The Nazis invented the sex doll

The Nazis invented the worst thing ever: the assembly-line death factory. But they also invented something else, perhaps the only legacy of theirs that endures to this very day. During World War II, Hitler's war machine dedicated resources to creating the world's first sex doll: Borghild.

The ”field-hygienic project” was an initiative of Himmler, who regarded the doll as a ”counterbalance” for the sexual drive of his stormtroopers. In one of his letters, he mentions the ”unnessessary losses” the Wehrmacht had suffered in France, inflicted by street prostitutes. ”The greatest danger in Paris are the wide-spread and uncontrolled whores, picking up clients in bars, dancehalls and other places. It is our duty to prevent soldiers from risking their health, just for the sake of a quick adventure.” One assumes Himmler also wanted to stop any racial dilution of the great German army.

The project was considered ”Geheime Reichssache”, which meant ”more secret than top secret.” Himmler put Dr. Joachim Mrurgowsky in charge, the highest ranking officer of Berlin's notorious SS Institute.

The world’s first sexdoll – or ”gynoid” – was built in 1941 by a team of craftsmen from Germany's Hygiene Museum in Dresden. The project was supervised by a famous technician, Franz Tschakert. He was the ”father of the woman of glass,” which happened to be the sensation in 1930’s II. International Hygiene Exhibit.

Psychiatrist Dr. Rudolf Chargeheimer wrote the following note as the project went forward:

”The sure thing, purpose and goal of the dolls is to relieve our soldiers. They have to fight and not be on the browl or mingle with 'foreign womenfolk.' However: no real men will prefer a doll to a real woman, until our technicians meet the following quality standards:
The synthetic flesh has to feel the same as real flesh;
The doll’s body should be as agile and moveable as the real body;
The doll’s organ should feel absolutely realistic.”

A stickler for verisimilitude. Between June 1940 – 1941, IG Farben had already developed a number of ”skin-friendly polymers” for the SS. Their special characteristics: high-tensile strength and elasticity.

The cast of a suitable model proved to be more difficult. Borghild was meant to reflect the beauty-ideal of the Nazis: white skin, fair hair and blue eyes. Although the team considered a doll with brown hair, the SS Hygiene Institute insisted on manufacturing a ”Nordish doll.” Tschakert hoped to plaster-cast from a living model. A number of famous female athletes were invited to come to his studios.

But in a letter to Mrurgowsky, Tschakert came to this conclusion: ”Sometimes the legs are too short and look deformed, or the lady has a hollow back and arms, like a wrestler. The overall appearance is always dreadful and I fear there is no other way than to combine.” While Mrurgowsky still favoured a ”whole imprint” of prevailing diva Kristina Söderbaum, the Borghild-designer decided to build the doll’s mold in a ”modular way,” taking bits and pieces from different women. In Tschakert's view, the doll should be nothing less than a ”female best-form,” a ”perfect automaton of lust,” that would combine ”the best of all possible bodies.” The team agreed on a cheeky and naughty face, a look-a-like of actress Käthe von Nagy, but she politely declined to lend her face to Tschakert’s doll.

After Mrurgowsky’s exit, Dr. Hannussen took over, and rejected the idea to cast a face from a living person. He believed in an ”artificial face of lust,” which would be more attractive to soldiers.

Eventually, the project appear to have been put on the back-burner as Nazi-Germany faced more pressing needs, and the German army had to face its enemies without the comfort of the Aryan plastic sex bomb. No wonder they lost, squeezed between French prostitutes and Russian bayonets. What remained of the project was destroyed when allied warplanes destroyed Dresden in 1945. Which proves that the Dresden bombing was a true atrocity: now we don't have a copy of the world's first sex doll.