You may think of the sex doll as a modern invention for lonely men, but it actually has a deep, ancient history. This great read in the Atlantic traces it’s origins back to when folks wrote poems about being obsessed with statues to Hitler to the first time you could actually ship these things in the mail. In the age of the internet and stuff like this, the ye olde sex doll almost seems like a throwback to simpler times and, as it turns out, they go back to way, way simpler times. Here’s five of the oddest facts from the piece .A persistent urban legend holds that Adolf Hitler charged one of his SS commanders to design sex dolls for German soldiers during World War II, to prevent them from slaking their lust with non-Aryan women.