EIGHTY years ago this month, on March 7 1939 as war clouds gathered over Europe, and just nine days before Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, German woman Gertrud Scholtz-Klink whom Adolf Hitler had described as the perfect nazi female landed at Croydon Airport.

When Hitler had come to power in 1933, he appointed long time nazi supporter Scholtz-Klink as Reich’s women’s “fuhrerin” and head of the nazi Women’s League.

Ironically, Scholtz-Klink had long argued against the participation of women in politics. “Anyone who has seen the communist women scream on the street and in parliament, realise that such an activity is not something which is done by a true woman,” she declared.

By July 1936, Scholtz-Klink was appointed as head of the Woman’s Bureau in the German Labour Front. Her job was to encourage women to work for the nazi government and to have as many children as possible. She had six children of her own and acquired five more when she married her third husband SS officer August Heissmeyer.  

Just a few hours into her visit Hitler’s perfect woman was introduced to Lady Douglas-Hamilton, better known as Prunella Stack, the leader of the 200,000-strong Women’s League of Health and Beauty.

Coincidentally Stack, at just 25, was known as Britain’s perfect girl.

Stack had inherited the well paid top job in this very profitable organisation on the death of her mother, the League’s founder, Mary Bagot-Stack. Stack had taken a troop of her League members to a nazi-organised international congress of physical fitness in Hamburg in 1938.

The two “perfect women” met at a dinner at Claridge’s organised by the Anglo-German Fellowship who claimed they had invited Scholtz-Klink to visit London “to study the work done by and for English women.”

In fact Scholtz-Klink was actually here on a propaganda mission to publicise cultural similarities between Britain and Germany and more importantly to meet with British movers and shakers sympathetic to the nazi cause. All this despite the fact that war was by now almost certain.

Also at the Anglo-German dinner were the ultra right-wing British aristocrat Lord Halifax, the Duke of Saxe Coburg Gotha and Joachim von Ribbentrop, German ambassador to Britain who had an affair with Wallis Simpson — wife of the abdicated King Edward VIII — and was later found guilty and hanged after the Nuremburg trials as a nazi war criminal.

Other guests at the Claridge’s dinner included Bank of England directors Frank Cyril Tiarks and Montague Norman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, Prince von Bismarck and Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times.

Corporate supporters included Price Waterhouse, Unilever, Dunlop Rubber, Thomas Cook, the Midland Bank and Lazard Brothers among others.

The Daily Worker exclusive did much to shift both public opinion and mainstream media against the right-wing high-born traitors so keen to support Hitler

There were many Conservative MPs at the dinner and from the House of Lords came Lord Brocket, Lord Galloway, the Earl of Glasgow, Lord Londonderry, Lord Nuffield, Lord Redesdale, Lord Rennell and the Duke of Wellington.

As you can see from the impressive guest list the Anglo-German Fellowship, of which Prunella Stack’s husband Lord David Douglas-Hamilton and brother-in-law and Tory MP Douglas Douglas-Hamiton were both leading members, was an upper-class Tory organisation. It also had a predominately right-wing pro nazi agenda.

In fact many of the fellowship were almost unashamedly pro-nazi and anti-semite. Many of them made no secret of their great admiration for Hitler.

Douglas Douglas-Hamiton was famous for his well publicised veneration of British womanhood but also for his homophobia. He attacked lesbianism at every opportunity.

He played a major part in the banning of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness about which he wrote: “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl prussic acid than this novel.”

He was also a well known nazi sympathiser and had attended the 1936 nazi Olympics in Berlin. While in Berlin he dined with von Ribbentrop, an old friend who become the German ambassador to Britain and later Hitler’s Foreign Minister.

In Berlin the Duke met with Hitler and many other leading nazis. Hermann Goering proudly showed him the rapidly growing Luftwaffe.

During this visit it is probable that he first made contact with Rudolf Hess who, on May 10 1941, parachuted into Scotland to meet with the duke and plot a secret peace treaty that would lead to the supremacy of Germany within Europe alongside a strengthened British empire.

Hess crash-landed and ended up in hospital. Hamilton rushed to his bedside and contacted Winston Churchill to tell him of Hitler’s deputy’s arrival but Churchill wanted nothing to do with the traitorous plot.

Hess was imprisoned until the end of the war and finally tried at the subsequent Nuremberg trials. He finally hanged himself in Spandau Prison in 1987 at the age of 93.

The pro-German London dinner was held just five months after Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — of November 10-11 1938 when the nazis burnt over 1,000 synagogues and destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses throughout Germany and Austria. The nazis were showing their true colours.

Ninety-one people were killed by the Stormtroopers that night and for the first time Jews were arrested on a massive scale and about 30,000 Jewish men were sent to the Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

Many of the right-wing people Scholtz-Klink secretly met with on her visit would be part of the Right Club a group of nazi supporters from high levels of British society

Just a few months after the Claridge’s dinner, on September 1 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the second world war began in earnest.

Scholtz-Klink’s main task at home was to promote both male superiority and the importance of having as many children as possible. She wrote: “The mission of woman is to minister, in the home and in her profession, to the needs of life from the first to last moment of man’s existence.”

During her three-day stay in Britain, this leading nazi visited an LCC nursery in Kensal Rise, north-west London, the headquarters of the Mothercraft Training Society at Highgate, the Lapswood Training School for girls at Sydenham Hill and the South London Hospital for Women near Clapham Common.

Not long before a delegation from the British Board of Education had gone to Germany to see how physical education was being taught there. The delegates particularly admired what they called the excellent work of the Kraft durch Freude (strength through joy) movement.

Many of the right-wing people Scholtz-Klink secretly met with on her visit would be part of the Right Club, a group of nazi supporters from high levels of British society — so high in fact that they would include King Edward VIII.

The Right Club was officially founded in May 1939 to rid the Conservative Party of perceived Jewish control. Its founder was Tory MP Archibald Ramsay who boasted: “The main objective was to oppose and expose the activities of organised Jewry.” Members included William Joyce — Lord Haw-Haw — who would broadcast for Hitler during the war. The Duke of Wellington chaired the meetings.

The Club’s badge was of an eagle killing a snake with the initials PJ standing for “Perish Judah.”

Courageous Daily Worker (forerunner of today’s Morning Star) reporter Fred Pateman bravely managed to infiltrate a Nordic League meeting at the Wigmore Hall and reported Ramsay as saying that they needed to end Jewish control “and if we don’t do it constitutionally, we’ll do it with steel” — a statement greeted with wild applause by fellow fascists at the meeting.

This Daily Worker exclusive did much to shift both public opinion and mainstream media against the right-wing high-born traitors so keen to support Hitler.

Meanwhile Scholtz-Klink returned to Germany to be at Hitler’s side. Just a few days later the nazis invaded Czechoslovakia and within months all Europe was at war.

She remained head of the Woman’s Bureau in the German Labour Front throughout the war but her main role was as a propagandist making many more foreign visits.

At end of the war, in the summer of 1945, she was briefly detained in a Soviet prisoner of war camp but escaped with the help of Princess Pauline of Wurttemberg who hid her in her castle with husband Heissmeyer. She was finally caught three years later and imprisoned until 1953.

She never lost her enthusiasm for the obscene nazi philosophy. In her 1978 book The Woman in the Third Reich she told readers she did not know whether “Adolf Hitler was alive or dead,” but “as long as he lives in the hearts of his followers, he cannot die.”
She died in 1999.