mWhile it is true that one of the internal German jokes for the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) was Bund Deutscher Matratzen, the reality of the sex lives of the BDM members was more complex than functioning as a harem for the NSDAP elite. Jokes alleging their promiscuity also coexisted with aspersions that they were prudes or even just brood-mares. This multifaceted denigration was a reflection of the confused approach the Nazis had towards sex and the low prestige that women's organizations had within the avowedly patriarchal Third Reich.

The BDM itself was actually a rather socially conservative organization. Most BDM leaders looked down upon unwed pregnancy and the organization enshrined a more conservative sexual mentality. Some of these leaders were quite at odds with the state's avowedly natalist platform and programs like the SS's Lebensborn. In the latter case, Himmler had to backpedal on his public rhetoric of male virility as he encountered not only pushback from the BDM and other institutions, but was also at odds with the SS's own self-fashioned identity as a stable institution that encouraged healthy marriages. The BDM would occasionally dismiss leaders who became pregnant. That the BDM tacked to such a more stringent form of sexuality was not surprising. The NSDAP devoted very little resources or thought to women's branches, thus women's groups within the Party often merged with older, established organizations of conservative and nationalist women. In some ways, the subordinate and gendered division of the NSDAP worked to women's organizations' advantage because their male superiors within the Party saw women's issues as beneath them and allowed women's leaders a good deal of latitude on their own turf. This relative independence came at a price as organizations like the BDM often suffered from lack of resources or priority compared to their male counterparts like the HJ. While the HJ often received state largess like uniforms or subsidized field trips, women's organizations often had to scrape by.

But while the organization's attitude towards sex was somewhat stuffy, there were many accounts of BDM members engaging in sexual activity. There were rumors, for instance, of some 900 BDM girls returning home from the 1936 Nuremberg Party rally pregnant. BDM leaders often registered complaints to both the HJ numbers and to state authorities that HJ had taken advantage of their wards. Beneath all of this hyperbole, it is perhaps not surprising that such sexual liaisons. There were periodic coordination between the male and female youth organizations for Party excursions, and poor supervision coupled with being away from the watchful eyes of family and neighbors were encouragements of sexual contact. Both HJ and BDM members were teenagers entering into a sexual maturity, so that some German youth gave into their hormonal urges is not surprising. Moreover, the regime's attitude towards sex at times could be rather libertine, especially within its male organizations. The NSDAP prided itself as a young movement that transcended prior moral barriers, and healthy sex was a right for Aryans. Artur Axmann, the Reichsjugendführer of the HJ from 1940-45, admitted at one HJ conference that the organization brought boys and BDM girls together "to bring the relationship between boys and girls unto a basis which reflected a knightly, clean and clear form."

Axmann's rather coded language that National Socialist sex was not promiscuous, but rather "knightly" illustrates the patriarchal notions of sex common in Nazi organizations. In National Socialist discourses on sex, women were either receiving vessels for male sexual pleasure or for bearing children. Himmler encapsulated this approach to sexuality in a speech to his immediate subordinates in 1936:

We must teach our men to recognize that they don’t have to marry the first girl they meet out dancing. I see from the requests to marry that our men often marry having no idea what marriage is. Reading the requests I often wonder: my God, does an SS man have to marry this woman of all people, this walking mishap with a bent and sometimes ghastly frame. A little eastern European Jew or a little Mongol can marry her; that’s all a girl like that is good for. In by far the most cases the men in question are radiant and handsome.

In Himmler's schema, Aryan male sexual pleasure needed outlets, but an SS man also must settle down and marry soon, albeit to the right girl. For all of the semi-public concern about female promiscuity, there was relatively little outrage against their HJ male partners. When one HJ liaison to the Propaganda Ministry asked that the HJ leadership that its local leaders be more discreet, the assistant to Reichsjugendführer Schirach shot back "what else are BDM girls for except to take to bed. It is necessary since otherwise they might become lesbians." The HJ leadership as a whole was rather blasé about their charges' heterosexual conquests, unlike the BDM's leadership. In contrast, the HJ did concern itself against charges of homosexual conduct among its members and was much more proactive about policing this aspect of young male sexual behavior. Complaints of male heterosexual promiscuity tended to register a shrug among male leaders.

The somewhat complicated sexual mores of the Third Reich acquired a new patina in the postwar period that distorted an already complicated picture. The emerging political culture of West Germany often cast Hitler and his gang as a bunch of moral degenerates. In this context, rumors of sadosexual perversions merged with actual Nazi crimes and often undergird the socially conservative laws of the FRG. The strict anti-pornography laws of the FRG became justified by notions that the Third Reich had enabled this depravity. The public language rationalizing this censorship often overlapped with the same hyperbolic rhetoric used by the NSDAP for its own censorship of political rivals. This political culture was avowedly patriarchal like its predecessor, and sought to strengthen the moral center of the new state by buttressing women's commitment to the three K's (Kinder, Kuche, and Kirche). The so-called New Woman was an undesirable element for both the FRG and the Third Reich's moral guardians. BDM women may have been vessels for male pleasure for HJ and other leaders, but they were also not to smoke, wear makeup, or engage in other modern pursuits of their own volition. The fifties likewise saw another officially-sanctioned leeriness of female agency, but justified upon a skewed vision that the criminal depravity of Nazism had left women in the wind by encouraging German men to abandon their proper role as father and husband.

The non-German West also played a role in emphasizing Nazi depravity. Rumors of Nazi perversion of the moral order were common in Allied propaganda and the regimentation of youth was one trope common in Allied films in this period. The 1943 film Hitler's Children had both sterilization and flogging as major plot points, making latent connections between Nazi ideology and perversion of proper sexual norms. The Disney film Education for Death did not deal directly with sexual matters, but it did portray Nazi educational system as throwing out all tenets of the moral order. The anti-religious nature of the Nazis was a theme that did dovetail into connections with rape and licentiousness. The plot of the film Hitler's Madmen, directed by the great German emigre Douglas Sirk had one of its key escalating actions Heydrich's interruption of a church ceremony. Posters for the film, such as this one, this one, or this example make explicit visual connections between Nazi iconography (swastikas, jackboots, etc.) and sexual perversion and predation. These images and linkages between ideology and sex primed the non-Western public to accept at face value charges of Nazi perversion. The press coverage trials of female SS auxiliaries and prison guards such as Irma Grese often highlighted their alleged sadosexual perversion of femininity such as Ilse Koch's alleged obsession with inmates' tattooed skin. This connection took on a life of its own with the subgenre of Naziploitation films like Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS which used the visual codings of Nazism to sell a lurid tale of taboo sexual dominance.