Background
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was born in Adelsheim, Baden, on 9 February 1902.
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was born in Adelsheim, Baden, on 9 February 1902.
An early member of the NSDAP, she had been appointed the Party’s women’s leader in Baden in 1929. Promoted to the leadership of the NSDAP's Women’s Organization in Hessen two years later, she was active in building up similar groups throughout South-West Germany and, when the Nazis came to power, Frau Scholtz-Klink was made Reichsfrauenführerin (Reich Women's Leader) of the Nazi Women’s League.
She also stood at the head of the German Frauenwerk (a federal organization of women) and of the Women's League of the Red Cross. From July 1934 the German Labour Front appointed her to lead its Women’s Bureau.
At a Party rally of 1937 she quaintly asserted that ‘even if our weapon is only the wooden spoon, its striking power shall be no less than that of other weapons’.
A good speaker with a rasping voice who was sent abroad frequently to propagandize on behalf of the régime, Frau Scholtz-Klink was the prototype of the militant Nazi woman. She sought to teach other German women how to organize their households according to the policies of the Party and consistently praised the ‘sacred character' of National Socialist conquest and struggle. After the war she hid for nearly three years under a false name until she was arrested and sentenced by a French military court on 18 November 1948 to eighteen months' imprisonment.
A de-Nazification court at Tübingen in November 1949 included her in its list of 'Major Offenders’ as a diehard advocate of Nazi ideology, but she was acquitted of guilt for war crimes.
As top Nazi women's leader in an anti-feminist regime, Scholtz-Klink invariably paid deference to male supremacy and exercised no real influence on Party leaders. Her task w as to emphasize the joys of labour and child-bearing, ‘the mission of woman to minister in the home and in her profession to the needs of life from the first to last moment of man’s existence’.
Preaching the cult of motherhood according to the well-known slogan of ‘Children, Church, Kitchen', Frau Scholtz-Klink wrapped up in mock-heroic verbiage the Nazi policy of treating women as breeding machines and beasts of burden for the greater glory of the Reich.
Quotations:
'The German woman fights at the Führer's side in his battle for the universal recognition of the German race and German culture.'
Active in mobilizing women for labour service, she declared at the 1938 Party rally that ‘the German woman must work and work, physically and mentally she must renounce luxury and pleasure'.
Physical Characteristics: A blonde, blue-eyed, slender little woman with classic features and a fresh complexion.
She had married a postal clerk at the age of eighteen and bore him six children (two of whom died) before she was widowed.