The role of the BDM

a sample BDM magazine

Structure

The BDM, Bund Deutscher Mädel, was the girl’s version of the Hitler Youth. It was compulsory for girls aged 14-18, though girls could join the organisation for younger girls Jungmädelbund, from the age of 10. At 18 they could go on to the organisation for older girls Glaube und Schönheit - Faith and Beauty.  

Curiously, although it was compulsory, in order to join girls had to meet three criteria. They had to:

Be of racial/ethnic German heritage
Be a German citizen
Be free of hereditary diseases

Activities

There was some camping and hiking and in fact their magazine looks very similar to any scouting or guiding magazine. However, as the years pass by, it changes subtly and is full of pro-Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitism. They read the Giftpilz – The Poisonous Mushroom  which is vehemently anti-Semitic. The magazine also recommends other reading and contains serialised stories that also have an anti-Semitic agenda.   

The girls became good at housekeeping and homemaking. They were in effect being trained to become good wives and mothers. The emphasis was on comradeship, service and physical fitness for motherhood. Indeed, in the letters that inspired this cycle of novels the words “comradeship” and “duty” occur frequently.  

There were residential camps, where they lived in tents or in specially built centres- many of these later became some of the splendid youth clubs that can now be found in Germany. Parents did have to pay for the camps but there were subsidies for poorer families.

There were sports competitions.

You can read some first-had accounts here.

War activities

Some BDM girls would help out on farms, visit the wounded in hospital or collect clothing for the Winter Relief and paper that could be made into fuel.    

A really smart uniform

The uniform was elegant: calf-length slightly flared navy blue skirt, black neckerchief, crisp white blouse and beige flying-jacket. Wealthier girls might also wear the smart great-coat in the winter. If you Google BDM girl, Germany, and look at the images you will see that sometimes the footwear let them down. Note also occasionally the flying-jacket is replaced with hand-knitted cardigan.     

Morale boosting

These young women had lived a hard life until now.  They were born just after the hyperinflation in Germany ended. The Depression hit Germany very hard, especially as it had substantial debts left over from the Great War. Of course the girls wanted to help to make Germany great again. The BDM also enable them to challenge some of their parents’ long-held beliefs. Membership could also help them to get university places and jobs.

And of course there was that wonderful uniform.

Hence the title of the third book in the Schellberg Cycle.       

   

  

That sense of duty

I noticed when I was studying the letters from the Wilhelm Lőhe School that two words occurred quite often: camaraderie and duty.  Now, I’ve made one of the girls also notice the word “duty”.

All of these girls will have attended the meetings and training sessions of the BDM, the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth. They would have thereby been indoctrinated.  This organisation at first glance seems much like our scouting and guiding movement. Young people are taught many useful life-skills, wear a smart uniform and get involved in a lot of outdoor activities. 

However it becomes a little more sinister, especially for the girls. They are to grow up to become useful women. Women were expected to be content with the bringing up children, working in the kitchen and going to church.  The latter may seem odd as the girls’ school was closed because it was a church school and did not teach Nazi values. Perhaps church was just a way of keeping the women occupied. 

Big families were encouraged, so that more Aryans may be born.  

The Lebensborn initiative was sinister. Women were encouraged to have good Aryan babies.  Single mothers were more than tolerated- as long as the father was a respected Nazi officer. Fantastic maternity homes and homes for young mothers were built. These became breeding centres. 

The BDM magazine again looks just like a scouting magazine – until you start looking at the book reviews. As the years went by, they changed from recommending outdoor activities to providing more and more articles about home-making. 

BDM girls were encouraged to think for themselves and not just think as their parents had thought. However, that thinking was encouraged to be anti-Semitic and over patriotic. Young girls aged 14-17 were encouraged to alert the authorities about anyone in their family who was thinking “wrongly”.  

The girls I am studying don’t seem that different from the young British women who lived through World War II. Our women worked in munitions factories, became land girls and took on many of the jobs that the men who had gone to war had left behind, including ones in middle management. The German girls had to do their RAD (compulsory work experience) and then war work. They had lived through hyperinflation and the depression which was worse in Germany than here because of the constraints put on the nation after the Great War. They were very young at the time of the hyperinflation but it would still have affected them and they lived with parents damaged by it.

Of course they wanted their country to be great. Why wouldn’t anyone want their own country to shine? 

In my latest novel, Erika, one of twins who have to run their father’s factory after he dies suddenly, and Frau Schmitz the secretary there, come up with their own version of what doing duty means. It is about being aware of the needs of others. And if that leads to Germany becoming great again, so be it.              

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

The Influence of the BDM

Uniform

The BDM had a lovely uniform:

A calf-length navy blue skirt, a white shirt, a neutral shade  flying jacket and a black neckerchief held together with a small leather ring.    

Some girls couldn’t afford smart black shoes, the flying jacket or the great coat for winter.  

Look for some pictures of BDM uniforms. Just how “uniform” were they?        

Germans were quite poor at this time, so the uniform was a real bonus.

Imagine a conversation between one of the girls and her leader or her parents.

BDM activities

 The BDM – started off looking like our guiding / scouting movements. There were campfires, hikes through the woods and sports activities.  Gradually, however, the girls were encouraged to become home-makers.

They had their own magazine, Das Deutsche Mädel. Try an internet search. Even if you can’t read German look at some of the pictures.

Imagine you are BDM girl and you write a letter to a friend about some of the things you have been doing.           

 

 Der Giftpilz

The girls were encouraged to distrust and dislike Jews. They were also asked to report their parents if they had any dealing with Jews.

Der Giftpilz – the poisonous mushroom – was written for young people and often read and discussed at BDM meetings.  You can read it here.   

What do you think of this material? One of the Nazi leaders even didn’t think much of it. Why not, do you think?

Discuss this with other students in your group. Ask your teacher to join in.   

Girl in Smart Uniform

Girl in a Smart Uniform is now out. This is the most fictional to date of the novels in the Schellberg Cycle.  Some characters, familiar to those who have read the first two books, appear again here. Clara Lehrs, Karl Schubert and Dr Kühn really existed. We have a few, a very few, verifiable facts about them. The rest we have had to find out by repeating some of their experiences and by using the careful writer's imagination.

Gisela adores her brother Bear, her gorgeous BDM uniform, and her little half-brother Jens. She does her best to be a good German citizen, and is keen to help restore Germany to its former glory. She becomes a competent and respected BDM leader. But life begins to turn sour. Her oldest brother Kurt can be violent, she soon realises that she is different from other girls, she feels uncomfortable around her mother’s new lover, and there is something not quite right about Jens. It becomes more and more difficult to be the perfect German young woman.

We know that BDM girls set fire to the house in Schellberg Street but got the children out first. This story seeks to explain what motivated the girls to do that, and what happened to them afterwards.

This novel has changed very much form when I first started writing it. The original version started off in the 1920s with the family suffering from the hyperinflation. I decided in the end to fast forward to the mid-1930s when anti-Semitism was growing rapidly and tell the story from the point of view of a teenage girl who want to help Germany to get strong again. I then included the material about the hyperinflation and other problems that Gisela and her brother had growing up into a flash back that Bear has when he’s fighting on the front.

Have I found out why some perfectly decent ordinary people become Nazis? I don’t think so. Gisela faced a particular set of problems that may not have been all that usual. Yet I can understand the pride that many young girls would have had in their very smart BDM uniform at a time when everyone was poor. Gisela and her very good friend Trudi certainly had a strong sense of camaraderie and duty – those two words that kept coming up in the letters that sparked this whole project. 

Is it a young adult novel? Possibly. It could certainly be enjoyed by some young adults but we see protagonist Gisela form the age of three to twenty-six. I’m beginning to think my historical fiction is more about feisty women. But maybe that is for the reader to decide.    

A German childhood 1925 – 1938

Hyperinfaltion

Most of the girls in the first book of the Schellberg Cycle were born as the hyperinflation in Germany ended. Some of the older girls in the story would have experienced this. Just imagine what it must been like having to turn your father's wages into goods the moment he came home from work. Families would buy some fresh food, certainly, but there would also have been lots of pickles, canned and bottled foods along with salted meat and fish.

Happy days in Nuremberg?

Renate spent much of her early childhood in Nuremberg. Certainly she had more vivid memories of that than of Jena where she was born. Nuremberg was then and still is a bit of a fairy tale place. It has a magnificent castle and is the home of the world's largest international toy fair.     

However, when Renate and her friends were younger it was also the home of the infamous Nuremberg Rallies. Thousands of people would march into the grounds that then echoed with Hitler's charismatic rhetoric and the "Sieg Hiel"s which don’t sound all that different from the Daleks' "Exterminate!"

Hitler's policy 1933

He wanted to take charge of education. He sought to mould young people into perfect Germans.

"My program for educating youth is hard … weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order, a new youth will grow up, before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless and cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes…That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication…That is how I will create the New Order.”

The first Waldorf school

In England, we know them as Steiner schools. They still exist and there are now many worldwide.

Steiner specified four conditions for the Stuttgart school:

1. that the school be open to all children;
2. that it be coeducational;
3. that it be a unified twelve-year school;
4. that the teachers, those individuals actually in contact with the children, have primary control over the pedagogy of the school, with a minimum of interference from the state or from economic sources.

This is so very different from what was going on in other schools in Germany. It eventually had to be closed down but opened again after World War II.  

Renate only experienced the Stuttgart school through her grandmother. However, she went to a Steiner school in England.

Germany does not have many private schools but it does tolerate the Waldorf schools. Many of the teachers who now work in these schools are very skilled artists.     

The BDM

The Bund Deutscher Mädel. An organisation for girls.

Renate actually left Germany before she had to join the BDM. It became compulsory for girls aged 14+. The uniform was very smart and must have been a joy for the girls who lived through the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s which hit Germany even more than other European countries.

It was a little like our scouting movement to start with but the emphasis soon shifted to making the girl into homemakers. There was some subtle indoctrination. The girls in the book have been taught to value camaraderie and duty.

This post and the next few relate to the Discovery Packs I am creating for the Schellberg Cycle Workshop