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.

Comments

Written for HIST 418: Nazism

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