Gertrud Scholtz-Klink - Nazi Activities

Nazi Activities

She married a factory worker at the age of eighteen and had six children before he died.

Scholtz-Klink joined the Nazi Party and by 1929 became leader of the women's section in Berlin. In 1932, Scholtz-Klink married Guenther Scholtz, a country doctor (divorced in 1938).

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he appointed Scholtz-Klink as Reich's Women's Führer 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."

Despite her own position, Scholtz-Klink spoke against the participation of women in politics, and took the female politicians in Germany of the Weimar Republic as a bad example, saying, "Anyone who has seen the Communist and Social Democratic women scream on the street and the parliament, realize that such an activity is not something which is done by a true woman". She claimed that for a woman to be involved in politics, she would either have to "become like a man", which would "shame her sex", or "behave like a woman", which would prevent her from achieving anything.

In July 1936, Scholtz-Klink was appointed as head of the Woman's Bureau in the German Labor Front, with the responsibility of 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.

Scholtz-Klink was usually left out of the more important meetings in the male-dominated society of the Third Reich, and was considered to be a figurehead. She did, however, have the influence over women in the party as Hitler had over everyone else.

By 1940, Scholtz-Klink was married to her third husband SS-Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer, and made frequent trips to visit women at Political Concentration Camps.