Posted by BDM Historian

Shown in the photo to the right is Clementine zu Castell, the first head of the BDM Werk Glaube und Schoenheit, the BDM Belief and Beauty Society, which was founded in 1938.

Clementine zu Castell was born on April 13, 1891 in Potsdam and was the Obergaufuehrerin of Franken prior to becoming the head of Belief and Beauty in February 1938 at the age of forty-seven.

A year and a half after taking this position, she married, and on September 12, 1939, she left her position, which was then taken over by Annemarie Kasper.

Annemarie Kasper was born on 3 January 1895 in Winden and besides holding the position of Obergaufuehrerin for Vienna, she was also a member of the Frauenschaft (the women's organization within the Nazi party) and the Nazi charity organization, the NSV. She was a trained nurse.

In 1941 she asked to leave the Belief and Beauty society because she planned to marry as well. By this point she was forty-six years old.

The third and last head of the Belief and Beauty Society was Dr. Jutta Ruediger who was also the National Speaker of the League of German Girls. Dr. Ruediger was born in 1910 in Berlin and had studied psychology, philosophy and economics at the university of Wuerzburg. She served as the head of the League of German Girls from 1937 until 1945 and worked as a psychologist after the war. She was twenty-seven when she joined the BDM and thirty-five at the end of the war.

If you read back over the short biographies of these three ladies you will find that I've made two points along the way. The first point is that all of these women were over the age of 21 by the time they even joined the League of German Girls. The second point is that when they married, they have to leave the organization.

Those points are interesting because a lot of historians say that membership in the league was open only to girls between the ages of 10 and 17, and some say between the ages of 10 and 21. In fact, a member could remain in the League for as long as she wanted as long as she did not marry or have children.

And that, of course, is the other point.

I often read articles in which it is written that the BDM did very little aside from pushing Nazi ideology down the girls' throats, and that this ideology mainly consisted of telling them they needed to marry and have as many children as possible (preferably blond, blue-eyed boys, of course) for the Fuehrer to supply the Fatherland with lots of future soldiers.

Some even say the girls were openly encouraged to have children out of wedlock to reach that goal. That statement actually goes back to a speech given by Himmler in which he said that "in the war a lot of men would be killed and therefore the nation needed more children, and it wouldn't be such a bad idea if a man, in addition to his wife, had a girlfriend would bear his children."

Dr. Jutta Ruediger remembered that speech and wrote in her autobiography: "And I must say, all my leaders were sitting there with their hair standing on end. "

I think the "having as many children under any circumstances" myth has followed the BDM around most persistently, even with all the other misconceptions that are out there, and there are many. (I found one thesis by a history student that claimed BDM girls accompanied Jews on the trains going to concentration camps. *sigh* I guess that was her understanding of the BDM's train station services?)

Anyway, I find this ironic because girls had to leave the organization if they did become pregnant or got married. I find it interesting as well that the leaders were to "set the example" for the younger members in many respects - not wearing makeup, not drinking or smoking in public, to name a few - but none of the leaders had any children or were married.