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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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This is a common misconception but for German Nazism it is wrong (dont know about Italian/Hispanic fascism). The Nazis rejected Christian morality and also Christian sexual morality like castity/celibacy. After the war the 1950s were very social conservative, but this was a backlash against the Nazis and Religion/Churches had the moral highground after the horrors of the war. It was the next generation and the 1968 movement who conflated both to have their moral high ground and leftist social/sexual revolution.

Here is a text of a Spiegel article you can translate:

https://archive.is/xsz8I

The young American journalist Howard K. Smith, who traveled through Germany in 1937, was quite taken aback by the images he encountered at the Haus der Kunst (House of Art) in Munich. In his memoirs—published in the United States in 1942—Smith wrote that Nazi art "lived solely and exclusively off two themes: pornography and militarism."

Smith’s account contradicts common assumptions regarding sexual morality under National Socialism. For a long time, Hitler’s ideology was considered hostile to pleasure.

The children of the Nazi-perpetrator generation fashioned this image in the 1960s, when they took to the barricades to protest against the uptight attitudes of their parents—and, above all, against an Adenauer-era republic that chose to forget its own history.

According to U.S. historian Dagmar Herzog, there was no overarching "hostility toward sexuality" in Nazi Germany. On the contrary, the majority of Germans at the time were actually "spurred on and encouraged" to "seek out and experience sexual pleasure." This applied, of course, only to those Germans who were heterosexual—and, furthermore, blond and blue-eyed, possessed a "Nordic" appearance, or could at least prove that their ancestors were "Aryan."

Much to the dismay of the churches, the new regime saw no issue with young "Aryans" sleeping together before marriage or having other sexual partners while married. Quite the contrary: the prevailing philosophy was that the sooner they learned how much pleasure could be derived from procreation, the better. The Nazi youth organizations were intended to serve as training grounds and playgrounds. Within the Hitler Youth, it was actively encouraged for young Germans to engage in sexual activity—or, as Hitler put it during his monologues at the Führer’s headquarters, to "try things out." A 1937 report on the Hitler Youth by the social democrats in exile noted that "promiscuity is the effectively accepted norm."

In the course of her research, historian Dagmar Herzog uncovered an internal, "strictly confidential" directive from 1934, addressed to the female leaders of the League of German Girls (BDM). It explicitly instructed them to encourage teenage girls to engage in premarital sexual intercourse.

The Nazis’ response to male homosexuality was more restrictive and infinitely more brutal. Shortly after seizing power, they made gay men fair game for the male-only, thuggish squads of the SA and SS. At the end of 1934—just months after the gay SA leader Ernst Röhm was shot dead on Hitler’s orders—the Gestapo established a dedicated commission to combat homosexuality. Acting on denunciations, this Gestapo unit compiled lists of names and kept suspected meeting places under surveillance. In Berlin alone, they estimated there were 200,000 gay men.

The Italians were not puritanical by the standards of their day; the actual-fascist Spaniards weren't either, but they were in coalition with Catholic theocrats who wound up taking over the state.

'Hostile to pleasure' seems like an odd description of a party that instituted policies like Strength Through Joy.

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