A talk by research fellow Kara Ritzheimer.

Thousands of Germans living in the Third Reich denounced each other to the Gestapo for passing along rumors, spreading gossip, and making comments that purportedly violated the 1934 “treachery law.” A majority of these cases involved defamatory comments and jokes about party leaders. A smaller subset entailed men and women supposedly making derogatory comments about girls who belonged to the League of German Girls (BDM). This talk explores how Nazi jurists used the law to muzzle criticism, why the “BDM girl” became a topic of derision, and how historians can and should use the rumors they encounter in archives.

Kara Ritzheimer is Associate Professor of Modern European History in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research concentrates on the history of Germany—particularly the development of commercial mass culture, national censorship laws in Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany, federalism, and the formation of national identity in the early twentieth century. She teaches in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, and her first book “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth Century Germany (Cambridge, 2016) uncovers the long cultural and political roots of Nazi-era censorship in pre-WWI social reform movements and the family politics of the Weimar Republic. She is a member of the German Studies Association and the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth.