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NS Reich Women’s Leader
Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink auf dem Titel der Zeitschrift NS-Frauen-Warte (Propagandafoto) | Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München
Born Gertrud Treusch, the daughter of a surveyor from Baden, she trained as a journalist after finishing secondary school. In 1920 she married Eugen Klink, the district leader of the Nazi Party in Offenburg, who died of a heart attack at an election rally in 1930. Joining the party herself in 1929, she became the leader of the ‘Order of German Women’ in Baden in 1930, and the following year took over leadership of the successor organization, the National Socialist Women’s League, establishing it in the regional administrative division (Gau) of Hesse. In 1932, she married the doctor Günther Scholtz, whom she divorced in 1937.
After the National Socialists came to power she became Reich Leader of the National Socialist Women’s League on February 2, 1934 (renamed ‘Reich Women’s Leader’ in November), earning her many other honorary positions and making her the highest female representative of the Nazi regime. With her unconditional commitment to Hitler, she fully represented the official role model of women under National Socialism – a status that was subordinate to men. As early as 1934 she stated the goal of “forming an instrument out of the good mass of German women [...] who stand ready to respond to every beck and call”. Beyond her key role in Nazi propaganda, Scholtz-Klink exerted little political influence, not least because of the subordinate status of herself, her Nazi Women’s League, the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) and later the Reich Labor Service (RAD).
After the end of the war, she went into hiding in Tübingen under a false name with her third husband, SS Senior Group Leader August Heißmeyer. Exposed and arrested by the French in 1948, she was initially sentenced to 18 months in prison for using a false identity. Despite being categorized as one of the ‘major offenders, the court of appeal which conducted the tribunal proceedings was unable to prove that she had committed a criminal act, so she was stripped her of her civil rights and sentenced to 30 months in a labor camp, from which she was released after an appeal for clemency. In her memoirs published in 1978, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink defended National Socialism. She died in Tübingen at the age of 97.
Berger, Christiane: Die „Reichsfrauenführerin“ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. Zur Wirkung einer nationalsozialistischen Karriere in Verlauf, Retrospektive und Gegenwart, Hamburg 2005.
Livi, Massimiliano: Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. Die Reichsfrauenführerin. Politische Handlungsräume und Identitätsprobleme der Frauen im Nationalsozialismus am Beispiel der „Führerin aller deutschen Frauen“ (Politische Soziologie, Bd. 20), Münster 2005.
