Borghild Project: When the Nazis Built the World’s First Sex Doll

In 1941, while the Second World War consumed Europe, the Nazi regime was quietly pursuing one of the strangest wartime projects on record. Under the direct direction of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Germany launched what became known as the Borghild Field-Hygiene Project — the creation of the world’s first sex doll. It was not a fringe idea floated by a low-ranking officer. It was an officially sanctioned program, driven from the very top of the SS command.

The trigger was a public health crisis. As German forces occupied France, syphilis spread rapidly among soldiers visiting French brothels. Himmler’s response was not to restrict soldiers’ behavior but to replace the source of infection entirely. His solution was a synthetic, disease-free substitute — a plastic woman soldiers could use in the field without the risk of contracting or spreading venereal disease. Himmler reportedly described the spread of syphilis as a serious threat to German military strength, and he meant to fix it with engineering.

To build the prototype, Himmler turned to Franz Tschakert, a sculptor attached to the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Tschakert was already famous in Germany for a creation called the “Woman of Glass” — a life-sized, anatomically correct transparent female figure that had stunned audiences in the 1930s. His expertise in detailed human anatomy made him the obvious choice to lead the project. The program operated under the umbrella of the Hygiene Museum, giving it a veneer of scientific purpose.

The design process was more rigorous than one might expect. The team set out three firm requirements: the doll’s synthetic skin had to feel realistic to the touch, the body had to be flexible and poseable, and the anatomy had to be functionally convincing. Early proposals, including aluminum skeletal frames, were rejected as too rigid and unnatural. Tschakert eventually settled on elastolin — a material more commonly used to manufacture children’s toy figurines — as the base material for what he called “galvanoplastical” dolls.

The debate over physical appearance was surprisingly heated. Team members disagreed on what the ideal body type should look like, but they eventually landed on a stylized, athletic figure with, in their own documented words, “graspable” breasts. The face proved even more contentious. The team believed the face was more important than the body in terms of making the doll usable by soldiers, and they went through multiple prototypes trying to achieve what they internally called an “artificial face of lust.” The dolls were given short hair — a deliberate design choice intended to keep the association with military discipline front of mind.

When the prototype was completed, it was declared a success by those involved. Himmler himself was said to have been so pleased that he immediately ordered 50 Borghild dolls for field deployment. Whether those dolls were ever actually distributed to troops, however, is where the historical record becomes murky. Reports from the time suggest that soldiers were deeply reluctant to carry the dolls, fearing the embarrassment of being captured by enemy forces with one in their kit. The mockery that would follow was, for many soldiers, a worse prospect than disease.

By 1942, the war situation for Germany had deteriorated sharply, and funding for the project was reportedly cut before mass production got underway. The Borghild Project quietly stalled. Then, in February 1945, Allied bombing raids on Dresden destroyed the German Hygiene Museum, taking with them nearly all physical evidence that the project had ever existed — prototypes, documents, and records alike.

What survives today is a small collection of photographs. They were rescued from a trash bin by a sculptor and later passed to German journalist Norbert Lenz, who brought the project to wider public attention. Without these images, the Borghild Project would likely have been dismissed entirely as wartime myth. Even with them, the full scope of the program — how many dolls were made, whether any reached the front lines, and what ultimately happened to the prototypes — remains unanswered. The bombing of Dresden ensured it stayed that way.