League of German Girls - Training and Activities

Training and Activities

The BDM used campfire romanticism, summer camps, folklorism, tradition, and sport to educate girls within the National Socialist belief system, and to train them for their roles in German society: wife, mother, and homemaker. Their Home Evenings revolved about domestic training, but Saturdays involved strenuous outdoor training. This was praised as ensuring health, which would enable them to serve their Volk and country. The "home evenings"—ideally to be conducted in specially built homes—also included world view training, with instruction in history. This would include learning the Horst Wessel song, the Nazi holidays, about Hitler Youth martyrs, and facts about their locality and Germans throughout the world. Physical educations included running, the long jump, somersaulting, tightrope walking, route-marching, and swimming. The importance of self-sacrifice for Germany was heavily emphasized; a Jewish woman, reflecting on her longing to join the League of German Girls, concluded that it had been the admonishment for self-sacrifice that had drawn her most. The League was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid Rassenschande or racial defilement, which was treated with particular importance for young females.

Holiday trips offered by HJ and BDM - i.e. skiing in winter and tent camps in summer - were affordable; children from poor families got subsidies. These offers were popular.

The League encouraged rebellion against parents. Der Giftpilz presented the story of a German girl being ordered to visit a Jewish doctor by her mother; the girl protested on the grounds of what she had learned at BDM meetings, and while at the office, remembered the warnings in time to escape being molested by the doctor. This caused her mother to agree that the BDM had clearly been in the right.

Ilsa McKee noted that the lectures of Hitler Youth and the BDM on the need to produce more children produced several illegitimate children, which neither the mothers nor the possible fathers regarded as problematic. These and other behaviors taught led parents to complain that their authority was being undermined. In 1944, a group of parents complained to the court that the leaders of the League were openly telling their daughters to have illegitimate children. Public opinion attributed a great deal of sexual laxity to the members.

The preparation camps for the Landdienst of girls and boys often lay nearby. 900 of the girls participating in the 1936 Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg came back pregnant. In 1937, a prohibition came out saying that camping was forbidden to the BDM.

Jungmadel were only taught, the BDM was involved in community service, political activities and other activities being considered as useful at that time.

Before entering any occupation or advanced studies, the girls, like the boys in Hitler Youth, had to complete a year of land service ("Landfrauenjahr"). Although working on a farm was not the only approved form of service, it was a common one; the aim was to bring young people back from the cities, in the hope that they would then stay "on the land" in service of Nazi blood and soil beliefs. Another form of service was as a domestic work in a family with many children.

The 'Faith and Beauty' organizations offered groups where girls could receive further education and training in fields that interested them. Some of the works groups that were available were arts and sculpture, clothing design and sewing, general home economics, and music.

Das deutsche Mädel was the Nazi magazine directed at these girls.