Gertrud Scholtz-Klink
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Gertrud Scholtz-Klink (February 9, 1902 - March 24, 1999; nee Treusch) was a fervent National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) member and Reichs Women's Leader.
She married a factory worker at the age of eighteen and had six children before he died. His martyrdom and her plain Germanic looks made her a perfect candidate for the National Socialists.
She joined the Nazi Party and by 1929 became leader of the women's section in Berlin.
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he appointed Scholtz-Klink as Reich Women's Fuehrer and head of the Nazi Women's League. A good orator, her main task was to promote male superiority and the importance of child-bearing. In one speech she pointed out that "the mission of woman is to minister in the home and in her profession to the needs of life from the first to last moment of man's existence."
In July 1936 she was appointed as head of the Women's Bureau in the German Labour Front. Scholtz-Klink had responsibility for persuading women to work for the good of the Nazi government. In 1938 she argued that "the German woman must work and work, physically and mentally she must renounce luxury and pleasure." though she herself enjoyed a comfortable material existence. As she was a woman, she was usually left out of the more important meetings in the Male dominated society of the Third Reich and has been considered usually to be a figurehead. She did, however, have the influence over women in the party as Hitler had over everyone else. By 1940 she was married to her third husband SS Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer and made frequent trips to visit women at Political Concentration Camps.
After the War she went into hiding and was not arrested until 1952. Later that year she was sentenced by a French military court to eighteen months in prison. Historian Claudia Koonz interviewed her in the early 1980s and found her to be largely unrepentant of her Nazi past.
[edit] Quotes
- "No Nazi woman will ever be motivated to work for money. Serving men is our only wish."
- "Though our weapon be but a wooden spoon, it must become as powerful as other weapons"
