Trude Mohr BDM Reichsreferentin

[Helge]

Trude Mohr: Reichsreferentin für Mädelfragen in der Reichsjugendführung

Trude Mohr (1902-1989 ) was bom in 1902 to parents whose political convictions were German nationalist. In the 1920s, she was actively involved in the German nationalist youth organization, the forerunner of the Hitler Youth (HJ). An NSDAP party member since 1928, she was entrusted with the assignment of establishing a BDM organization in the Brandenburg district by the HJ in 1930. In 1933, she was furoughed from her position in the national postal administration to be able to devote full-time attention to the organization and expansion of the BDM in the districts of Brandenburg and Berlin. When the HJ was outlawed for a few months in 1932, the ban of course applied to the BDM as well. This imposed illegality elevated Trude Mohr’s sense of her own importance:
Ach, that was a lot of fun. I had been in South Tyrol (Northern Italy) and had a stopover in Berlin on my way to Masuren (East Prussia). A woman on my staff was supposed to meet me at the train terminal to bring me a suitcase packed with clean clothes. In the meantime, the ban had be decreed, and she met me at an out-of-the-way station disguised in civilian clothing.
But, of course, the BDM’s work went forward, and no one paid the slightest attention to the ban.
In 1934, as a result of feuding and internal intrigues in the organization, Trude Mohr was appointed national chairwoman of the BDM by Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach, a position she held until 1937. Her most important goal was to try to bring about a change in the appearance of female youths. This had assumed importance following Hitler’s horrified reaction to the “girls” who marched past him on the occasion of the 1932 national youth day celebration.9 Heinrich Himmler had also expressed serious doubts about the attractiveness of German girls. “I regard it as a catastrophe. If we con­tinue to masculinize women in this way, it is only a matter of time until the difference between the genders, the polarity, completely disappears. Mohr then attempted to postulate a new type of German girl based upon this critique:
Our Volk needs a generation of girls which is healthy in body and mind, sure and decisive, proudly and confidently going forward, one which assumes its place in everyday life with poise and discernment, one free of sentimental and rapturous emotions, and which, for precisely this reason, in sharply defined femininity, would be the comrade of a man, because she does not regard him as some sort of idol but rather as a companion! Such girls will then, by necessity, carry the values of National Socialism into the next generation as the mental bulwark of our people."
On the personal level as well, Trade Mohr’s actions met party expectations; her marriage to SS-Obersturmfiihrer Bürkner was in ac­cordance with provisions requiring BDM leaders to marry members of the SS. This wedding almost did not take place, however, as a result of a motion submitted by the Central Office for Racial and Settlement Policy (RuSHA). Mohr’s “certificate of proof of Aryan origin” was in­deed impeccable; her extreme shortsightedness, however, diminished her genetic-biological value in the eyes of the defenders of racial purity. It was only after heavy pressure was applied by the party’s district administration upon the RuSHA that permission to marry could be obtained. Quite striking in this connection is the fact that the respon­sible RuSHA official seems to have been completely unimpressed by Trude Mohr’s high rank as national chairwoman of the BDM. How­ever, despite coming into conflict with the regime in this existential question, Trude Mohr-Bürkner, like many others, did not draw the obvious conclusion from this incident, and her loyalty toward the regime remained undiminished. By 1937, when she stepped down from her leadership position in the BDM as a result of her pregnancy, the combined national organization for girls had grown to nearly 2,758,000 members. By fully acceding to the educational demands of the state, she participated in the regime’s project of placing German youth into the service of the party and the state, or, to be more precise, the person of Adolf Hitler. The “total commitment” which she demanded would later find its concrete expression for BDM girls in the form of war.
Although she no longer appeared in public life after 1937, Trade BQrkner did not take complete leave of the political stage. She was assigned the task of setting up a system to provide social welfare services for plant workers at the Hermann Goring Works which had been opened in the summer of 1937. If, up to this point, she had seemed to have gone about her job with little regard for public recognition, this matter now took on great importance for her. At least she wanted to obtain a lower party membership number. Until then, she had not had to document to the public at large her key position within the party by means of a low membership number, but her new assignment changed that. “Is there a possibility,” she inquired, “that I could assume a lower membership number that has subsequently become free? This would mean a great deal to me, since, as can well be imagined, a membership number over one million gives a com­pletely false impression of the circumstances of my membership in the NSDAP.” The party bureaucracy rejected her application, and Bürkner was once again forced to capitulate. The fact that she knew that such backdating was a common practice in the case of prominent male party members must have made this even harder for her to accept. But thereafter as well, the level of her approval and her commitment was undiminished. In fact it had the opposite effect of spurring her to redouble her efforts (for example in the NSF and in the national civil defense organization) in order to make up for the lack of a low membership number. Not much is known about the job she did at the Hermann  Göring plant complex, other than the fact that she performed her social service work for the so called “foreign and Eastern European laborers” in an exemplary fashion. These “presumably exemplary social services, provided at all such plants throughout the entire Reich, helped to insure that, of the 1.3 million such slave laborers recruited to work in these plants, at least 523,000 did not survive their terms of employment.”
Trude Mohr Bürkner was imprisoned by the British in June 1945. Following her release, she neither granted interviews nor did she express herself in print. It was not until 1980 that Martin Klaus was able to convince her to go on record. In this interview, she summed up her life as follows: “It certainly makes a big difference if, from out of the abundance of experiences one has in life, one devotes one’s entire self with complete commitment and total effort to a single idea, or whether one follows events from the sidelines, smiling maliciously and observing with cool irony. I belong to the first group and I’m not ashamed of it.

Source: Women in Austria - Günter Bischof,Anton Pelinka,Erika Thurner.
Photo : https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/hitler-j ... laud-4495/

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Photo 1: Trude Bürkner-Mohr - Konstantin Hierl 19.11.37
Photo 2: Trude Bürkner-Mohr in Königsberg.
Photo 3 :Trude Bürkner-Mohr - Walter Buch 1.12.37.

Photo: http://www.hermann-historica.de

[Sejanus]

Trude Mohr was also pictured in a 1937 edition of the BDM magazine "Das Deutsche Mädel", at a rally reviewing BDM members with Baldur von Schirach. While I am not able to link to the images directly, they can be seen here (on Page 19):

https://deutschesreichforever.files.wor ... raktur.pdf

Come to think of it, I do not recall ever seeing a photo of any HJ or BDM members wearing glasses, except for Mohr. Interesting. Was a eyesight an official consideration as to whether one could become a member of the NS youth organizations or not?