Jutta Rüdiger

Dr Jutta Rüdiger (14 June 1910 – 13 March 2001), German psychologist, was head of the Nazi Party's female youth organisation, the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM) from 1937 to 1945.

Born in Berlin but brought up in Düsseldorf where her father was an engineer, Rüdiger was trained as a psychologist. While a student at Würzburg in the 1920s, she became a convinced Nazi and joined the National Socialist German Students' League (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, 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, who had vacated the position on her marriage, as Nazi policy required.

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 (and his successor from 1940, Artur Axmann). 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 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 race.

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