Secrets of Hitler's fashion bureau
Thinking of the moment, 80 years ago this spring, that Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, certain totemic images spring to mind. Probably the most familiar is the procession of Storm Troopers bearing lighted torches aloft, filing through the Brandenburg Gate. Then there’s the photograph of Hitler and his inner circle waving from the Reich Chancellery at the ecstatic crowds below. Or the SA guards standing at the doors of department stores to enforce the anti-Jewish boycott.
They’re all images of men, yet the upheaval in women’s lives prompted by the arrival of Hitler was just as enormous. One of the most surprising Nazi initiatives, which has remained almost ignored by history, was the establishment of the Reich Fashion Bureau, to direct the way that German women dressed.
The idea of Nazi uniform usually suggests the German army officers’ field grey or the black SS dress outfit with its sinister silver Death’s Head skull on the cap. But a less official, female Nazi uniform emerged too, which expressed just as clearly the perverted ideology of the regime.
Surprisingly, Hitler had firm views on fashion. ‘The Berlin women must become the best dressed women in Europe,’ he announced, shortly after coming to power. The Fashion Bureau would ‘re ect the nature and character of the German woman’.
Under the aegis of the Deutsches Modeamt, as the Fashion Bureau was called, women would only wear clothes made by German designers, with German materials. By ‘German’, Hitler of course meant Aryan, and that posed an immediate problem because the fashion industry and the textile trade of the time were dominated by Jewish companies. Most high-society fashion designers were Jewish, too, and people like Paul Kuhnen, Richard Goetz, Max Becker and Fritz Grünfeld were favourites of Magda Goebbels and Emmy Goering, who continued to use them well into the late 1930s.
Nonetheless, an organisation called the Association of German Aryan Clothing Manufacturers quickly sprung up, with its own label to be sewn into garments, guaranteeing that they had only been touched by Aryan hands.
The Germanic look that the Fashion Bureau produced had to fulfill several functions at once. First of all, it celebrated tradition, and thus dirndls, bodices and Tyrolean jackets were all the rage. But it was equally important that the image must not be foreign.
Hitler had a strong antipathy to French fashion, both because it was French, but also because he thought the styles pioneered by designers like Chanel encouraged an unnaturally slender silhouette. A nation of women striving for slim hips and boyish bodies was certainly not ideal if you wanted to encourage prolific child bearing. Full hipped, voluminous skirts were far more conducive to the kind of fecund body shape likely to result in more babies for the Reich.
Not that women were allowed to be too sexually enticing to their men. Cosmetics were frowned on – Hitler famously hated lipstick and used to tell women guests that it was made with animal waste. Unity Mitford was one of the few women who dared wear lipstick in his presence and even then, Hitler’s friends hesitated to introduce her because she was so heavy handed with the Max Factor.
The ideal woman didn’t pluck her eyebrows, paint her nails or dye her hair, either. Wearing fur was also discouraged because it involved killing animals, a fact that the vegetarian Führer found regrettable. Making fur politically incorrect was especially painful for high-society women, who rarely ventured out in the bitter Berlin winters without a bit of fox, mink or sable around their necks.
Smoking, too, was out for the Nazi woman. Hitler loathed cigarettes and banned them at his residences. Visitors to the Berghof report how, when desperate for a fag, they were obliged to congregate in one of the bathrooms, using the towels to waft illicit smoke out of the windows.
In the early days of the Reich, bars and restaurants were plastered with signs saying ‘German women don’t smoke’ and Storm Troopers who saw a woman smoking were advised to dash the cigarette from her lips. This anti-smoking zeal slackened as war arrived, when it became obvious that women needed all the small pleasures they could get.
But perhaps the strangest, most bizarre and ironic aspect of the Reich Fashion Bureau, and the one that rst drew my attention to it when writing my novel Black Roses, was the fact that Magda Goebbels, wife of the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, and the Reich’s unofficial First Lady, was put in charge.
It would be hard to think of anyone less suited to being at the helm of such a retrograde outfit. Think Madonna running the Women’s Institute or Marie Antoinette chairing the Socialist Workers. Magda Goebbels adored French fashion. Famed for her love of couture, she changed several times a day, slathered on Elizabeth Arden cosmetics, chain smoked and wore handmade Ferragamo shoes. The other senior Nazi wives, especially Annelies von Ribbentrop and Inge Ley, wife of the Labour Front leader Robert Ley, had similar tastes.
For a historical thriller set in 1930s Berlin, the almost farcical nature of the Fashion Bureau was fertile grounds for fiction, even though it was the other, more secret, contradiction in the life of Magda Goebbels, which forms the motor of my plot.
Adolf Hitler
Seen through the eyes of an Anglo-German actress, Clara Vine, the lives of the Nazi wives and girlfriends are a hotbed of feuds and insider gossip as they struggle to survive in the toxic atmosphere of the Third Reich. It seemed to me that although there has been a wave of books set in Nazi Germany, women’s lives have not been closely studied and I wanted to reappropriate those perspectives, which are often overlooked. Any picture of a society that does not look at the lives of women is only half a picture.
Ultimately, Hitler saw fashion both as an ideological instrument, to celebrate Teutonic virtues, and as a way to control women.
The Bureau did not survive, but curiously, the popularity of ‘Trach’ – traditional Bavarian costume – is again on the rise. In Munich recently, I not only saw plenty of people wandering around in dirndls, but also advertisements featuring young people wearing trendy Trach clothing, such as Lederhosen. But this time, though, people are wearing them free of the once poisonous politics of fashion.
Black Roses, by Jane Thynne, is published by Simon & Schuster, on 28 March, priced £12.99.
They’re all images of men, yet the upheaval in women’s lives prompted by the arrival of Hitler was just as enormous. One of the most surprising Nazi initiatives, which has remained almost ignored by history, was the establishment of the Reich Fashion Bureau, to direct the way that German women dressed.
The idea of Nazi uniform usually suggests the German army officers’ field grey or the black SS dress outfit with its sinister silver Death’s Head skull on the cap. But a less official, female Nazi uniform emerged too, which expressed just as clearly the perverted ideology of the regime.
Surprisingly, Hitler had firm views on fashion. ‘The Berlin women must become the best dressed women in Europe,’ he announced, shortly after coming to power. The Fashion Bureau would ‘re ect the nature and character of the German woman’.
Under the aegis of the Deutsches Modeamt, as the Fashion Bureau was called, women would only wear clothes made by German designers, with German materials. By ‘German’, Hitler of course meant Aryan, and that posed an immediate problem because the fashion industry and the textile trade of the time were dominated by Jewish companies. Most high-society fashion designers were Jewish, too, and people like Paul Kuhnen, Richard Goetz, Max Becker and Fritz Grünfeld were favourites of Magda Goebbels and Emmy Goering, who continued to use them well into the late 1930s.
Nonetheless, an organisation called the Association of German Aryan Clothing Manufacturers quickly sprung up, with its own label to be sewn into garments, guaranteeing that they had only been touched by Aryan hands.
The Germanic look that the Fashion Bureau produced had to fulfill several functions at once. First of all, it celebrated tradition, and thus dirndls, bodices and Tyrolean jackets were all the rage. But it was equally important that the image must not be foreign.
Hitler had a strong antipathy to French fashion, both because it was French, but also because he thought the styles pioneered by designers like Chanel encouraged an unnaturally slender silhouette. A nation of women striving for slim hips and boyish bodies was certainly not ideal if you wanted to encourage prolific child bearing. Full hipped, voluminous skirts were far more conducive to the kind of fecund body shape likely to result in more babies for the Reich.
Not that women were allowed to be too sexually enticing to their men. Cosmetics were frowned on – Hitler famously hated lipstick and used to tell women guests that it was made with animal waste. Unity Mitford was one of the few women who dared wear lipstick in his presence and even then, Hitler’s friends hesitated to introduce her because she was so heavy handed with the Max Factor.
The ideal woman didn’t pluck her eyebrows, paint her nails or dye her hair, either. Wearing fur was also discouraged because it involved killing animals, a fact that the vegetarian Führer found regrettable. Making fur politically incorrect was especially painful for high-society women, who rarely ventured out in the bitter Berlin winters without a bit of fox, mink or sable around their necks.
Smoking, too, was out for the Nazi woman. Hitler loathed cigarettes and banned them at his residences. Visitors to the Berghof report how, when desperate for a fag, they were obliged to congregate in one of the bathrooms, using the towels to waft illicit smoke out of the windows.
In the early days of the Reich, bars and restaurants were plastered with signs saying ‘German women don’t smoke’ and Storm Troopers who saw a woman smoking were advised to dash the cigarette from her lips. This anti-smoking zeal slackened as war arrived, when it became obvious that women needed all the small pleasures they could get.
But perhaps the strangest, most bizarre and ironic aspect of the Reich Fashion Bureau, and the one that rst drew my attention to it when writing my novel Black Roses, was the fact that Magda Goebbels, wife of the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, and the Reich’s unofficial First Lady, was put in charge.
It would be hard to think of anyone less suited to being at the helm of such a retrograde outfit. Think Madonna running the Women’s Institute or Marie Antoinette chairing the Socialist Workers. Magda Goebbels adored French fashion. Famed for her love of couture, she changed several times a day, slathered on Elizabeth Arden cosmetics, chain smoked and wore handmade Ferragamo shoes. The other senior Nazi wives, especially Annelies von Ribbentrop and Inge Ley, wife of the Labour Front leader Robert Ley, had similar tastes.
For a historical thriller set in 1930s Berlin, the almost farcical nature of the Fashion Bureau was fertile grounds for fiction, even though it was the other, more secret, contradiction in the life of Magda Goebbels, which forms the motor of my plot.
Adolf HitlerSeen through the eyes of an Anglo-German actress, Clara Vine, the lives of the Nazi wives and girlfriends are a hotbed of feuds and insider gossip as they struggle to survive in the toxic atmosphere of the Third Reich. It seemed to me that although there has been a wave of books set in Nazi Germany, women’s lives have not been closely studied and I wanted to reappropriate those perspectives, which are often overlooked. Any picture of a society that does not look at the lives of women is only half a picture.
Ultimately, Hitler saw fashion both as an ideological instrument, to celebrate Teutonic virtues, and as a way to control women.
The Bureau did not survive, but curiously, the popularity of ‘Trach’ – traditional Bavarian costume – is again on the rise. In Munich recently, I not only saw plenty of people wandering around in dirndls, but also advertisements featuring young people wearing trendy Trach clothing, such as Lederhosen. But this time, though, people are wearing them free of the once poisonous politics of fashion.
Black Roses, by Jane Thynne, is published by Simon & Schuster, on 28 March, priced £12.99.