The internet is a cesspool of information both good or bad, right or wrong, proven to be false or proven to be true, it doesn’t really matter. You can find absolutely anything on the World Wide Web.
However, it may be frustrating when you are trying to do proper research on something you are interested in but all you find are articles repeating themselves by saying all the same things.
This is an issue when trying to research things that happened throughout history, because who the hell even knows how some things went down?
Nobody that wasn’t there can’t know what happened for sure, and this allows for a plethora of biased misinformation to be spread left and right.
One such popular theory is that Mr. Adolf Hitler himself was the sole inventor of the arguably most desired sex object – a sex doll.
It’s weird to think that between starting World War II, executing people left and right, and spreading his toxic and racist agenda, this man had the time to think of how to make life a little easier for his loyal soldiers all while keeping them in good health.
Or did he even care about that at all? Let’s take a look at what we know and what we don’t know, and hopefully come up with an answer to the ever-burning question of who invented sex dolls?
For this, we have to go back to Nazi Germany, some eighty years ago.
The “Borghild Project”
Historians have long recorded the battles, atrocities, carnage, and aftermath of World War II in great detail, which is probably the most helpful manual of how we shouldn’t be in life, but one secret project that hailed from that cursed time still remains shrouded in mystery to this day.
The “Borghild Project” was (allegedly) a super-secret project that provided Nazi soldiers with inflatable sex dolls all in good hope and in an attempt to stop the spread of syphilis.
However, the evidence to support the wild conspiracy theory regarding this project is in best terms described as sketchy, so chances are that it probably isn’t a true story, after all.
It definitely sounds like a cool idea, having one of the worst men to ever walk this earth being also the inventor of something as useful as a sex doll, which is why many people decided to roll with the story.
It’s not like Hitler can dispute or confirm this anyway, right? So let’s just go crazy with it. People who want to believe this probably will because it sounds too damn cool to ignore.
However, if you are someone that likes to take a critical approach in an attempt to find out the truth, here are some true facts from that time:
Nazis Were Going Crazy For Parisian Prostitutes
The Nazi occupation of France in 1940 led to a lot of socializing between German soldiers and Parisian prostitutes, and the resulting outbreak of syphilis led to a lot of ubermensch not being able to accomplish their assigned duties, which we all know included oppressing Jews, terrorizing innocent people, and getting their high-and-tight haircuts.
So, something had to be done about it, right?
In a document supposedly uncovered by journalist Norbert Lenz (who, by the way, only ever posted this article alone and nothing else), SS chief Heinrich Himmler wrote: “The greatest danger in Paris is the widespread and uncontrolled presence of whores, picking up clients in bars, dance halls, and other places. It is our duty to prevent soldiers from risking their health for the sake of a quick adventure.”
Himmler’s solution wasn’t “tell the men to stop bedding French whores.” Instead (as the story goes) Himmler said, “Let’s make plastic women who don’t have diseases!” And so the above-top-secret Borghild Project was born.
Alleged Development Of The Perfect Woman
Hitler (supposedly) liked this idea and signed off on the plan, therefore, the SS chief Himmler quickly hired Franz Tschakert of the German Hygiene Museum to design and manufacture the requested sex dolls.
Mr. Tschakert was a real person: he created the “Transparent Man” in 1927 — an anatomically correct transparent sculpture of a man that caused a sensation in 1930s Germany — therefore, he was tasked with the gig of designing a perfect female counterpart but not for the same purposes, obviously.
However, a reasonable question arose very quickly, and the Nazis recognized a huge flaw in their plan. Namely, nobody wanted to do the nasty with a doll. It was something unheard of.
Here’s how Nazi psychiatrist Dr. Rudolf Chargeheimer described the issue:
“The purpose and goal of the dolls are to relieve our soldiers. They have to fight and not be on the prowl or mingle with ‘foreign womenfolk.’ However, no real men will prefer a doll to a real woman.”
That is unless the dolls can meet a high bar of quality or in simpler terms: look and feel more realistic.
Dr. Chargeheimer suggested the following three standards to overcome the potential reluctance of the soldiers:
- The synthetic flesh has to feel the same as real flesh.
- The doll’s body should be as flexible and movable as a real body.
- The doll’s organ should feel absolutely realistic.
Once these suggestions were taken into consideration, the team at the Hygiene Museum immediately got down to do business.
Initially, sex dolls with aluminum skeletons were considered but rejected. Tschakert eventually decided on “galvanoplastic” dolls made out of elastin, a plastic-like material used in children’s toys.
Creating the Perfect Woman
So once the material problem was solved, the sex doll makers turned to the actual design of the woman, and obviously, this would lead to many-a different opinions on what the perfect woman would actually look like.
We all have different tastes and what one sculptor found attractive wasn’t necessarily something others saw as attractive, as well.
These disagreements lead to Dr. Tschakert actually inviting famous athletes at that time Wilhelmina von Bremen and Annette Walter to model for the development of the sex dolls that will ultimately resemble their bodies.
However, the plaster casts proved extremely disappointing, with Dr. Tschakert describing it as “Sometimes the legs are too short and look deformed, or the lady has a hollow back and arms like a wrestler.”
Eventually, Dr. Tschakert and his team settled on a stylized representation of a woman, with graspable but not too large breasts, and an athletic look.
The next challenge the sex doll makers encountered were the facial features, which is another obvious one. Some men liked prominent chins, others liked prominent cheeks, but they all agreed on one thing and that was that it’s not just the body that makes a man aroused.
This resulted in Dr. Tschakert essentially writing:v“When the soldier makes love to Borghild, it has nothing to do with love. Therefore the face of our anthropomorphic sex-machine should be exactly how Weininger described the common wanton’s face.”
They thought it would be a good idea to hire actress Käthe von Nagy to model for the doll’s facial features, however, she declined to even be associated with an “atrocity” of such sort, which left the team deciding that Borghild should bear an “artificial face of lust”.
They molded ten different faces and used psychological tests to determine which was the most desirable to most men.
Borghild’s hair was kept short, to serve as a reminder to the soldiers using her that she was just a part of the fighting force and a means to an end, and not a feminine ideal.
With the design locked, Tschakert and company began cranking the prototype Nazi sex doll. It looked like this:
According to the reporting of journalist Norbert Lenz:
“Borghild’s presentation in Berlin was a great success. Himmler was there, and Dr. Chargeheimer. While the gentlemen examined her artificial orifices, Franz Tschakert was very nervous, but Himmler was so enthusiastic that he ordered fifty Borghilds on the spot.”
The Project’s Demise
Now, this is where it gets interesting as we are getting closer to the probably the only evidence we can take semi-seriously in this entire situation.
After a total of fifty dolls were supposedly ordered for the soldiers to use, the purported project was canceled by Himmler after two years. Some say this was (allegedly) due to the soldiers refusing to carry them around from the fear of embarrassment if they were captured. Others say Himmler cut the funding before the dolls were finished because the war was going pretty badly by 1942.
Evidence Of A Hoax
According to supporters, the main evidence for the project were two photographs purportedly rescued by a sculptor from the trash and given to Norbert Lenz.
These photographs were later proven to be a hoax.
Furthermore, the existence of a journalist named Norbert Lenz has also been questioned, as there is no proof that he ever existed in the first place.
Additionally, no other employee at the German Hygiene Museum ever recalled the project ever-existing, when they were (supposedly) asked. I mean, you would assume they probably just don’t want to be associated with any of that, so who knows what really happened. What we know is that the Hygiene-Museum really was heavily damaged during the bombing of Dresden. This occurrence rather conveniently destroyed evidence of the project (if any existed).
So…Who Invented Sex Dolls?
The only answer to this is who the hells knows, really?
For all we know, masturbating aids that were then called sex dolls have been used ever since the 15th century and as the world progressed and we became smarter, we just learned how to make things more sophisticated.
What is truly remarkable though is how crafty the human mind can get when in need of something.”Necessity is the mother of invention”, they said, and inventing a sex doll is a situation where that proverb perfectly shines through.