On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  From the smoothest, artiest, most mondain circles from which fashion often got its kick-start, Moise Kisling, the Polish-born painter known as Kiki, had married Renée Gros. She was a magnificent blonde blaze of unforgettable vitality. Sybille Bedford described her memorably:

  A head of rock-hewn features supported on a strong neck and powerful bronzed shoulders, large prominent blue eyes, heavy-lidded, thickly lined with kohl and a fat blue, honey fair hair, straight cut, savagely bleached and streaked by sea water and sun, a fringe covering one side of the wide forehead, a nose like a parrot’s beak. Her clothes dazzled with strong plain colours; she dressed simply, a pair of sailor’s trousers, bare-backed singlets, turquoise or scarlet, sea-shells about her neck, shell and ivory bracelets on her arms. It was superb. And when the monster smiled – proffering, it might be, a slice of melon – it was a smile of serene sweetness and sensuality.96

  Blonde hair, long the racial ideal cherished by anthropologists, eugenicists, sexologists, assorted cranks and their growing audiences, was breaking out into fashionable reality. It still, however, carried exciting hints of sexual menace. At a party in Hollywood in the early 1930s, Margot Asquith was asked rather cattily by a blonde Jean Harlow how she pronounced her first name. ‘The “t” is silent,’ she replied, ‘as in Harlow.’

  h British nudist societies began as rather pallid little gatherings in shady, ant-infested corners of isolated woods. Soon the expanding membership built luxurious camps and in winter they gathered indoors around sunlamps. Mass nudism, however, permitted no levelling of class distinctions: at the superior camps, butlers and waitresses providing refreshments of tinned salmon and lettuce were obliged to acknowledge their lower social status by wearing G-strings and aprons.

  i The novel, written in 1920, contains a conversation in which the key characters discuss why two-thirds of the members of every senior council over a ten-year period at Princeton have been blond, and wiry well over half the presidents of the United States were blond. They conclude that the blond man is a ‘higher type’.

  12

  The Man Who Would be God

  In 1931, Platinum Blonde opened in American cinemas, kicking off a capillary revolution. Jean Harlow, the star, had dyed her hair a dazzling shade of blonde. Her erotic glamour and salty delivery filled the cinemas of depression-hit America. She was astounding. Americans had never seen anything like it. Harlow slinked across the screen like some radiant hallucination draped in a series of voluptuous bias-cut satin dresses. But all eyes were fixed on her irresistible hair. Harlow had hair like a beacon and other women wanted it. Jean Harlow fan clubs sprang up, and across the country women reached for the peroxide on the shelves of their local drug stores. Soon heads of platinum-blonde hair could be seen vamping up and down fashionable boulevards from Los Angeles to New York. Before long virtually the entire pantheon of America’s goddesses, the stars of Hollywood, had followed Harlow’s lead and mutated into luminous blondes. In America, blonde was best. It was glamorous and highly attractive. It was also a tacit signal of a superior racial type. Two years later in Germany, Hitler’s National Socialist Party came to power. Here, too, according to the Nazi racial ideals of the time, blonde was best. Germany’s gods were blonde.

  For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the world’s three most dynamic nations – Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union – held beliefs about race which, although pursued quite distinctly, were derived from the same origins. In Germany the Aryan blond was vigorously promoted as the noble, virile and godlike racial ideal, demanding as its corollary the vicious demonisation of the Jew. In white America, a historic belief in the superiority of the Aryan, combined with a persistent strain of anti-Semitism and an antipathy towards blacks, Hispanics and Asians, encouraged the development of a radiantly sunlit blonde American ideal, the WASP American dream. In the ethnically disparate Soviet Union, racial antipathy towards Jews and other minorities, coupled with the need to centralise and energise an ethnically sprawling state, led to a similar creation of a dynamic blonde Soviet ideal, the representative of a new, healthy and vigorous nation.

  In each case, by the time war loomed at the end of the 1930s, blonde hair had acquired symbolic trappings of purity and moral cleanliness. It represented an unchallenged physical and intellectual superiority; and it was beautiful. Naturally the top wartime box office female film stars in all three countries were blonde. In the Soviet Union it was the elfin Lyubov Orlova, who made her debut in the 1934 film A Petersburg Night, and became the darling of Soviet cinema audiences during the war. In America, the uncontested cinematic pin-up queen for GIs around the world was the bubbly blonde Betty Grable, pure, unthreatening and innocent. And in Germany the spotless blonde maiden Kristina Soderbaum topped the box office for many years.

  Germany’s blonde ideals had ominous origins dating back to the race theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But under the Nazis, the concept of blonde Aryan supremacy was taken with great efficiency to such innovative and diabolical political extremes that it still exerts a horrifying fascination. The Nazi leaders were obsessed with their semi-religious belief in a superior race of blond German godlike men and their mastery of a world in which inferiors had been exterminated. The imagery of the pure blonde Aryan provided the Nazis with the basis for the major themes of their ideology: the contrast between good and evil, pure and impure, order and chaos, salvation and destruction. Himmler calculated that, with the strict application of Nazi laws on racial hygiene, the German people could be gene-coded into a pure-blooded blonde ‘Nordic’ race within a period of 120 years.

  Hitler himself had been an interested follower of blonde supremacy theories from at least as early as the 1910s, when he was an impoverished painter in Vienna. By the time he was plotting his political ascendancy he had elevated this racial ideal to a heroic holy grail. He was well versed in the ideas of Aryan superiority put forward by nineteenth-century racial theorists. Standard biographies demonstrate that he had also read the works of Guido von List, a cultist believer in the future world domination by a blonde Aryan German race. List was a prolific turn-of-the-century writer who helped to popularise the swastika, an ancient Hindu symbol for the sun which he reinterpreted as a sign of the unconquerable Germanic hero. Hitler was also well acquainted as a young man with the crackpot blonde-worshipping ideas of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels.

  Hitler’s own obsessions with Aryan racial purity corresponded closely with those of Lanz. In Mein Kampf Hitler laid out his political philosophy based on a violently nationalistic theme of race. His arguments urged the suppression of Jews and Marxists and the squashing of such contaminating ideas as democracy, liberalism and feminism. He presented the blonde Aryan Germanic race as the superior race of genius and devoted many embittered pages to his contempt for the Jews, damning them as parasites in the bodies of other peoples. The ‘contamination of our blood, blindly ignored by hundreds of thousands of our people, is carried on systematically by the Jew today. Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile our inexperienced young blonde girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.’97

  Hitler’s rhetoric was tailored to suit the prevailing climate of xenophobia, to engineer and use existing hostilities towards the Jews. Unfortunately for the Nazis, few Jews fitted the stereotypical image imposed upon them, and some flouted it to an unreasonable degree. In her memoir of wartime Warsaw ghetto life, Lisa Appignanesi described how the hair colour of her Jewish parents had profound consequences on their lives. Her lather was dark, but her mother had inherited her family’s persistent natural blondeness. In the horrifying circumstances in which they lived, the psychological results of this genetic accident were striking. Her father was fearful, her mother fearless. With her various acquired Aryan aliases, she could simply pass as a gentile woman and her honey-coloured hair and blue eyes became a means of survival for the entire family. ‘Blondeness meant everything that was desirable, strong,
powerful; darkness was weak, shameful, uncertain. Since she was blonde power itself, my mother’s narrative about her life was never one of fear . . .’ Others, too, managed to evade capture and death by dyeing their hair. Ruth Langer, for example, an Austrian-Jewish Olympic swimmer escaped from Austria to England in 1938 by bleaching her hair and carrying a false baptismal certificate.98

  It seems absurd that the logic of Nazi racism rested so heavily on the vulnerable and easily undermined logic of appearances. Most galling for the Nazi leadership was the fact that the appearance of the German population itself fell far short of their fetishised ideals. Hans Günther, one of Germany’s most popular racial theorists, known as ‘Rassen Günther’ to his friends, had calculated that a mere 6–8 per cent of Germans where pure Nordics. Pure Mediterraneans, he said, made up 2–3 per cent of the population and pure Baltics and Alpines a further 2–3 per cent each. The remainder was a racially muddy mixture.

  The relatively small proportion of pure Nordics confirmed Hitler in his idea that Germany’s noble blonde race was being destroyed by parasitic Jews. The overriding necessity, as the Nazis saw it, was to nurture and boost the idealised Aryan elements within the population. This, they reasoned, would lead to the rightful European and later world domination by the German Nordics. The Nazis resolved to achieve their aim in two ways. On one level, a cultural one, they conjured up by means of distorting propaganda an image of pure Aryan blondeness for Germany. On another level, they developed two ‘curative’ population strategies. The first was an Aryan breeding programme by which racially and physically acceptable men and women worked to ‘make a child for Hitler’. The second was an abduction policy by which blonde babies and children were taken from their parents in parts of the nascent Nazi empire and brought back to the homeland for Germanisation.

  The population programmes were Himmler’s responsibility. He planned to breed a whole nation on the model of the elite blond SS superman. In 1934 he appointed the Agriculture Minister, Walther Darre, an Argentine-born former chicken-breeder, as the head of his SS Race Office. Darre was the author of a book called Blood and Soil, published by the Nazi party in 1929, in which he posed the thesis that the true German race was one of exceptional quality which should be encouraged to breed productively. His philosophy complemented Himmler’s perfectly:

  Just as we breed our Hanoverian horses using a few pure stallions and mares, so we will once again breed pure Nordic Germans by selective cross-breeding through the generations. Perhaps we will not be able to keep the whole of the German people pure through breeding, but the new German nobility will be pedigree in the literal sense of the word . . . From the human reservoir of the SS we shall breed a new nobility. We shall do it in a planned fashion and according to biological laws . . .99

  Within two years, Himmler had founded the Lebensborn organisation and opened the first of the Lebensborn homes as a medical centre and maternity home. It catered for unmarried (or married) Aryan mothers giving birth to genetically valuable babies fathered by SS men and other racially impeccable Germans. Stories abound of SS men of abundant Aryan genes being singled out as part of the programme and sent off to perform their patriotic duty as ‘conception assistants’ with blonde Aryan women who, so the theory went, would eventually present the Fiihrer with an Aryan son.

  There were twelve Lebensborn homes in Germany and more were set up in occupied territories: three in Poland, two in Austria, and one each in Belgium, Holland, France, Luxemburg and Denmark. In Norway, where the blonde women were considered particularly good breeding stock, nine homes were established. The German High Commissioner for Norway, SS Lieutenant-General Rediess, in his pamphlet The SS for Greater Germany – with Sword and Cradle, declared in 1943, ‘This is a Germanic people, it is our duty to educate its children and young people to make the Norwegians a Nordic people again, as we understand the term. It is definitely desirable that German soldiers should have as many children as possible by Norwegian women, legitimately or illegitimately.’ Few German soldiers were inclined to disobey such explicit orders for patriotic promiscuity.

  It is not clear exactly how many children were born as a result of the Lebensborn project – most historians put the figure at 12,000 or fewer. But Himmler himself recognised that it would not, alone, make a significant contribution to the immediate demands of the war nor to the long-term requirement for a fully Nordicised Germany. His second Aryan population-growth scheme was based on the capture of racially acceptable children from conquered territories (judged largely by then-blonde hair and blue eyes) who were young enough to allow complete brainwashing and ethnic acceptance as Germans. Following a comprehensive racial and physical examination, the selected children were brought to Germany where their names were changed and all links with their parents severed. Adopted by Nazi families or sent off to live in orphanages or boarding schools, thousands of blonde children were expected to turn themselves into patriotic Germans.

  One of the victims, a young Polish girl named Helena Wilkanowicz, later recounted her capture from a Polish orphanage in 1943. ‘Three SS men came into the room and put us up against a wall. There were about a hundred children altogether. They immediately picked out the fair children with blue eyes – seven altogether, including me, though I do not have a drop of German blood in my veins. I was twelve years old at the time – somehow I managed to survive. Perhaps it was because I’m blonde, I don’t know.’100

  Himmler’s two blond-obsessed population programmes blighted the lives of hundreds of thousands, but did little to Nordicise Germany. If Germany was yet to turn itself into a nation of blondes in practice, the Nazis resolved in the meantime to make it one in theory. Hitler and his Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, set about creating a propaganda machine which would gain supremacy over education and the arts and turn Germany into a country teeming with ideologically acceptable blondes. Nazi orthodoxy was instilled at every level. Teachers were required not to convey truth but to promote the official doctrine of Aryan supremacy. Children were encouraged to play not ‘Cowboys and Indians’ but ‘Aryans and Jews’.

  Under the eye of the pugnacious Goebbels, the visual arts were systematically purged and remade according to a new aesthetic which endorsed and illustrated Nazi racist policy. The new canon called for the abolition of all forms of ‘degenerate’ modern art. This meant art associated with social ‘degeneracy’, in particular Bolshevism, Jewry and speculative capitalism. It included anything abstract, from expressionism to cubism, as well as anything intimating the debauchery of Berlin, all the jazz, high heels, bobbed hair and foxtrots that Hitler loathed. At the same time the Nazis installed in its place a crudely stereotyped depiction of the noble and heroic blonde German race.

  In 1936 Hitler appointed Professor Adolf Ziegler, a prominent painter and President of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, to lead a purge tribunal to confiscate specimens of morally impoverished degenerate art from over a hundred German museums. The following year a selection of the confiscated paintings was shown in Munich as the first stop of a touring exhibition of Degenerate Art. It was the most popular art exhibition ever staged in the Third Reich. More than two million visitors came to stare at the unframed paintings, displayed m a confused muddle and captioned with filthy jokes; and the venomous Goebbels employed actors to mingle with the crowds and pour scorn on the paintings. The exhibition amounted to the public pillorying of culture associated with politically unacceptable ideology. The Nazis’ perceived cleansing of their aesthetic world nicely mirrored their intended racial cleansing of the real world.

  The exhibition was part of a heavily staged political showdown in the confrontation between the superior and the inferior race, giving the two opposing sides a clearly defined visual image. The art of the superior race – made by carefully straitjacketed Nazi-approved artists – was promoted at the same time with a loudly trumpeted show entitled the Great German Art Exhibition, displayed nearby in a specially constructed neoclassical ‘tem
ple of German art’. Although less successful, this exhibition did establish the unmistakable trends in Third Reich art of the aesthetically sanitised racial ideal. Pompous Nordic heroes dominated the displays, monumental male bodies with the chests of supermen, striking virile poses. They were strangely banal figures, matched by full-bodied Amazonian women with naked skins of corset-like impenetrability, two-dimensionally, lifelessly perfect, who managed to appear both sanctimoniously asexual and pointedly fecund.

  The Great German Art Exhibition was a show-case of Nazi paranoia. Hitler’s embrace of racialist myth had nurtured in him an obsession with the rural German family of ‘noble simplicity’. Accordingly, the exhibition included plenty of images of racially approved rural life. Sylvan idylls teemed with robust blonde peasant families, wielding scythes and sheaves of wheat, dancing round maypoles, positively oozing honesty and virtue and displaying a Utopian lifestyle of timeless simplicity far removed from reality.

  One of Hitler’s pastoral favourites was the 1937 painting Sower by Oskar Martin-Amorbach which hung in his headquarters in Munich. A monumental peasant figure with peroxide-blond hair strides across the fields contentedly casting seeds into the bosom of mother earth. In the distance a rainbow hangs above a team of farmers using a primitive plough pulled by cattle. A brilliant light illuminates the unspoiled horizon, symbolising the goodness of a pure and honest life. The painting wilfully ignores the high levels of technology that powered mechanised farming in Germany by this time, the very mechanisation that the Nazis believed was eroding the ethnic features of Germany’s glorious classical history. It was only later, once war had become a reality, that Nazi art began depicting the nation’s vast and unassailable war potential, churning out images of zealous factory workers forging weapons for the fighters on the front line.