page_title: Trümmerfrau
section_title: Removal of ruins
hierarchical_section_title: Trümmerfrau / Removal of ruins
caption_attribution_description: Der "grüne Heiner" im Herbst vom weiten aus dem Industriegebiet Weilimdorf gesehen
context_page_description: Trümmerfrau is the German-language name for women who, in the aftermath of World War II, helped clear and reconstruct the bombed cities of Germany and Austria. With hundreds of cities having suffered significant bombing and firestorm damage through aerial attacks and ground war. So, with many men dead or prisoners of war, this monumental task fell to a large degree on women.
context_section_description: Between 1945 and 1946, the Allied powers, in both West Germany and East Germany, ordered all women between 15 and 50 years of age to participate in the postwar cleanup. For this purpose, previous restrictive measures protecting women in the labor force were removed in July 1946. Recruitment of women was especially useful since at that time, because of the loss of men in the war, there were seven million more women than men in Germany.
  Usually, private enterprises were given assignments to remove the ruins, together with a permit to employ the women for that purpose. The main work was to tear down those parts of buildings that had survived the bombings, but were unsafe and unsuitable for reconstruction. Usually, no heavy machinery was used. The main tools were sledge-hammers,  picks, buckets and hand-winches. After tearing down the ruins, the remnants had to be further demolished, down to single bricks that could later be used in rebuilding. A chain of women would transfer the bricks to the street, where they were cleaned and stacked. Wood and steel beams, fireplaces, wash basins, toilets, pipes and other household items were collected to be reused. The remaining debris was then removed by barrows, wagons and lorries. It was later reused to fill up bomb craters & trenches left in the streets or to make new bricks. In some German cities, schuttberge (debris mountains) were created from leftover debris and exist today in a number of German cities.
  Trümmerfrauen, both volunteers and regular workers, worked in all weather. They were organised in Kolonnen (columns) of ten to twenty people.
caption: The Grüner Heiner, a schuttberg in Stuttgart-Weilimdorf
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