Hitler Youth

• 1. Introduction

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  In the summer of 1938, Adolf Hitler stood before a crowd and described exactly what his regime was doing to the children of Germany. Boys joined his organizations at age ten, he explained. By fourteen, they moved up to the Hitler Youth proper. Then came Labour Service. Then the Wehrmacht. "Whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left," he said, the military "will take care of that." It was a frank admission of a total pipeline for the human mind.

  The Hitler Youth began not as an all-consuming state institution but as one small political club among many in the chaotic youth culture of Weimar Germany. It grew into something that had eight million members by 1940 and sent teenagers into combat during the Battle of Normandy in 1944. How did a fringe Munich youth group become the sole legally permitted youth organization in an entire nation? What did it do to the people caught inside it? And what happened when those people had to reckon, decades later, with what they had been part of?

• 2. From Munich Club to National Monopoly

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  On the 8th of March 1922, a notice appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter announcing the founding of the Jugendbund der NSDAP, the Nazi Party's first official youth wing. Its inaugural meeting followed on the 13th of May that same year. At this point, the organization was tiny and operating in a crowded field. Weimar Germany had a rich tradition of youth movements spanning religious, ideological, and political orientations, from Young Conservatives to Young Protestants. For a new political movement trying to capture the next generation, this landscape was both an opportunity and a model.

  The attempted Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 disrupted the fledgling organization. Nazi youth wings were officially disbanded in its aftermath, but many units simply went underground, operating in small cells under assumed names. The group re-emerged in April 1924 under the name Grossdeutsche Jugendbewegung, the Greater German Youth Movement. A law student from Plauen in Saxony named Kurt Gruber had rebuilt and reorganized it. On the 4th of July 1926, the organization was officially renamed the Hitler-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend, the name taken up on the suggestion of Hans Severus Ziegler. Gruber had already beaten out a rival group led by Gerhard Roßbach to secure the title of the Nazi Party's sole official youth wing.

  By 1930, the Hitler Youth had enrolled over 25,000 boys aged fourteen and upward. A junior branch, the Deutsches Jungvolk, took in boys aged ten to fourteen. Girls from ten to eighteen had their own parallel body, the League of German Girls, known as the BDM. On the 30th of October 1931, Hitler issued a decree formally placing the Hitler Youth under the nominal command of Ernst Röhm and the SA.

  When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Baldur von Schirach was appointed the first Reichsjugendführer, or Reich Youth Leader. He brought all competing youth bodies under his authority, and membership surged to 2,300,000 by the end of that year alone. A large portion of that growth came through force: the Evangelische Jugend, a Lutheran organization with 600,000 members, was absorbed on the 18th of February 1934. In December 1936, a new law declared the Hitler Youth the only legally permitted youth body in Germany, and membership became mandatory for Aryan youth under the Gesetz über die Hitlerjugend. Three years later, the Jugenddienstpflicht of March 1939 extended that compulsion to every German young person, even over parental objection. Parents who refused were investigated by the authorities.

• 3. The Machinery of Indoctrination

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  Weekly meetings at the local cell level were where Nazi doctrine entered the daily lives of German children. Adult leaders ran these sessions, teaching ideology alongside practical activities. Regional leaders organized rallies and field exercises for dozens of cells at once. The largest annual gathering took place at Nuremberg, where members converged from across Germany for the Nazi Party rally.

  The organization ran training academies designed to identify and cultivate future Nazi Party leaders, with a separate set of corps oriented toward producing future Wehrmacht officers. The Marine Hitler Youth served as an auxiliary to the Kriegsmarine. The Deutsche Arbeiter Jugend trained future labour leaders and technicians, using a rising sun with a swastika as its symbol. A program called Landjahr Lager, or Country Service Camp, was specifically designed to instill what the regime called high moral character standards in selected BDM girls through rural education.

  The Hitler Youth published a range of periodicals to shape its members' reading habits. These included the Hitler-Jugend-Zeitung, the Sturmjugend, Junge Front, Deutschen Jugendnachrichten, Wille und Macht, Das Junge Deutschland, the girls' paper Das deutsche Mädel, and Junge Dorfgemeinschaft. Historian Richard Evans noted that "The songs they sang were Nazi songs. The books they read were Nazi books."

  Boys were indoctrinated with myths of Aryan racial superiority and taught to view Jews and Slavs as subhumans. Members were directed to associate those groups with Germany's defeat in the First World War and with social decline. Beyond classroom indoctrination, the Hitler Youth was deployed to break up church youth groups, spy on religious classes and Bible studies, and disrupt church attendance.

  The regime appropriated the outdoor activities of the Boy Scout movement, which it banned in 1935, including camping and hiking. Over time, those activities were militarized. Weapons familiarization, assault courses, and basic combat tactics replaced recreational goals. More than a fitness program, sport became, in the words of a 1936 Foreign Affairs article, a "means to an end, a weapon in the hands of the All Highest," with the explicit aim of producing what that same article called "the mass production of cannon fodder." By 1937, a Hitler Youth rifle school was operating, established in part at the urging of General Erwin Rommel, who toured HJ meetings and lectured on German soldiering while pressuring Schirach to turn the HJ into a "junior army." During 1938, roughly 1.5 million HJ members received rifle training. By the end of 1939, more than 51,500 boys had earned the HJ Marksmanship Medal. Former Hitler Youth member Franz Jagemann recalled that the notion "Germany must live," even if HJ members had to die, was "hammered" into them.

• 4. Pressure, Coercion, and Dissent

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  Even before membership became compulsory in 1939, staying out carried real consequences. Students who resisted were assigned essays titled "Why am I not in the Hitler Youth?" Teachers and fellow students subjected hold-outs to sustained taunting. Schools could refuse to grant diplomas to non-members, which blocked access to university. A number of employers refused apprenticeships to anyone outside the organization. By 1936, the Hitler Youth controlled a monopoly over all youth sports facilities in Germany, effectively excluding non-members from athletic life.

  Hans Scholl, the brother of Sophie Scholl and one of the founders of the anti-Nazi resistance movement known as Weiße Rose, or White Rose, had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth. His case illustrates how even those who would later oppose the regime were drawn into its youth structures. Some boys who eventually left found themselves unable to work or study, and rejoined for practical reasons alone.

  There were a small number of members who privately disagreed with Nazi ideology, but overall the historian Gerhard Rempel described the Hitler Youth as the single most successful of all the mass movements in the Third Reich. It was, in Rempel's account, the "incubator that maintained the political system by replenishing the ranks of the dominant party and preventing the growth of mass opposition."

• 5. Children at War

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  On the 15th of August 1939, two weeks before Germany invaded Poland, Baldur von Schirach and General Wilhelm Keitel agreed that the entire Hitler Youth leadership corps must receive defence training. On the 1st of May 1940, Artur Axmann was named Schirach's deputy, and he succeeded him as Reichsjugendführer on the 8th of August 1940. Axmann set about converting the organization into a genuine auxiliary military force. Hitler Youth members joined fire brigades, assisted with recovery efforts in bombed cities, and served in the Reich postal service, the Reich railway, and with anti-aircraft defence crews.

  In 1942, Hitler decreed the formation of Hitler Youth defence training camps, commanded by Wehrmacht officers. The following year, in early 1943, Axmann proposed to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler the idea of a Waffen-SS combat division made up entirely of Hitler Youth members. The plan targeted boys born in 1926. Hitler approved it in February, and Gottlob Berger was assigned to recruit. Fritz Witt, of SS Division Leibstandarte, was appointed divisional commander.

  In 1944, the 12th SS-Panzer-Division Hitlerjugend was deployed in the Battle of Normandy against British and Canadian forces north of Caen. Over 20,000 German youths took part in the effort to repulse the D-Day invasion. They destroyed 28 Canadian tanks in their first engagement, but before the Normandy campaign was over, 3,000 of them were dead. When Witt was killed by Allied naval gunfire, SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer, aged 33, took command.

  As the war deteriorated on both the eastern and western fronts through 1944 and into 1945, the Volkssturm was drafting Hitler Youth members as young as twelve. During the Battle of Berlin, Axmann's Hitler Youth formed a core part of the city's final defence. General Helmuth Weidling, the Berlin city commander, ordered Axmann to disband the HJ combat formations, but in the chaos of the city's last days that order was never carried out. The remnants of those youth units took catastrophic casualties against advancing Soviet forces. Only two survived. In that same year, there were documented incidents of Hitler Youth members shooting prisoners, participating in executions, and committing other wartime atrocities.

• 6. Reckoning and Prohibition

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  The Allied Control Council formally outlawed the Hitler Youth on the 10th of October 1945, along with all other Nazi Party organizations. Because the members had been children, Allied authorities made no serious effort to prosecute suspected war crimes. The adult leadership faced a different verdict. Baldur von Schirach was sentenced to 20 years in prison, though not for leading the Hitler Youth. He was convicted of crimes against humanity for his actions as Gauleiter of Vienna, because Axmann had been the functional leader of the HJ from 1940 onward.

  Axmann received a 39-month prison sentence in May 1949 and was not found guilty of war crimes. In 1958, a West Berlin court fined him 35,000 marks, roughly equivalent to £3,000 or US$8,300 at the time, representing about half the value of his Berlin property. The court found him guilty of indoctrinating German youth with National Socialism until the end of the war.

  German children born in the 1920s and 1930s grew up to hold senior positions across both West and East Germany during the Cold War. Since membership had been compulsory after 1936, it was neither surprising nor socially stigmatizing that many leading figures in postwar German society had belonged to the Hitler Youth. Little effort was made to bar such people from public life.

  Historian Gerhard Rempel found that a large proportion of former HJ members gradually came to understand that "they had worked and slaved for a criminal cause." Historian Michael Kater tracked how many former members stayed silent until old age, when they became grandparents. When they were finally able to look back at their role in what Kater called "a dictatorship which oppressed, maimed, and killed millions," he argued that an honest accounting would force them to conclude that their contributions had "damaged their own souls." Under Section 86 of the Criminal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Hitler Youth remains an unconstitutional organization today, and the public display or distribution of its symbols, outside educational or research contexts, is illegal.