Gertrud Scholtz-Klink

Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was a fervent National Socialist German Workers Party leader.

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.

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 war Scholtz-Klink went into hiding and was not arrested until 1952. Later that year, she was sentenced by a French military court to eighteen months in prison. Historian Claudia Koonz interviewed Scholtz-Klink in the early 1980s and found her to be largely unrepentant of her Nazi past