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.
Although a number of bride schools were established in locations across Germany, the demands of the Second World War made it impossible for the Nazis to realise their ideal of women as being exclusively home-bound.
Even so, the schools appear to have continued until as late as May 1944 but their existence faded from memory after the war, perhaps as a result of an unwillingness on the part of former Nazi brides to discuss their enrollment.
[3] The Nazi government passed a Law for the Encouragement of Marriage which enabled newlyweds to take out a state loan of 1,000 reichsmarks (approximately €3,500) and keep a quarter for each child they had, in effect subsidising procreation.
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.
[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."
[6] The women were required to pledge to raise their children in accordance with National Socialist beliefs, to be loyal to Hitler throughout their lives and to marry in faux neo-pagan ceremonies led by Nazi Party members, rather than in church.
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.
[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.
[8]According to Dr Marius Turda of Oxford Brookes University, "the bride schools perfectly illustrate the Nazi regime’s ambition to control its population, both privately and publicly.
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.
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.