“Take hold of the frying pan, dust pan, and broom, and marry a man.” Sounds like something from the conservative Mommy blogs that your favorite feminists rebuke on Twitter, no? Actually, it’s one of the Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s “Nine Commandments for the Workers’ Struggle,” published and posted throughout Germany in 1934. Wading anew into the Mommy Wars, and on the heels of the back-to-school season, is an item just discovered in the stacks of Germany’s Federal Archive: a rule book for the Reichsbräuteschule, or Reich Bride School, set up by the Nazis “to mould housewives out of office girls.”

In 1935, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the highest-ranking female in the Third Reich, recommended that women do their part: “Women must be the spiritual caregivers and the secret queens of our people, called upon by fate for this special task!” In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, in collaboration with Scholtz-Klink, issued a decree requiring women engaged to members of the Schutzstaffel (or S.S., Hitler’s paramilitary henchmen) to complete the course; this meant promising devotion to the Führer and his cause above all. “The woman’s is a smaller world,” Hitler put it at a party conference in Nuremberg, in a speech to the National Socialist Women’s League. “But what would become of the greater world if there were no one to tend and care for the smaller one? How could the greater world survive if there were no one to make the cares of the smaller world the content of their lives?”

To train women within their lesser sphere, a villa was erected in 1937 on Schwanenwerder Island, on Berlin’s Wannsee Lake. In this pretend model household, young women—many of them teen-agers—would live in groups of twenty, spending six weeks, “preferably two months before their wedding day, to recuperate spiritually and physically, to forget the daily worries associated with their previous professions, to find the way and to feel the joy for their new lives as wives.” Scholtz-Klink further barred any woman with Jewish or gypsy heritage, physical disability, or mental illness from taking part. The course cost a hundred and thirty-five reichsmarks (six hundred and twenty-five dollars, in today’s cash), and covered everything from shopping and cooking to gardening and cocktail conversation, from home decorating to boot, dagger, and uniform scrubbing.

But expertise in craftsmanship and the culinary arts was not the essence of the school; it existed to drill Nazi dogma into “sustainers of the race,” those women who, under the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, would be effectively bribed to produce babies. The course insisted that women “acquire special knowledge of race and genetics” and only when a woman had acquired such knowledge could she gain certificates of accomplishment (which were also found in the archive, embellished with the Germanic ‘Tree of Life’; a woman who did not comply was refused not only this certificate but also permission to marry). The course also entailed a commitment to Nazi doctrine until death, and a placement of faith in the Führer over religious faith: marriages had to be neo-pagan rituals officiated by party members, not in a church ordained by a cleric. Children had to be raised to worship not Jesus, but Hitler.

Graduates of the schools stayed up to date with Scholtz-Klink’s twin mandates of domestication and inculcation with the League of German Maidens, and then the National Socialist Women’s League (N.S.-Frauenschaft). (Membership was strongly required.) The party’s official women’s magazine, the N.S.-Frauen Warte, printed pastoral photos of the brides-in-training going about their activities in kitchens, gardens, and fields of hay: black-and-white renderings of girls like Heidi in blond plaits, young women in starched aprons, prim petticoats, and demure swim clothes, holding baskets of blooming flowers, making “beautiful things for later use in their own homes.”

By 1940, at least nine Reichsbräuteschule existed in Berlin, and more were established throughout the country, eventually accepting not only S.S. fiancées but those females deemed racially suitable (which is to say, superior). The toll of years of war caused shortages in the labor force—even taking into account Nazi slave labor—and Hitler was forced to allow more women into the German workforce. But there are indications from historians that bride schools—which remain largely unexposed—continued to operate as late as May 1944.

Nazi ideology held that women belonged to the home sphere; it barred them from medicine, law, and civil service. The party awarded a state-and-civil decoration—a brilliant cross presented with a ribbon to wear around the neck—called the Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter, or Cross of Honor of the German mother. Bronze went to eligible mothers with four or five children, silver for those with six or seven, and gold to those with eight or more Kinder. Even today, the German “Hausfrau” is celebrated, and women looked down upon as Rabenmütter, or raven mothers, when they try to balance work with children—black birds that push chicks out of their nest. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is a woman, but many call it less than incidental that she is not a mother. The BBC reported in 2011 that no more than 2.2 per cent of senior management jobs at top German companies are held by women.

The divide between the soldier or protector (productive) and the homemaker (reproductive) is not specific to Nazi ideology. But women enjoyed higher proportional representation in the Reichstag in Weimar Germany than in corresponding bodies in other European countries (all long before France and Switzerland gave women the right to vote). It’s telling that when Hitler came to power, the woman that he appointed the Women’s Führer—Scholtz-Klink—saw her sex’s greatest potential in the womb.

In the past few years, as recession has led many Europeans once more into the far-right, a number of women have been linked to xenophobic extremism. Last year, the Times cited an estimate by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 2010 that, of twenty-five thousand far-right extremists in Germany, about eleven per cent were women. And yet, it went on, “although they account for a relatively small number, roughly half of the women who are involved in the scene were recorded as holding leadership positions within nationalist political organizations.” It’s not liberation, but it’s something.

Photograph by Becke/FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty.