"I will cover you with kisses": The women who wrote love and lust letters to Hitler

All indications point to the fact that the term "groupies" was born in the 1960s. Counterculture, rock and roll, world tours, and the desire, especially of young women, to touch fame. There were groupies who looked for a one-night stand, and there were groupies who chased singers and bands from coast to coast and became part of the entourage. But it turns out that "groupies" were born as early as the late 1920s.

The Nazi era is known in history books mainly through the famous and cruel men of the party. Famous Nazi women like Eva Braun and Leni Riefenstahl remained mainly behind the scenes of the regime. Irma Grese and Maria Mandel were known for their cruelty and were an important tool in the murder machine, but they were not household names from this terrible era. However, women's voices were an important tool in Hitler's rise to power. The German women who enthusiastically supported the Nazi party continued to support the tyrant even when he began his cruel killing sprees across Europe and the systematic murder of Jews. It was much more than a choice and support: women adored and loved Hitler, they wanted to bear his children, and the reactions to him when he spoke in cities were like those of girls at a rock concert.

As great as the adoration was, so great was the breakdown of the ardent supporters following the defeat of Nazi Germany. Magda Goebbels, the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, murdered her six children and committed suicide along with her husband at the end of World War II, arguing that "the world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism is not a world worth living in."

Referring to Hitler as a sexual object

Adolf Hitler was far from being a feminist. He believed that a woman's role is to be beautiful and bring children into the world. But the Nazi machine gave many women a sense of belonging and partnership. They set up various organizations that helped in welfare projects or volunteered to help in the war economy. To young women, the party gave a first opportunity for independence and action outside the boundaries of the family.

Many German women saw Hitler as a sexual object. At the end of the war, American soldiers found among the ruins thousands of letters of adoration, love, and lust from German women to the Führer. There were women who sent Hitler such explicit love and lust letters and with such frequency that the regime decided to capture them and send them to a concentration camp or labor camp, on the grounds that they were "distracting the Führer from his important work."

"When you come, I will open the door for you and cover you with kisses, so that you know how much I love you," wrote a German woman named Eva.

Not only did Hitler never answer these letters, but they were sent to a man who never desired offspring, despite the desire of thousands of German women to give birth to little Hitlers, and who may have been asexual altogether. It can be assumed that these women were not attracted to Adolf Hitler's physical appearance. In many books written about Hitler and his relationships with women, the adoration for him is interpreted as him radiating power and control, courage and leadership, and showing the ability to sweep an entire nation after him and his ideas and conquest campaigns. Hitler did not provide these women with an aesthetic sexual fantasy; they were attracted by the fact that he radiated confidence and gave them the feeling that he could protect them from dangers. The adoration of women for Hitler's power was also seen in other dictatorial regimes such as North Korea or Libya.

"Self-realization" through the Führer

By today's standards, with free women enjoying gender equality and independence, it is even harder to understand Hitler's groupies. Despite the integration of women into party institutions, the attitude towards women in the Nazi period is similar to the status of women in dark regimes today: stay at home, have children, be beautiful, and help preserve the purity of the race. Feminine characteristics were met with contempt by the male population. There were almost no women working in large offices, universities, or the public sector. They were forbidden to smoke in public. Those who worked did so mainly in nursing, secretarial, or assembly line roles. But for those Hitler groupies, it was enough. Carrying out the orders of the great leader was absolute self-realization for them.

The myth of Hitler helped many women build fantasies about their lives, almost immediately after he was elected, as it turns out from many letters collected after the war and research papers written based on them. "My life is gray, and I am just something small in a big life and world," was written in one of them as early as 1935, "With the adored leader Adolf Hitler, I will still be something small, but I will be something small that participates and contributes in a real way to a huge national enterprise." "My sweet," wrote another woman, "I must write to you exactly how my heart feels. My love for you is as pure as gold."

These letters, by the way, were collected in the mid-nineties for a play that was performed off-Broadway. The actors: the Jewish Theater Ensemble.

Hitler loved two types of women: those much older than him, who showered him with love and maternal affection, or young women who were obedient to him. Eva Braun married Hitler forty hours before she committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill in a bunker in Berlin, but she had tried to commit suicide at least twice before because of their relationship. At least three other women tried to commit suicide after their relationship with the Führer ended. Magda Goebbels always said that she married propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as a consolation prize. She always wanted to marry only Adolf Hitler. "The thing is that no one can marry Hitler," Goebbels said, "He is married to Germany." Not long after Hitler committed suicide, she entered the room where her six children were sleeping, made them swallow cyanide, and swallowed one herself.