Dr Jutta Rüdiger German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 psychologist, was head of the Nazi Party's female youth organisation, the League of German Girls

League of German Girls

The League of German Girls or League of German Maidens , was the girl's wing of the overall Nazi party youth movement, the Hitler Youth. It was the only female youth organization in Nazi Germany....

 (Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM) from 1937 to 1945.

Early career

Born in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 but raised in Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...

 where her father was an engineer, Rüdiger was trained as a psychologist. While a student at Würzburg

Würzburg

Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....

 in the 1920s, she became a convinced Nazi and joined the National Socialist German Students' League

National Socialist German Students' League

The National Socialist German Students' League was founded in 1926 as a division of the NSDAP with the mission of integrating University-level education and academic life within the framework of the National Socialist worldview...

 (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund). From 1933 she was an assistant psychologist at the Institute for Occupational Research in Düsseldorf. She also became active in the leadership of the BDM, which had been started in 1930 as a girls' auxiliary to the male-only Hitler Youth

Hitler Youth

The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...

, but which grew rapidly after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. In 1935 she became BDM Leader in the Ruhr-Lower Rhine region. In November 1937 she became Leader of the BDM, joining the Nazi Party at the same time, succeeding Trude Mohr

Trude Mohr

-Early life:She was born in 1902 to a German nationalist family. She never completed gymnasium, and joined the German nationalist youth movement by the 1920s, becoming a BNM leader...

, who had vacated the position on her marriage, as Nazi policy required.

Career in the Reich

As BDM Leader Rüdiger had the title Reichs Deputy of the BDM (Reichsreferentin des BDM). This signified that her position was subordinate to the overall Nazi Youth Leader (Reichsjugendführer}, Baldur von Schirach

Baldur von Schirach

Baldur Benedikt von Schirach was a Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Vienna....

 (and his successor from 1940, Artur Axmann

Artur Axmann

Artur Axmann was the German Nazi leader of the Hitler Youth from 1940 through war's end in 1945.-Early life:Axmann was born in Hagen on 18 February 1913...

). This was in accordance with Nazi policy that women and their organisations must always be subordinate to male leadership. Schirach was zealous in preventing the BDM becoming autonomous, or coming under the control of the Nazi Women's Organisation (Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, NSF), whose Leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink

Gertrud Scholtz-Klink

Gertrud Scholtz-Klink née Treusch was a fervent Nazi Party member and leader of the National Socialist Women's League in Nazi Germany.- Nazi activities :...

 he regarded as a rival.

Membership of the BDM became compulsory for girls between 10 and 18 in 1936, and the law was strengthened in 1939, but membership was never as universal as membership of the Hitler Youth was for boys. The basic purpose of the Hitler Youth was to train boys to be inducted into the armed forces, and Nazi ideology did not envisage women bearing arms. The destiny of BDM girls under the Nazi state was to become wives and mothers to Nazi men, bearing many children to increase the strength of the "Aryan

Aryan

Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...

" race.

By 1941, however, there was an acute labour shortage in Germany as men were drafted away to the front, and the BDM girls were increasingly pressed into compulsory labour service, usually either on farms or in munitions factories, with girls from upper or middle class families going into office jobs. Rüdiger came to preside over a female work force of several millions, directing them as the economic ministries requested additional labour.

From 1943 onwards the BDM also supplied thousands of girls for work in flak (anti-aircraft) batteries guarding German cities. This was the nearest the Nazi regime would allow young women to come to combat service. Girls as young as 13 manned flak batteries and shot down Allied planes. Many were killed when their batteries were hit by bombs or machine-gun fire from Allied fighters. In the last days of the war some BDM girls fought alongside Hitler Youth boys against the invading Allied armies, but this was never officially sanctioned by the regime, and Rüdiger denied after the war that she had approved it.

Arrest and later life

Rüdiger was arrested by the Americans in 1945 and spent two and a half years in detention. She was not charged with any specific offence and was never brought to trial. On her release she resumed her career as a paediatric psychologist in Düsseldorf. According to a recent historian, she remained "an unreconstructed Nazi". In a 2000 interview she said: "National Socialism is not repeatable. One can take over only the values which we espoused: comradeship, readiness to support one another, bravery, self-discipline, and not least honour and loyalty. Apart from these, each young person must find their way alone." She died in 2001 at Bad Reichenhall

Bad Reichenhall

Bad Reichenhall is a spa town, and administrative center of the Berchtesgadener Land district in Upper Bavaria, Germany. It is located near Salzburg in a basin encircled by the Chiemgauer Alps ....

. A neo-Nazi website commented: "On March 13 Dr. Jutta Rüdiger died in Bad Reichenhall at the age of ninety. She was the highest leader of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (female version of the Hitler Youth) and remained a loyal comrade her entire life."