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.
Scholtz-Klink joined the Nazi Party and by 1929 became leader of the women's section in Berlin.
In 1932 Scholtz-Klink marries Guenther Scholtz, a country doctor (divorced in 1938).
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, Scholtz-Klink was appointed as head of the Women's Bureau in the German Labour 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. Being a woman, 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. Scholtz-Klink did, however, have the influence over women in the party as Hitler had over everyone else.
By 1940, Scholtz-Klink she was married to her third husband; SS-Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer, and made frequent trips to visit women at Political Concentration Camps.
After the fall of the Third Reich, in the summer of 1945 she was briefly detained in a Soviet prisoner of war camp, but escaped shortly after and went into hiding in the Bebenhausen Castle near Tübingen. Together with her third husband, they spent the subsequent three years under the false names of Heinrich and Maria Stuckebrock.
On February 28, 1948 the couple were identified and arrested. A French military court sentenced Scholtz-Klink to 18 months in prison on the charge of forging documents. In May 1950, a review of her sentence classified her as the 'main culprit' and sentenced her to additional 30 months. In addition, the court imposed a fine and banned her from political and trade union activity, journalism, and teaching for ten years.
After the release from prison in 1953 Sholtz-Klink settled back in Bebenhausen.
In her 1978 book A Woman in the Third Reich (Die Frau im Dritten Reich), Scholtz-Klink demonstrated her continuing support for the National Socialist ideology. She once again upheld her position on National Socialism in her interview with historian Claudia Koonz in the early 1980's.
Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, mother to 11 children and the perfect Nazi woman, as described by the March 27, 1939 edition of Time Magazine, died on March 24, 1999 in Bebenhausen, Germany.
[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"
