Aryan ideal was tall, Nordic, muscled and demonstrably cruel.
Goebbels was mentally brutal and intellectually cunning but physically and visually everything the ideal was not. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, a view held by many senior Nazis. His entire life was consumed by ambition.
Goebbels obtained his sexual conquests through two avenues, and he pursued both with unrelenting persistence. Firstly, through his position, he targeted the young secretaries and administrative staff of the propaganda ministry, who were utterly dependent on him for their careers, a sweaty obvious pool of potential victims. The second, from his position as the powerful overlord of the German film and theater industries, where he could manipulate the careers.
The minister could never fully separate his desires from his official duties. Goebbels was extremely manipulative and a liar. His long-serving secretary recalled how he preyed on the many attractive young female members of his staff.
He pursued them, had 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with them, and then if they attempted to break off the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇, he would threaten suicide, putting them in an impossible position. Many of these women were virgins, little more than teenagers, far away from families, desperate and not suited to understand such threats from a virtually all-powerful state official. It was brutal, coercive and predatory 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 of power than any other of the regime’s leaders.
However, his true preference and his main diversion appears to have been the actresses he controlled. One actress in particular held his attention for a very long time. A Czech actress named Lida Barova.
They had first met in 1936 and they commenced a full 𝒔𝒆𝒙 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 in 1937. This was a deep emotional relationship, one that would prove to be the most serious love 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 of his life, and it threatened his marriage. Magda Goebbels had found out about the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 and she, perhaps bizarrely, complained directly to Hitler in 1938, asking him to intercede.
This in turn prompted the Führer to rebuke Goebbels and ordered him to immediately stop the illicit and dangerous 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇, particularly as Hitler was about to annex the Czech Sudetenland and any 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁 involving a leading Czech actress could have done substantial political damage at a delicate diplomatic moment. Their relationship was to become the biggest crisis of his life. Lida Barova eventually she was finished as an actress in Germany, any picture of her destroyed.
In fact, she was labeled as a “harlot” in the propaganda press that Goebbels himself oversaw, a measure of how his career collasped.
The 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with Barova appears to have been consensual, at least on its surface, sexually and emotionally of two adults. However, that was not the casea case with the others. Goebbels’s senior secretary, Karl Hanke, who would later go on to become a powerful Gauleiter, and was the last German commander of besieged Breslau, had actually taken the side of Magda Goebbels in the conflict over over the relationship with Barova.
In fact, the scale of the great humiliation was so vast that Hyner, exceedingly disgusted with his boss’s predatory behavior, drew up a formal list. The list contained the names of 36 actresses and other stars that he knew Goebbels had had affairs with, meaning the sheer scale of his predation was enormous. And just for good measure, Magda Goebbels also had an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 of her own with Hanke, proving she was not simply a passive bystander to her husband’s infidelity.
Even within the corrupt and permissive upper
Crass of the Nazi Party, Goebbels behaved in an extreme and constant predatory fashion that shocked even his allies and made them despise rather than admire him.
One of his other nicknames, apart from the very apt “Poison Dwarf brim,” was the “Randy Goat of Babelsberg.” This far-less flattering name was a reference to the famous Babelsberg Studios in Berlin, which were the center of the German film industry, and that was because of his insatiable predilection for ogling and pursuing pretty young actresses. He was given this nickname supposedly by the actress, the German-Balt aristocrat, Irina von Mondorf, who had famously rejected his advances.
It did not matter that Goebbels was a powerful politician. She turned him down flat and described with cruel precision what he was. Von Molo was famous enough that her career was not particularly damaged by this encounter, and in the post-war period, she had the final laugh of it.
It was she who had the last word on his pathetic vanity, reduced from an all-powerfigure to a naming punchline. In the postwar Germany, she even, she went on to marry the British film star James Robertson Justice, successfully distancing herself from the Nazi period She had truly experienced.
Others were less fortunate in their dealings with Goebbels and suffered the full weight of his concentrated revenge. One up-and-coming actress who tried to withstand the Goebbels Casting Couch has been named her new film had premiered but was pulled from the cinema despite the financial losses she caused, and she was immediately banned from acting entirely following her refusal to sleep with Goebbels. It ended her career.
It possibly ended her career and brought her into obscurity and pain. It completely wrongfully destroyed her career and her public reputation in a moment.
Not all the really established stars were safe from Goebbels, and it also affected big names. For example, the famous Dutch actress and performer Charlotte Elsa was blacklisted in 1944 after rejecting Goebbels’s advances very specifically, which she took y in being insulted by being exactly around the same area to with such an offer. She specifically sent back to him an expensive gift that an incident that reflected the sheer power and hubris he wielded over the fates of artists and entertainment.
Goebbels also used his extreme luxurious lakeside villa at Trumpf in Brandenburg, 25 m north of Berlin, as an establishment where he would take many of the acts and conduct his seductions, his repulsive behavior around the entire industry. Nearly 70 room mansion was equipped with every expensive and taste and was, in the official capacity, was a place to entertain but was most famously used for the most private and criminal aspect of his function.
At the end of the war, the rumble of guns grew near and the taste of defeat was in the air. Goebbels positioned himself entirely at Hitler’s side, presenting a wall of histrionic loyalty. Indeed, he was the only Nazi leader.
He was the only one. He followed Hitler to the bitter end, apart from, of course, Martin Bormann, who never left and died what was fishing. Realizing that it was the bruch of the world, Dr.
Goebbels had succeeded as Reich Chancellor formally, President afterward Hitler’s suicide on the 30th of April, 1945 actually. He held his actual position for about one day, amongst the ruins of a city that hated him. Realizing the situation was hopeless and that every surrender would mean execution or worse, he and his wife Magda were determined, suicide and even their children killed.
Their fanaticism brought them to that horrifying final solution.
Goebbels and his wife pumped all four children with poison, one by one, taking their own lives with extreme pain that witnessed twisted, utterly maddened version of family devotion. Then, on the 1st of May, Goebbels to complete the murder of everyone in their family, He ordered for their six children to be shot at the tens, and then Goebbels shot Magda Goebbels dead in the Reich Chancellery garden with chilling efficiency, and then finally he took the same pistol and turned into his mouth, shooting himself as well. The man who had called other men weaker, the creature who had been the light of the party, was dead, and with him left a legacy of evil and the Predatory wreck of a person he had been in life.
The one-time “Randy Goat” was finally silenced. It was an ending worthy of one of the darkest figures in the history, a man who divided the lines between corrupt power, art, and crime in his own giant dark personality.
