Chapter Eight - Bund Deutscher Mädel

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Chapter Eight
Bund Deutscher Mädel
Vienna
March-September 1938
In this chapter, Bekka joins the League of German Girls, and begins to understand what the change in circumstances means even for her interior life. There, she meets Hilda Kienzl who becomes her best friend for the rest of their lives,  who was years ago removed from her parents under the Dollfuß regime. Bekka becomes Girl Group Leader in the BDM and petitions to earn a Medic Badge, typically reserved for boys in the Hitlerjugend. The Reich Church worshipping Hitler is instituted, and Bekka plays the harmonium for the Schneider children on Sundays.  The girls practise gynmastics and dancing in preparation for their presentation at the last Nuremberg Rally.

The BDM in pictures:




















 Bekka and Hilda:


 
Girl in the Country- Propaganda film about the BDM. A silent, black-and-white historic German film produced during WWII as propaganda in support of the Nazi regime. In particular, the film was made to highlight life at an indoctrination camp for the League of German Girls. The BDM used campfire romanticism, summer camps, tradition, and sports to indoctrinate girls within the Nazi belief system and train them for their roles in German society: wife, mother, and homemaker. Note: This film would have originally been accompanied by a typewritten script, which would have been read out loud by an instructor or projectionist.
 
The History of the BDM and Belief and Beauty Society Documentary. To expand the education of female youth, National Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach founded the BDM Belief and Beauty Society on January 19. 1938. In 1938 and 1939, the film Belief and Beauty was created by order of the National Youth Leadership. Heinrich Medau founder of the Medau gymnastics school and Clementine zu Castell were able to get Hitler`s photographer Hans Ertl`s cooperation in making this film. Filmed in the unmistakable style of director Leni Riefenstahl, this first-ever documentary on the society was to open in German theaters in October 1939, but Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels prohibited the film`s release due to the outbreak of World War II. This film includes the actual never-before-released 1938 film Belief and Beauty.

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