The League of German Girls, or BDM, was founded in 1930 as a branch of the Hitler Youth, or HJ, the Nazi Party’s youth auxiliary. After January 1933, girls joined the BDM in large numbers, and after 1939 membership was mandatory for all girls between the ages of ten and eighteen. The League offered young girls countless opportunities to develop domestic skills.

In this image, a BDM leader is inspecting the girls’ shoe cleaning. Lessons in cleaning, cooking, sewing, and caring for infants were meant to prepare girls to become ideal German wives and mothers—the bedrock of Nazi reproductive and gender policies. Women were to marry a (racially suitable) German man and bear multiple children to ensure the security of the “Aryan race.” Somewhat paradoxically, women who served as BDM leaders were required to be single, unmarried, and childless, even though they provided instruction in wifely and motherly skills. When the leader of the BDM, Trude Mohr, married in 1937, she was forced to resign from her position and was replaced by a single woman and close friend of the head of the Hitler Youth, Dr. Jutta Rüdiger. There was no room in the Nazi worldview for a woman who wanted to have a career and a family.