Class Year
2021
Document Type
Student Research Paper
Date of Creation
Spring 2021
Department 1
History
Abstract
The Reichsfrauenführerin, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, led the National Socialist Women’s League from 1934 until she went into hiding in 1945. During her career in the Nazi Party, she created a female focused sector of the party that promoted pronatalist propaganda, discouraged women from engaging in politics, and urged women to only perform gender-suitable work. In contradiction to her message, Scholtz-Klink was the highest-ranking female political figure and a divorcee, who regularly chose her political career with the Nazi Party over her duties in the private sphere. Although she had little to no political power in the inner circle because of her sex, she did influence the actions and ideals of German women. She retrospectively claimed women, including herself, were not political. However, her speeches and other retrospective statements of hers demonstrated the racist ideology she promulgated for the party. This demonstrated Scholtz-Klink’s complicity in the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews and non-Germans. Nazi ideology of women was contradictory and always evolving because the Nazis’ main focus was the annihilation of the Jews, not control over women. Because of generations of systemic misogyny and racism, women posed no perceived threat to the Nazi men. Therefore, female focused policies lacked stability since “racial purification” was the first priority of the Nazi Regime.
Recommended Citation
Frasier, Mary C. S., "Women’s Advocate or Racist Hypocrite: Gertrud Scholtz-Klink and the Contradictions of Women in Nazi Ideology" (2021). Student Publications. 940.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/940
Included in
European History Commons, History of Gender Commons, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Comments
Written for HIST 418: Nazism