Senior Nazi figures lightened their war with often-bizarre sex, including naked girls on horses or roulette wheels and castle orgies led by an opera singer, according to British archives released today.
The revelations were part of an arsenal of compromising material available to British agents in the propaganda fight.
Among the most lurid details in the files compiled by the Special Operations Executive is the report that the Munich-based Nazi Party leader, Christian Weber, was notorious before the war for orgies in which girls rode naked on horseback while giving "spirited renderings" of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.
The files reported a German lieutenant's claim that he had witnessed, at the start of the war, a party given by Weber in which there "was a large roulette wheel on which a naked girl had been strapped".
"Weber, drunk as usual, was acting as croupier and set the table in motion. The audience of mainly SS men sat ready round the table. The gentleman opposite the girl when the wheel stops then obliges." "A good time was had by all", the lieutenant said. "But by the end of the orgy, the woman was unconscious."
The documents report rumours that the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, who planned the genocide against Jews, was "protector" of a cult that met in a German castle for sex to the accompaniment of its high priestess, a lead singer with the Berlin State Opera.
They also refer to an officer in charge of Nazi propaganda in Paris as a fetishist who held gay orgies in his chateau.
In addition, 61-year-old Admiral Conrad Albrecht would allegedly get his mistress to have anonymous sex with U-boat sailors while wearing "nothing but a transparent raincoat".
Other reports refer to a German plane and Norwegian ship used as brothels, and the activities of the German consul in Casablanca, Morocco, with local men and boys.