The myth of the rubble heroine
By Magdalena Tiegs and Catrien Spijkerman
With her bare hands, Helga Velden, along with thousands of other women, cleared the rubble from German streets. These so-called Trümmerfrauen are seen as ‘heroines of the reconstruction’. Velden herself saw that quite differently.
Helga Velden is 18 years old when, shortly after the war, she goes to work in Tiergarten, the large park in her hometown Berlin. The park is littered with rubble and explosives, and she is there to clear them up. Together with forty other women, she is in the streets sorting war materials. The Soviet soldier coordinating the work, advises them to throw any ammunition into the nearby lake. Just to be safe, to prevent anything from exploding after all.
Velden is one of many Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) who, after the war, clean up Germany with their bare hands. With many men killed, imprisoned or missing, the heavy work is up to them. They volunteer in large numbers because they believe in a brighter future ahead of them.
There are countless photos of women like Velden. They stand in the midst of the rubble with a hammer or brick in their hands, a scarf on their heads and an apron over their skirts. They pull carts full of debris or laughingly pass bricks to one another. Decades later, they are still praised as if they were mythological figures of some sort. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl for instance, recalls in 2005: ‘They were close to despair, (…) yet they did not give up. These ‘rubble women’ became a symbol of German resilience and determination to rebuild after the war.” The Trümmerfrauen are the heroines of post-war reconstruction.
Except, that it is not entirely true.
Nazis among the ‘heroines’
For starters, Trümmerfrauen aren’t as widespread a phenomenon as one might think. At its peak in May 1946, there are about 26,000 of them in Berlin. This is because people soon realised that clearing 400 million cubic meters of rubble could not be left to inexperienced citizens. By far most of the clearing and construction work is therefore done by men working for professional companies using heavy machinery.
Also, the voluntary aspect of it is minimal. Already during the war, the Nazis force prisoners of war and inmates of concentration camps to clear rubble as a form of punishment. After the war, the Allies continue that practice. From then on, it is the former NSDAP members who are forced to do the work. That means there are Nazis among the ‘heroines’ as well. Besides, those who are not made to work as a form of punishment, are basically forced by hunger and scarcity: unemployed people who refuse to work lose their food stamps.
Helga Velden is forced as well. Like all Germans after the war, she has to report to the authorities. The Soviet officer who interrogates her, asks her if she had been a member of the League of German Girls (the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth). Velden denies. The officer does not believe her though. ‘Apparently, not a single German has been a Nazi; who caused all of this then?’ Velden is told to start working in Tiergarten the next day.
Velden’s parents are anti-Nazi during the war, but their aversion remains behind closed doors. ‘My father always said: “I am not a hero; I am not joining the resistance. I want to survive this nightmare”’, Velden says about it later. She is still confronted with the consequences of her parents’ anti-Nazi stance though. She wants to become a teacher, but because she is not a member of the League of German Girls, she is not allowed. Her father then arranges her a job at the company where he works himself. There they train her to become a technical drafter.
Two fatalities
Among the explosives that Helga Velden needs to sort after the war, are the typical German Stielhandgranaten: hand grenades featuring a long wooden handle. Helga is allowed to take that wood home to use as firewood. It is how her father becomes aware of the dangerous work she does. ‘What are you doing? That can’t possibly be true! This is work that the Nazis should be doing!’ He forbids her to work there even for a single day longer and arranges sick leave through the doctor. A few days later, an anti-tank weapon explodes in Tiergarten. Two women are killed and fourteen are seriously injured.
Later, Velden is to clear a collapsed apartment building. She brings metal buckets from home, fills them with rubble, empties them into a wheelbarrow which she then hauls outside. She does so, with one other woman for seven months, 48 hours a week.
Hard worker or housewife
The Trümmerfrauen become a true media sensation. In 1945 and 1946, the newspapers are full of stories and photos of the heroic women. The Berlin city council aims to spruce up the image of rubble clearing, hoping that more people will sign up for the heavy labour. How do they get those photos of cheerful looking women though? They stage them. Sometimes the women even wear makeup and work clothes that are more flattering. In East Germany -part of the Soviet occupation zone- the Trümmerfrau evolves over the years into the prototype of the new socialist woman: emancipated, hardworking, and a pioneer of equality between man and woman.
In West Germany, which is part of the occupation zone of the French, British and Americans, the opposite happens. There, the image of the Trümmerfrau gradually turns more negative. In the West, people prefer to see women in the role of mother and housewife. They use the image of the Trümmerfrau to vilify the East: she is portrayed as the poor sister in the East, forced to a man’s work.
In the 1980s, when the women’s movement emerges in the West, that image is reassessed once more. The role of women during and after the war is researched and in publications the Trümmerfrau is praised once again for her strength and her unfaltering attitude when society needed to be rebuilt. By the time of the reunification of Germany in 1990, an attractive collective myth was born: the Trümmerfrau as a symbol of renewal, resilience and the reconstruction of Germany.
‘We simply had to eat’
And what about Helga Velden? She ends up working as a primary school teacher after all. After the war, many teachers are fired because of their ties to the Nazi party, which results in a major shortage of teachers. People with different educational backgrounds are called upon to retrain. Velden doesn’t hesitate for a moment. In her first job, she teaches a class of sixty.
When Velden is confronted with the image of ‘heroine’ at the age of 92, she has to laugh out loud. ‘It was not heroic work; things simply needed to be cleared up. And we had to eat, that played a role as well’, she says in an interview. She passes away in 2024 at the age of 97. She stayed in Berlin all her life, not far from the apartment building where she cleared rubble in 1945.
