World War II Day by Day

Berlin, Germany • December 1, 1936

On April 20, 1930 (Adolf Hitler’s 41st birthday), the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Maedel, abbre­vi­ated BDM) was founded in Germany. It was the female wing of Hitler’s Nazi Party youth orga­ni­za­tion, the Hitler Youth (Hitler­jugend, abbre­vi­ated HJ), whose origins dated to 1922 under several dif­fer­ent names. Recruit­ment in the BDM and HJ jumped begin­ning this date, Decem­ber 1, 1936, with the pas­sage of the Law Con­cern­ing the Hitler Youth (Gesetz ueber die Hitler­jugend). The law required all eli­gi­ble German citi­zens of either gender living with­in the borders of the Third Reich to enroll in one or the other youth branch or its junior affil­i­ate. Excep­tions were briefly made for Catho­lic youth. Girls had to be at least 10 years old to enroll in the junior ver­sion of the BDM and, like boys, had to be free of “hered­i­tary dis­eases.” Not until 1939 did member­ship in the parallel youth pro­grams become fully com­pul­sory. After that the two pro­grams became the only legal orga­ni­za­tions in which German youth could belong.

In both youth branches, the leader­ships’ inten­tion was to indoc­tri­nate their charges in the tenants of Nazi Party ideo­logy, espe­cially German nation­al­ism and theories about con­flict between supe­rior (“Aryan” or Nordic) and infe­rior (Unter­menschen) races. The Nazis lumped Jews and Slavs (i.e., east­ern Euro­peans like Poles and Rus­sians) in the sub­human cate­gory. The impor­tance of self-sacri­fice for the Father­land and loyalty to the Fuehrer (national leader) was front and center. But boys and girls also wanted fun so there was camping, camp­fire sing-alongs, swim­ming, hiking, horse­back riding, track and field sports, gym­nas­tics, lessons on flying, sailing, skating and skiing, and so on. Of par­tic­u­lar focus in the BDM was training females for their roles in German society: obe­di­ent wife, mother, and home­maker. “If a German girl must choose between marri­age or a career,” declared Magda Goeb­bels, wife of Minis­ter of Propa­ganda and Enlighten­ment Joseph Goeb­bels, “she will always be encouraged to marry, because that is what is best for a woman.” The League also strongly warned girls to avoid Rassenschande, or racial defilement.

The oversize role members and graduates of these two youth orga­ni­za­tions played in the Third Reich in the 1930s to the cata­clys­mic end of Hitler’s total­i­tar­ian dicta­tor­ship in May 1945 is truly remark­able. During the 12 years of a highly mili­ta­rized society, roughly 20 mil­lion German youth wore a uni­form of one kind or another. The para­mili­tary Reich Labor Service (Reichs­arbeits­dienst, RAD), divided into sepa­rate sec­tions for men and women ages 18 to 25, worked to miti­gate the effects of unem­ploy­ment on the German eco­nomy and in so doing helped mili­tarize the work­force and indoc­tri­nate workers in Nazi ideo­logy and core values (see photo essay). During the war years, com­pul­sory labor ser­vice brought more young women into the RAD, and the orga­ni­za­tion devel­oped an auxil­iary unit to support the Wehrmacht armed forces.

In the last year of war a half-million women auxili­aries were in the Wehr­macht (Wehr­machts­helferin­nen), serving in the army (Heer), air force (Luft­waffe), and navy (Kriegs­marine). About half were volun­teers; the other half per­formed obli­ga­tory ser­vice con­nected to the war effort (Kriegs­hilfs­dienst). They were assigned duties both inside the Third Reich and inside German-occupied Poland, France, Yugo­slavia, Greece, and Roma­nia. Females were tele­phone, tele­graph, and radio oper­a­tors, also admin­is­tra­tive clerks, typists, messen­gers, and stenog­ra­phers. In mili­tary health ser­vice they served as volun­teer Red Cross nurses. By late 1944, the Luft­waffe flak artil­lery corps listed 160,000 female person­nel. On the darker side, as civil­ian employees of the SS (Schutz­staffel, the Nazi Party’s “Pro­tec­tive Squad­ron”), these SS Gefolge served as camp guards and nurses in death and con­cen­tra­tion camps. Some women became mem­bers of the sinis­ter Waffen (Armed) SS (SS Helferinnen).

The League of German Girls (BDM) During the Hitler Years, 1922–1945

Left: As required by Landfrauenjahr (a year of rural service), 18‑year-old girls from the Berlin chapter of the League of German Girls gather in the hay har­vest in this photo­graph from Septem­ber 18, 1939. Girls billeted in a Land­jahr­lager or with farm fami­lies per­forming both farm and domes­tic chores. This same photo was repur­posed in May 1942. The cap­tion in the propa­ganda maga­zine Das Deutsche Maedel (May 1942 issue) read: “Bringing all the enthu­si­asm and life force of their youth, our young daugh­ters of the Reich Labor Ser­vice make their con­tri­bution in the German terri­tories ‘regained’ in the East.” “Regained in the East” was a refer­ence to the Polish terri­tories Nazi Germany annexed after Septem­ber 1, 1939, when Hitler declared war on his east­ern neigh­bor, Poland. Com­pul­sory Reich labor serv­ice in the RAD was a half-year for men and women. Many BDM girls were sent to occu­pied Poland to “Ger­manize” ethnic Germans who were resettled there from further east. The girls were placed under SS supervision.

Right: Young women of the League of German Girls practicing gymnastics in 1941. Dicta­tors like Hitler dis­covered that sports and gym­nas­tics could be con­verted from sources of recrea­tion and enter­tain­ment to a means to an end: phys­i­cally strong and tough, highly patri­otic and moti­vated sol­diers or, put less deli­cately, can­non fodder. That’s exactly what thou­sands upon thou­sands of German youth at ever younger ages who were im­pressed into the Wehr­macht and Volks­sturm (home guard) became in the late stages of World War II. It’s been esti­mated that 100,000 Hitler Youth perished in the last months of the war. During the Battle of Berlin from April 16 to May 2, 1945, Hitler Youth were a signif­i­cant part of the Nazis’ last-ditch, suicidal defenses.

Left: Nazi propaganda photo: a radiant mother, her radiant daughters, and her radi­ant son attired in a Hitler Youth uni­form pose for the Febru­ary 1943 edi­tion of SS-Leitheft (SS Lead Book­let), a Nazi peri­odi­cal from 1934 to 1945. Trans­lated into Norwe­gian, Danish, Flemish, Dutch, and Esto­nian, the peri­odi­cal cir­cu­lated among profes­sional offi­cers in the SS, the uni­formed elite corps and self-described “polit­ical sol­diers” under the leadership of Reichsfuehrer‑SS Heinrich Himmler.

Right: Blonde girl in twin braids (Zoepfe) wearing the unif­orm of the League of German Girls and holding the flag of the Hitler Youth. The drawing was used as a poster for the Nazis’ 10th Party Con­gress, named the “Rally of Greater Germany” (Reichs­partei­tag Gross­deutsch­land), Septem­ber 5–12, 1938, which cele­brated Austria’s Anschluss (union) with Nazi Germany. The girl’s image against the back­drop of old town Nurem­berg, minus the text, was a popular postcard.

Left: League of German Girls 1938 poster: “All ten-year-olds [belong] to us.” By 1936, under the Jugend­dienst­pflicht (for­mally, Law Con­cern­ing the Hitler Youth) the Hitler Youth had enrolled 5.4 mil­lion young­sters aged 10–18. Rival youth groups—whether polit­ical, reli­gious, or simply asso­ci­a­tional—dis­banded, were banned, or were swept into the Nazi Party’s collec­tive orga­ni­za­tions, which were based on a mili­tary model of squads, pla­toons, and com­panies. By 1939 Hitler Youth member­ship com­prised 90 per­cent of the coun­try’s youth, up from 60 per­cent in 1935. The pro­phesy of the young girl in the poster had proven nearly correct.

Right: League of German Girls 1938 poster: “Build [HJ] youth hostels and homes” says this fresh-faced, smiling “can rattler.” BDM girls were encouraged to become involved in com­mu­nity ser­vice pro­jects, national wel­fare and chari­table fund-raisers, polit­i­cal activ­ities, and other activ­ities that their leader­ship con­sidered advanced National Socialism (Nazism) and helped build a great and pros­perous New Germany. Activ­ities included col­lecting dona­tions of money, gathering clothing for Winter Relief (Winter­hilfe) and knitting socks, stationing them­selves at train sta­tions where injured sol­diers or refugees needed assist­ance, visiting bed­ridden sol­diers in hos­pi­tals, laying out and tending small vege­table and fruit gar­dens (equivalent to “victory gardens”), etc.

Left: Females were seen as the “incubators” of Germany’s future sol­diers, as house­keepers and child rearers. Mother­hood was sacro­sanct in Hitler’s Germany, but a marital relation­ship between a man and a preg­nant woman was not required. German women were encouraged, even rewarded, for giving birth to large num­bers of chil­dren, even ille­git­i­mate ones. The govern­ment provided finan­cial incen­tives and nur­series and child­care at no cost. Prolific child bearers were awarded special medals: the Honor Cross of the German Mother (Mutter­kreuz) with Bronze for more than 4 chil­dren, Silver for more than 6, and Gold for 8 or more. In the 5 months between Decem­ber 1939 and May 1940, a total of 121,853 Honor Cross Gold medals were awarded during the annual Mothering Sun­day (else­where Mother’s Day), cele­brated on the second Sunday of May.

Right: During the war years members of the League of German Girls volun­teered to take chil­dren from large famil­ies to the park while the mothers of infants were at work. This domes­tic ser­vice was the flip­side of Land­frauen­jahr or the man­da­tory RAD youth labor service, both described above.

League of German Girls, a Documentary