ABSTRACT

If the rise to power of the NSDAP had been meteoric, its demise was instantaneous, at the moment of German defeat in May 1945. Some of its major officers were apprehended and brought to trial at Nuremberg, but large numbers, of whom Martin Bormann was the most significant, simply disappeared. Even Himmler managed to disguise himself and evade arrest for a short time. 1 The ensuing trials of the major war criminals involved only men; many women passed through denazification courts — including some who had not been members of the NSDAP or its affiliates, like Leni Riefenstahl 2 — but they were treated as the very small fry they had been in the Nazi system. A distinction was rightly made between NSF and DFW members, 3 but neither were treated with severity; this appropriately signalled the minimal impact which the women’s organisations had had on Party policy and on the female population of Germany. Accordingly, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was treated more as the figurehead of an impotent organisation than as a malefactor. She and her SS-officer husband almost escaped detection, living in her home state of Baden under an assumed name for almost three years. The two of them were actually denazified under their false name, and when their deceit was discovered, early in 1948 by the French occupation authorities, it was on this account that she was imprisoned for eighteen months. Now that she was discovered, she was tried as a major war criminal by a court in Tubingen, but this status was a formality accorded because of her former title. The court’s decision confirmed the political unimportance of her former role by sentencing her to eighteen months’ imprisonment — a sentence she was deemed to have already served, in autumn 1949, because of her term in prison for the earlier offence. 4 No doubt this leniency owed something to the changed mood in the West, with the Cold War, and not vengeance against former Nazis, now the chief preoccupation.