She was born on a farm, the youngest of three, watching bulls mount cows while her mother — one of Germany’s first female doctors — spoke frankly about bodies, babies, and birth control. It was a home where nothing was off-limits. That openness would shape everything.
Beate Uhse wasn’t raised to be quiet. And she never learned how.
As a girl, she glued chicken feathers into wings and hurled herself off the veranda, chasing flight. By 18, she was a licensed pilot. By 21, she was flying fighter planes for the Luftwaffe during World War II.
Beate was many things — athlete, actress, pilot — but above all, she was a woman who refused to be grounded. Not by war. Not by motherhood. Not by fear.
But her bravest flight came in 1945 — not for a government, but for her family. As Soviet forces closed in on Berlin, Beate’s unit were ready to escape. Already having lost her husband - her aviation instructor & fighter pilot, who was shot down in 1944 - she detoured home to collect her two-year-old son Klaus and his nanny. By the time she returned to the airfield, her unit had already left. She was stranded.
On the runway sat a Siebel Fh 104 she’d never flown. So she read the manual. With her son, his nurse, a mechanic, and two wounded men, she took off into war-torn skies and flew west. They landed near the Danish border, where she was taken in as a prisoner of war. It was a daring, defiant act of maternal love — and self-belief.
After the war, flying was forbidden for former Luftwaffe pilots. So Beate turned her courage to a different kind of navigation: helping women survive postwar Germany.
The men had come back. The pregnancies had begun. The poverty hadn’t changed.
Women were terrified — and trapped. Contraception had been banned. Abortions were dangerous. So Beate reached for what she had: knowledge. Her mother had taught her about fertility tracking. She typed it up. Printed it in exchange for her rations of butter. And sold it as 'Pamphlet X'. Within months, 32,000 women had bought a copy.
She didn’t call herself a feminist. But she saw what women needed — and met it head-on.
In 1951, she founded a mail-order company for “marital hygiene.” Condoms, contraceptive advice, books about sex and relationships — discreetly posted, quietly devoured. It wasn’t about shock. It was about choice.
In 1962, she opened the world’s first sex shop in Flensburg. It was careful, clinical. She named it the Institute for Marital Hygiene. But everyone knew what it really was — a lifeline.
Raided, prosecuted and constantly discriminated against, more than 2,000 legal complaints were filed against her. She lost just one. “With my underwear and sugar-coated pills, with creams and juices, with confectionery and condoms,” she once said, “I have managed to patch up millions of broken marriages over the years.”
In the decades that followed, her business became a European empire. She launched a sex TV channel. Opened an erotic museum. Floated her company on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. And through it all, she insisted that the real revolution wasn’t digital. It was the vibrator.
In her later years, Beate lived as boldly as ever. She bought a private plane the moment she could afford one — and kept flying into her seventies. At 75, she took up scuba diving. And, according to one German documentary, confided that flying was the only think she liked more than love-making. Even in her older years, she reputedly had a much younger lover. Of course she did.
Beate Uhse died in 2001. She left behind three sons, a multimillion-euro company, and a quieter kind of liberation: the kind that starts in a brown envelope, posted to a woman who needs it.
She didn’t ask for permission. She just flew.