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IMPORTANT:  this is a 75+ year old German book that contains photographs of many nude humans. If you are offended by full-frontal or other nudity, go no farther, and do not buy it.

For reasons unknown many people with a strong familiarity with the Third Reich and its culture assume that nudity was not generally acceptable among Nazis or the general population in Germany, and that nudity only flourished in a subculture as a sort of pornography. That assumption is entirely incorrect. Not only was nudity a pervasive force in the arts in Germany at the time, but the concept was considered a healthy lifestyle fully in-step with all things Aryan, Nordic, Germanic, spiritual and beautiful.

The text in this 1940 Geist und Schönheit book makes it plain that nudity should for Germanic people be a matter of racial pride, and a part of any normal lifestyle. Chapters are titled Physical Shape and Harmony, The Body as a Visible Sign, The Task of Healthy Human Beings, Race and Physical Shape, Racial Characteristics, and others.

The last page contains a quotation from an October 1938 issue of the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps titled "For Real and Noble Nudity" (shown left).

The text is supplemented with 16 high-quality professional black & white full-page nude photographs. In lightly used and in very good, original condition. Because of the Nazi content in the text and because of some of the illustrations come from semi-official Nazi sources, the books were extremely unpopular after World War II and replaced with other nudist literature. They are obscure at best today, and very difficult to find.

This original 1940 example of Geist und Schönheit is complete and in nice used condition with the name of a previous owner (at a Reichssportschule) on the front flyleaf. No odor.

The softcover German book we offer here, Geist und Schönheit (Spirit and Beauty), measures 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches and has 48 pages of text and nude photographs, mostly of women. This is Volume 2 of the series by Wilm Burghardt, published in 1940 by Verlag Geist und Schönheit of Dresden.