People sometimes tell me that the pictures of the piles of corpses, in the concentration camps are the most disturbing ones from the Holocaust.
However, I am not in total agreement because I found the photo above much more disturbing. It shows the cause of the Holocaust. Hitler understood for the Nazi ideology to work and he needed the youth. They had to be indoctrinated at a young age. The two boys in the photo above, I reckon, are about age three or so.
I often hear people say, “Love will conquer hate.” That is not really true, though—there is a thin line between love and hate, and it is easy to cross that line given the right circumstances and environment.
Education is the key to the battle of hate. However, education must not be confused with teaching. Teaching is only a small part of education. Children (and some adults) need to be educated—not only by teachers, trainers or coaches—but also by parents, grandparents and family.
The photograph above was taken in 1931—when membership in the Hitler Youth wasn’t compulsory. I don’t know who the parents were, but I can envisage that maybe they weren’t engrossed in the Nazi messages. Perhaps they only liked some of the elements initially.
However, the NSDAP was well funded and were able to facilitate childcare through means of holiday camps, after school activities, etc. What parent would not sign up to that? The mistake many Germans made in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they didn’t question this generosity. They may have seen that Hitler and his cronies weren’t the nicest of people, but they put food on the table and looked after the kids. So they were willing to turn a blind eye. At the start even the Nazi propaganda appeared to be reasonably harmless, it echoed what many people thought, albeit without foundation.
It wasn’t only the Nazi supporters who benefited from this generosity, at least not at the start.
Another question people often ask me is, “What political movement was responsible for the Holocaust?” The honest answer is all of them. Yes, it is true the communist were anti-NSDAP, but on the other hand, the Nazis struck a deal with the USSR just before the war. The USSR was the communist country in Europe at the time. People accepted how things were going because it suited them. When it no longer suited their lifestyles, they started to ask questions. By then, it was too late. In 1936, the Hitler Youth movement had reached five million members. Five million young minds were indoctrinated into an evil ideology that snuck in as a gradual virus.
So why is there a lesson to be learned for the near future? For starters—I suggest reading the book, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patal. All you have to do is to change the decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.
Parents nowadays have their children following different ideologies without asking the question, “Who is behind these ideas?” I am not saying that every ideology a child is exposed to is menacing—the majority are probably good. However, I see more ideas sneaking into the mainstream and our youth should be questioning them—but very few are doing so. Critical thinking seems to have disappeared from our schools and universities. In case you wonder what the consequence of that will be…
In 2023, there appears to be an upsurge of people having a photograph of a political leader as their profile picture on social media. This is the 21st-century equivalent of having an image of a political leader hanging in the living room. (Like so many did in the past with pictures of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler.) This has never ever been a good idea in history. All you are doing is telling your children that you worship someone who doesn’t have their best interest at heart and you are willing to follow them blindly.
The Holocaust happened in the past but could effortlessly occur again. What scares me is that the foundation of the next Holocaust has already been laid.
I was going to give this piece the title Confessions of a Young Fan of Hitler, but I decided to stick with the one I am using.
Hitler thought that he who had the youth, had the future.
Alfons Heck (3 November 1928 – 11 April 2005) was a Hitler Youth member who eventually became a Hitler Youth officer and a fanatical adherent of Nazism during the Third Reich.
In the 1970s, decades after Alfons Heck immigrated to the United States via Canada, Heck began to write candidly of his youthful military experiences in news articles and two books. Thereafter, he joined up with Jewish Holocaust survivor Helen Waterford, each presenting their differing wartime circumstances before more than 200 audiences, most notably in schools and colleges.
In 1991, Alfons Heck recalled his time in the Hitler Youth during an interview for HBO.
“I was captured on the seventh of March, 1945 in my hometown. During my captivity, I was forced to look at documentary footage of concentration camps and death camps. And I didn’t accept them.”
And I said to my friend, are they nuts? This is staged. I mean, anybody can pile up bodies.
The French were so incensed by our insensitivity when they showed us this that they began to wade into us and beat us with rifle butts. They said, “You goddamn Nazis. Don’t you know this? This is what you people did.”
In Germany in the 1930s, an army of approximately eight million children pledged their lives personally to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. They were called “The Hitler Jugend,” the Hitler Youth. This is the story of one of these children. Alfons Heck would rise to high command, receive the Iron Cross from Hitler’s own hands, and live to tell this cautionary tale.
Alfons Heck articulated, “I grew up in a small town in the Rhineland of Germany. Peaceful, small town. 8,000 population. Life was very quiet.
The first significant event in the life of the town occurred on the 7th of March in 1936, when Hitler decided to move German troops into the Rhineland. I was sitting on my Uncle Francis’s shoulders. The people just went stark raving mad when they saw German troops. And they were screaming, heil, heil. And he lifted me, and he said, ‘…over there in the Mercedes—that’s Hitler.’
I was infected by the obvious feeling of a nation that the whole town felt. Two months after Hitler became the chancellor of Germany I started elementary school, and I believe this is an aspect that is overlooked in our history books. Almost immediately, the Nazis exercised their very first priority, which was to captivate the young.
Twice a week we were taught racial science, which was a specific instruction to be able to differentiate us from the so-called inferior races. That’s when I heard for the first time the term master race. They taught us about racial purity by the shape of your skull. They matched eye colour as an additional measure of the purity of the Aryan race. Very specifically, I remember clearly, our teacher indicating why, for instance, the Jews were different from us.
We were surrounded by newspapers that told us that the Jews had made war on us for the last 4,000 years. I remember seeing one movie that went much further. It was called Der Ewige Jude, which means The Eternal Jew.
Rats spread typhus, cholera, and plague. Just as rats are the lowest form of animals, so are the Jews, the lowest form of mankind.
One thing we knew for sure—that you had to be on constant watch for Jews. The movie that made the biggest impression on me was not about Jews but about a Hitler Youth boy. It was called Hitlerjunge Quex.
It was modelled on the life of a real Hitler Youth boy, Herbert Norkus. He was a member of a Berlin Hitler Youth unit, and he was giving out leaflets. He was caught by a bunch of young communists. They stabbed him, and he died with the words of the Hitler Youth anthem on his lips. To me, it looked like heaven for the Hitler Youth, and I certainly wanted to go there.
Even before I reached 10, as soon as I could, I joined the Hitler Youth on Hitler’s birthday in 1938.
I promise at all times to do my duty for the Führer, so help me, God. I had accepted the ideology. I had accepted what was being taught in school—in racial science. I had accepted fully the notion of the master race, but it didn’t come together until I went to Nuremberg.
Nuremberg was the Nazi showcase. It was the annual Nazi Party Conference, a high honour, indeed, to attend. It was my first long trip away from home alone. But more important than being away from home for the first time was the feeling, almost immediately, that you belonged to a very vast and important movement.
We 50,000 were a highly select group from all over Germany, representing eight million members of the Hitler Youth. Suddenly, at the tribunal, the Führer appeared with Baldur von Schirach, the vice leader of the Hitler Youth. ‘Heil,’ he said.,‘Heil, youths.’ He called us, ‘his youths.’
I stood in the first row because of my size, maybe 40 or 50 feet from the podium. I said to my bunkmate, ‘The Führer looked directly into my eyes.’ And he said, ‘He looked into mine.‘
Hitler said, ‘We will be one people, one nation, and you, my youths, you are going to be that people and that nation.’ After he had uttered this sentence, I belonged to Hitler, body and soul. He said, ‘Before us lies Germany. In us, Germany marches, and after us comes Germany.’ It was mesmerizing to hear the Führer speak. That’s the feeling that I had at the end of Hitler’s speech. Suddenly, you had become invincible.
After my return from Nuremberg, life in the town seemed quite boring. But all of a sudden, on 9 November 1938, excitement broke loose. It was Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass. It seemed like a frenzy of hatred, all of a sudden.
As we were crossing the marketplace, a van stopped, and there were perhaps 18, at the most 20 people on it. One of them was shouting, “Let’s get to the synagogue and take it apart.’ Literally seconds later, the stained glass window came crashing into the road, and a few minutes later, one of the stormtroopers was up on the roof. And he released the rolls of the Torah, and he was shouting, “Wipe your asses with it.’
Even to me, as a 10-year-old, the events of the Kristallnacht, my witnessing the brutality committed on townspeople that I had known all of my life, signified the end of German innocence. From now on, not one of us could ever maintain that we did not know what was in store for the Jews.
By the fall of 1940, the first deportations of the Jews of Germany began. One of the first ones occurred in my hometown. I recognized all of them, naturally, but there were some I had known intimately as a boy. I had no personal animosity toward them, but I felt, what a misfortune that they were Jewish. And I thought it was completely justified that for the survival of Germany, they needed to be deported.
Despite the fact the first friend of my life, Heinz Ermann, was Jewish, within the space of six years, the constant Nazi indoctrination had made me indifferent to their fate. And I accepted the deportation as a just measure.
I fully believed that we, as the master race, were entitled to eventually rule the world. All Nazi functions worked on the principle of music and song. You always had the music in your ears. The Nazis were, in that sense, unsurpassed masters.
I don’t know if the Germans are more sentimental than other people with singing, but as soon as you begin to sing, the words in a song seem to acquire meaning. In our Hitler Youth anthem, the flag version, these weren’t merely words. All of a sudden, they became a conviction. I think you can compare it to a religious revival meeting. It was soul-stirring.
By 1943, we had been fighting Russia for two years.
I was approaching 15 years of age when the German army surrendered at Stalingrad. I remember hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony followed by the announcement of Hans Fritzsche.
He very bluntly stated that our brave men in Stalingrad had surrendered. Stalingrad was the first time that I conceived that a German defeat might be possible. It was a terrible disaster.
The newsreels carried the call for the German people to defend their nation.
Goebbels asked, do you want total war?
And we said, ‘Yes.‘ The only coherent unit in every German town was the Hitler Youth. Anything that normally would be done in the function of a city was run by the Hitler Youth. All young boys, 11, 10 even, were asked to paint curbs in fluorescent colours so they would be visible during the night during the air raids.
On 6 June, we were told at noon by our commander that the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy.
It was called D-Day, but for us Hitler Youth, it meant the enemy was on European soil. June the 6th was the most decisive day since Stalingrad for the Hitler Youth because it became quickly apparent that from now on, the total war effort would take all of us.
Hitler decreed the creation of the Volkssturm, the last-ditch defence of your own home territory.
Two things we had in abundance—bazookas and panzerfausts, which were very effective up to a range of 200 yards. Even women were taught how to use them.
People who could still barely walk were being inducted into the Volkssturm, and they were rounded up by members of the Hitler Youth. Within two weeks, the age limit was lowered to 14, and at the very end of the war, in my unit, I had boys of 12. It was the last sacrificial effort of the Hitler Youth to turn the tide for Germany.
Our greatest moment occurred early in October of 1944 when my gun crew shot down a B-17 Flying Fortress. The youngest boy in my unit was 13 and a half, and I was the oldest at 16 and a half.
We were so elated that we pulled into spontaneous shouts. The death-defying attitude of the Hitler Youth was such that even boys of 11, 12, and 13 had no greater wish than to earn a medal, the Iron Cross, for the survival of the fatherland. The idea of facing death, at no time, was that terrifying, because our fanaticism had prepared us for that possibility for years. The thing that you could do for Germany most was either to win or to die. It was better to die than to live in slavery.
Only ten days before his suicide, it is fitting that Hitler chose to appear for the last time in public with members of the Hitler Youth. These were the only Germans he fully trusted. These were the only Germans eager still to die for him, even with the knowledge that Germany would go down. It was a fatal bond that bound us to the Führer to the very end.
The fatal bond between Hitler and his Hitler Youth was not even crippled by his suicide. Many thousands of members of the Hitler Youth kept on fighting to the very end, preferring to die rather than live in a country without their leader.
I was in the basement of my gymnasium in Wittlich, and I told Monika Mohn, who was Scharführer of the Hitlerjugend, as well as my schoolmate, that it was all over. And she said to me, we almost had it all. And I stood at attention, and I said, ‘Heil Hitler,’ the last time I did it.
I watched through the slit of our basement window as Sherman tanks moved into the centre of my hometown. And at that moment, I admitted to myself that Germany was finished. It was the only time in my life that I actively contemplated suicide. I pulled my pistol, and I stuck it in my mouth, and I didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. I threw it against the wall, and I decided then to try and make it back to the German lines.
I was captured on 7 March 1945, in my hometown. During my captivity, I was forced to look at documentary footage of concentration camps and death camps.
And it was the first time that I was shown the atrocities committed by our nation. And we looked at this. And I said to my friend, ‘Who do they take us for? This stuff is staged.’
And one of us began to snicker. And our captors became so incensed that they started yelling at us, ‘You goddamn Nazi bastards, do you think this is a comedy?’ This is what you have done.’
It was almost a year later before I was able to accept the veracity of the films that I had seen. And it occurred at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1946.
When I arrived in the city of Nuremberg, I was stunned by the total change of the Nuremberg I had seen at the Nazi Party rally of 1938. While I listened on the loudspeakers outside, I heard the full evidence of the accusation directed at the 22 top Nazis who were on trial. One of them was my leader, the former leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach. He was the principal reason why I came to Nuremberg. I wanted to know what he had to say in particular regarding the activities of the Hitler Youth.”
Von Schirach told the court—
“It is my guilt that I have trained youth for a man who became a murderer a million times over. Baldur von Schirach received 20 years for crimes against humanity, and that, in turn, implicated me, too, in the count of mass murder, because I had served Hitler just as fanatically as von Schirach.
I had an overwhelming sense of betrayal in Nuremberg, and I recognized that the man that I had adored was, in fact, the biggest monster in human history. It’s a devastating feeling. If you follow it to the conclusion that you are part of the human race, the experience of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany constitutes a massive case of child abuse.
Out of millions of basically innocent children, Hitler and his regime succeeded in creating potential monsters. Could it happen again today? Of course, it can. Children are like empty vessels. You can fill them with good. You can fill them with evil. You can fill them with hate. And you can fill them with compassion.”
So the story of the Hitler Youth can be repeated—because, despite Auschwitz, the world has not changed for the better all that much.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to categorize any particular day as the eviliest day during World War II, but I think 20 April 1945 would be a good contender.
On that day, Allied bombers in Italy began a three-day attack on the bridges over the rivers Adige and Brenta to cut off German lines of retreat on the peninsula. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday as under a Gestapo reign of terror resulting in the hanging of 20 Russian prisoners of war and 20 Jewish children: Of these, at least nine were under the age of 12. All of the victims had been taken from Auschwitz to Neuengamme, the place of execution, for the purpose of medical experimentation.
On his 56th birthday, Adolf Hitler made his last trip to the surface, from the bunker, to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. Although the below picture was taken in March 1945, and the officer awarding the Iron Cross clearly isn’t Hitler, it does indicate how young these child soldiers were. The boy is Willi Hübner, he was 16 when he received the Iron Cross, but he looks about 12.
On 20 April 1945, it must have become blatantly clear that the Nazis would lose the war within a matter of weeks. Yet children would be sacrificed and murdered.
On Hitler’s 56th (and maybe for his) birthday, the SS took 20 children, who had been victims of medical experiments at Neuengamme, to a school building in Hamburg. Situated on Bullenhuser Damm, this location was a subcamp of Neuengamme. (10 boys and 10 girls, all Jewish) to be murdered.
The Nazis also murdered four adult prisoners that day, who had been looking after the children at the camp. The adults were two French doctors, Gabriel Florence and René Quenouille, and the Dutchmen Dirk Deutekom and Anton Hölzel.
The children were told that they had to be vaccinated against typhoid fever before their return journey. Then they were injected with morphine. They were hanged from hooks on the wall, but the SS men found it difficult to kill the mutilated children. The first child to be strung up was so light – due to disease and malnutrition – that the rope wouldn’t strangle him. SS untersturmführer Frahm had to use all of his own weight to tighten the noose. Then he hanged the others, two at a time, from different hooks. ‘Just like pictures on the wall’, he would recall later. He added that none of the children had cried.
One of those children was Jacqueline Morgenstern, she was 12 when she was murdered.
Before you continue reading, I want you to look into the eyes of Jacqueline, and imagine her body hanging on a hook like a piece of meat.
These are the names of the 20 children, remember all of them, Get their names ingrained in your brain.
Alexander Hornemann, 8, the Netherlands Eduard Hornemann, 12, the Netherlands Marek Steinbaum, 10, Poland Marek James, 6, Poland W. Junglieb, 12, Yugoslavia Roman Witonski, 7, Poland Roman Zeller, 12, Poland Sergio de Simone, 7, Italy Georges Andre Kohn, 12, France Eduard Reichenbaum, 10, Poland Jacqueline Morgenstern, 12, France Surcis Goldinger, 11, Poland Lelka Birnbaum, 12, Poland Eleonora Witonska, 5, Poland Ruchla Zylberberg, 10, Poland H.Wasserman, 8, Poland Lea Klygerman, 8, Poland Rywka Herszberg, 7, Poland Blumel Mekler, 11, Poland Mania Altman, 5, Poland
The murder of children is something I will never understand.
A phrase often used by Hitler was “whoever has the youth has the future” the scary thing about this is that there are elements of truth in that statement. I often come across pictures of young Holocaust victims and each one of them without exception are heartbreaking. For all those kids their future was denied.
But what I find equally disturbing of pictures of often very young children who so clearly have been indoctrinated in the Nazi ideology, taught to hate, like the picture of the 2 toddlers above.
Or like the children in the pictures below.
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One of the more disturbing and intriguing aspects about Hitler is his seemingly fondness of children,at least ‘aryan’ children.
The same man who was responsible of millions of children to die, made sure he would use any photo opportunity with kids. He saw children in two ways, they were either impure and the offspring of vermin or they were the future warriors and breeding machines for the third reich. Both would often have the same outcome, death, either in the gas chambers or as result of slave labour or at the battlefield.
Although he would like to be portrayed not only as the Führer but also as the father of the nation. A man who had only the best intentions of the country and all he did was to build a secure future for the children of the nation.
And the propaganda worked, people believed it, At least early on during his time as the supreme German leader. He kept his promises of jobs and prosperity, and in a poverty stricken country that is a very powerful tool.
But prosperity made with the endorsement of violence and without a social conscientiousness breeds selfishness. People didn’t want to see the crimes committed by their leaders. They had a good life as had their family, and that was all that mattered. Little did they know that all this wealth and prosperity was only superficial. It only serve one real purpose, the indulgence of a power mad evil regime.
Soon the citizens of the third reich found out that to maintain their standard of living sacrifices had to be made. Those young warriors were called to serve their master, not their country, but their master.
At the end the only one the Führer cared for was the grandson born out of wedlock to Maria Schicklgruber, the son of Alois Hiedlet(later Hitler) , Adolf Hitler.
He didn’t care how many were sacrificed or what age they were.
Were the signs there? Yes and they were blatantly clear. But as I said earlier, the propaganda was believed and for a short time life had been good. But only for those who were deemed to be of a pure race. For the Jews,Roma,Disabled,Homosexuals,Jehovah Witnesses, the narrative was one of death and destruction. Eventually all of Germany faced destruction caused by the allies because the Nazi leaders left them no choice.
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In psychology there is a hypothetical question that regularly comes up “If you could go back in time, knowing what you know about Hitler, would you kill the baby Adolf?”
You don’t have to answer that question to me, you can answer it to yourself. I will however give you my answer/ I would, without even blinking an eye.
Something that has always intrigued me is the notion that although I strongly believe no one is born evil, Hitler may just have been the exception. Now this is not a scientific proof but just my own theory, his evil presence or karma for the lack of a better word. may already have effected his own family.
Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary (in present-day Austria), close to the border with the German Empire. He was christened as “Adolphus Hitler”. He was the fourth of six children born to Alois Hitler and his third wife, Klara Pölzl. Three of Hitler’s siblings—Gustav, Ida, and Otto—died in infancy.
On the morning of 3 January 1903, Hitler’s Father Alois went to the Gasthaus Wiesinger (no. 1 Michaelsbergstrasse, Leonding) as usual to drink his morning glass of wine.
He was offered the newspaper and promptly collapsed. He was taken to an adjoining room and a doctor was summoned, but Alois Hitler died at the inn, probably from a pleural hemorrhage.
When Alois died in 1903, he left a government pension. Klara,Adolf’s Mother, sold the house in Leonding and moved with young Adolf and Paula to an apartment in Linz, where they lived frugally.
In 1906, Klara Hitler discovered a lump in her breast but initially ignored it. After experiencing chest pains that were keeping her awake at night, she finally consulted the family doctor, Eduard Bloch, in January 1907. She had been busy with her household, she said, so had neglected to seek medical aid. Dr. Bloch chose not to inform Klara that she had breast cancer and left it to her son Adolf to inform her. She died on December 21, 1907 age 47.
Henri Ford was a great admirer of Hitler and vice versa. In 1938 Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi officials. It is also alleged that Henri Ford sent a personal cheque of $50,000 to Hitler on his birthday for several years.
The picture below is of Goering, Keitel, and Himmler wishing Hitler a happy Birthday on April 20th, 1941. Just over 4 years later they would thankfully all be dead.
On 20 April, his 56th birthday, Hitler made his last trip from the Führerbunker (Führer’s shelter) to the surface. In the ruined garden of the Reich Chancellery, he awarded Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth, who were now fighting the Red Army at the front near Berlin.
At his last public appearance on April 25,1945 he Hitler decorated more members of the “Hitler Jugend”
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There are 2 indisputable facts when it comes to the youngest members of society.
A child is born with no state of mind, a baby does not know how to hate or how to love, he/she is taught how to do both and is conditioned to the environment he or she grows up in.
He who has the youth has the future.
Hitler was aware for his ideology to work on a large scale it needed to be indoctrinated from a very young age. The Nazi regime needed to have full control of life cycle from cradle to grave.
So many parents. often misguided, trusted Hitler and believed every word he said, they had therefore no issues with putting him on a pedestal as a role model for their children. They did not see that in fact Hitler could not care less about their children. Eventually he would only use them for his own plans. Plans of hate and destruction, if that meant he had to sacrifice them,then so be it.
So many saw him as a God and failed to see he was more of a Satan. Willing to sacrifice anyone to further his own cause and to pursue his twisted ideology.
As casualties mounted during the Second World War, Germany was forced to call up ever younger conscripts to fill the ranks of the Wehrmacht. So dire was the situation at the end of 1944, that boys born in 1928 were called up to serve the Fatherland. They were 15 or 16 years old and had grown up in the shadow of Nazism.One of these young soldiers was Willi Hübner, a 16-year-old messenger with the Führer Grenadier Division.
Adolf Hitler touches the face of Wilhelm “Willi” Hübner during an awards ceremony behind the Reich Chancellery on March 20, 1945.
The banality of evil. I don’t know who these kids are, but I am sure they did not realize the man behind them was responsible for killing children if their age. And if the time was ripe he would have expected them to do likewise.
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Before you start thinking that this will be a blog about Punk bands like the Sex Pistols singing about WWII, you’d be wrong. In fact, it has nothing to do with Punk music but more about Jazz.
I am referring to Punk as a rebellion against the establishment. During WWII there were 2 groups very similar in how they rebelled against the Nazi regime, the Swingjugend in Germany and the Zazou in France. Unlike the Punk movement in the 70s, the Zazou and the Swingjugend could risk their lives or be sent to a concentration camp for their rebellion.
Swingjugend
As the Nazi Party took power in Germany in 1933, a complete crackdown on all subversive elements took hold. Having dealt with his political opponents in prior years, his rise to the chancellorship, Hitler intended to finish the job by eradicating all potential opposition.
In schools and on the streets, a silent flame tingled. The Teenagers rejected the strict militarism code of behaviour bestowed by the Nazi Party throughout the youth organisations like the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls.
It proved unsuccessful because instead of embracing the Hitler Youth pastimes, city girls and boys crowded in the swing dance joints.[2] It seemed to be the case, particularly in Hamburg, where the swing scene was huge.
The Swingjugend rejected the Nazi state above all, because of its ideology and uniformity. Its militarism, the Führer Principle and the levelling Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). They experienced a massive restriction on their freedom. They rebelled against all with Jazz and Swing music, which stood for a love of life, self-determination, non-conformism, freedom, independence, liberalism, and internationalism.
Though they were not a political opposition organisation, the whole culture of the Swing Kids evolved into a non-violent refusal of the civil order and culture of National Socialism.
From a paper by the National Youth Leader The members of the Swing youth oppose today’s Germany and its police, the Party and its policy, the Hitlerjugend, work and military service, and are opposed, or at least indifferent, to the ongoing war. They see the mechanisms of National Socialism as a “mass obligation.” The greatest adventure of all time leaves them indifferent; much to the contrary, they long for everything that is not German, but English.
From 1941, the violent repression by the Gestapo and the Hitlerjugend shaped the political spirit of the swing youth. Also, by police order, people under 21 were forbidden to go dancing bars, which encouraged the movement to seek its survival by going underground.
The Swing Kids of Hamburg at some point had contacts with another famous resistance movement, when three members of the White Rose (German: Weiße Rose) developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal cooperation arose, though these contacts were later used by the Volksgerichtshof (“People’s Court”) to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda and sabotage of the armed forces. The consequent trial, death sentences and executions were averted by the end of the war.
On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swingjugend were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration camps. The boys went to the Moringen concentration camp while the girls were sent to Ravensbruck.[10]
This mass arrest encouraged the youth to further their political consciousness and opposition to National Socialism. They started to distribute anti-fascist propaganda. In January 1943, Günter Discher, as one of the ringleaders of the Swing Kids, was deported to the youth concentration camp of Moringen.
On 2 January 1942, Heinrich Himmler wrote to Reinhard Heydrich calling on him to clamp down on the ringleaders of the swing movement, recommending a few years in a concentration camp with beatings and forced labor:
The crackdown soon followed: clubs were raided, and participants were hauled off to camps.
Zazou
In France a similar movement like Germany’s Swingjugend arose by the name Zazou.The zazous were a subculture in France during World War II. They were young people expressing their individuality by wearing big or garish clothing (similar to the zoot suit fashion in America a few years before).
On 27 March 1942, the French Vichy government issued the barbershop decree, demanding that barbers collect cut hair and donate it to the war effort to make slippers and sweaters. The rebellious Zazous refused and grew their hair long. The Zazous were directly inspired by jazz and swing music. A healthy black jazz scene had sprung up in Montmartre in the inter-war years. Their name was inspired by a line in a song – Zah Zuh Zah – by Cab Calloway
Vichy had started ‘Youth Worksites’ in July 1940, in what Zazous perceived as an attempt to indoctrinate French youth. The Vichy regime was very concerned about the education, moral fibre and productivity of French youth. In 1940 a Ministry of Youth was established. They saw the Zazous as a rival and dangerous influence on youth.
In 1940, 78 anti-Zazou articles were published in the press, a further nine in 1941 and 38 in 1943.
The Vichy papers deplored the moral turpitude and decadence that was affecting French morality. Zazous were seen as work-shy, egotistical and Judeo-Gaullist shirkers.
By 1942 the Vichy regime realised that the national revival that they hoped would be carried out by young people under their guidance was seriously affected by widespread rejection of the patriotism, work ethic, self-denial, asceticism and masculinity this called for.
Soon, round-ups began in bars and Zazous were beaten on the street. They became Enemy Number One of the fascist youth organisations, Jeunesse Populaire Française. “Scalp the Zazous!” became their slogan. Squads of young JPF fascists armed with hairclippers attacked Zazous. Many were arrested and sent to the countryside to work on the harvest.
At this point the Zazous went underground, holing up in their dance halls and basement clubs.
Though they did not suffer like their contemporaries in Germany, nevertheless, in a society of widespread complicity and acquiescence, their stand was courageous and trail-blazing.
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Sources
Queens of Vintage
Timelne
Libcom
Special thank you to Norman Stone who pointed me to the story of the Zazou.
There are 2 indisputable facts when it comes to the youngest members of society.
A child is born with no state of mind, a baby does not know how to hate or how to love, he/she is taught how to do both and is conditioned to the environment he or she grows up in.
He who had the youth has the future.
Hitler was aware for his ideology to work on a large scale it needed to be indoctrinated from a very young age. The Nazi regime needed to have full control of life cycle from cradle to grave.
I have heard people say “If my child was in the Hitler youth I would severely discipline my son or daughter” the fact is you wouldn’t, because firstly you would have brought your child to the meetings, secondly you would fear your own safety if you would even say anything negative about the Nazi regime even to your child. In many cases Hitker youth children would even betray their own parents.
Being part of a group was very intoxicating for a young child, in fact it still is. The truth is at the start it was fun. They did all sorts of cool things. They went camping together, built bonfires and they were even taught how to shoot a rifle, not a toy one but a real genuine rifle. What boy wouldn’t love that.
They weren’t taught to hate straight away, it was a gradual process. Although it really doesn’t take that long to brainwash a child, if the conditions are right it only takes a few days to alter their attitude completely, as the ‘3rd wave experiment@ conducted in 1967 by high school teacher Ron Jones illustrated. This experiment even had the benefit of hindsight, Where the Hitler youth had no prior knowledge of what evil some of them would eventually embark on.
Donation
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful. Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had only 50,000 members, but by the end of the year this figure had increased to more than 2 million. By 1936 membership in the Hitler Youth increased to 5.4 million before it became mandatory in 1939. The German authorities then prohibited or dissolved competing youth organizations.
The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were the primary tools that the Nazis used to shape the beliefs, thinking and actions of German youth. Youth leaders used tightly controlled group activities and staged propaganda events such as mass rallies full of ritual and spectacle to create the illusion of one national community reaching across class and religious divisions that characterized Germany before 1933.
Founded in 1926, the original purpose of the Hitler Youth was to train boys to enter the SA (Storm Troopers), a Nazi Party paramilitary formation. After 1933, however, youth
leaders sought to integrate boys into the Nazi national community and to prepare them for service as soldiers in the armed forces or, later, in the SS.
In 1936, membership in Nazi youth groups became mandatory for all boys and girls between the ages of ten and seventeen. After-school meetings and weekend camping trips sponsored by the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls trained children to become faithful to the Nazi Party and the future leaders of the National Socialist state. By September 1939, over 765,000 young people served in leadership roles in Nazi youth organizations which prepared them for such roles in the military and the German occupation bureaucracy.
The Hitler Youth combined sports and outdoor activities with ideology. Similarly, the League of German Girls emphasized collective athletics, such as rhythmic gymnastics, which German health authorities deemed less strenuous to the female body and better geared to preparing them for motherhood. Their public displays of these values encouraged young men and women to abandon their individuality in favor of the goals of the Aryan collective.
Upon reaching age eighteen, boys were required to enlist immediately in the armed forces or into the Reich Labor Service, for which their activities in the Hitler Youth had prepared them. Propaganda materials called for ever more fanatic devotion to Nazi ideology, even as the German military suffered from defeat after defeat.
In the autumn of 1944, as Allied armies crossed the borders into Germany, the Nazi regime conscripted German youths under sixteen to defend the Reich, along side seniors over the age of 60, in the units of the “Volkssturm” (People’s Assault).
After the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces in May 1945, some German boys continued to fight in guerilla groups known as “Werewolves”. During the following year, Allied occupation authorities required young Germans to undergo a “de-Nazification” process and training in democracy designed to counter the effects of twelve years of Nazi propaganda.
The Hitler Youth was disbanded by Allied authorities as part of the denazification process. Some Hitler Youth members were suspected of war crimes but, because they were children, no serious efforts were made to prosecute these claims. While the Hitler Youth was never declared a criminal organisation, its adult leadership was considered tainted for corrupting the minds of young Germans. Many adult leaders of the Hitler Youth were put on trial by Allied authorities.
Below are some images of the Hitler Youth.
Hitler Youth members train with rifles. Date and location unspecified.
A crowd of Hitler Youth gives the Nazi salute during Hitler Youth Day at one of the parties rallies in Nuremberg, circa 1930s.
Hitler Youth members who had been wounded while on duty during an air raid receive decoration for their actions, September 23, 1943.
Hitler Youth members play tug of war while training with gas masks in Worms, 1933.
Four boys of the Hitler Youth stand in front of the Nazi flag at an unspecified location, circa 1935.
Hitler Youth members force Jews to clean a street as a crowd looks on in Vienna, Austria in 1938.
16-year-old Willi Hübner being awarded the Iron Cross in March 1945
Members of a Hitlerjugend company of the Volkssturm at the German-Soviet front in Pyritz, Pomerania, February 1945.
13 year old Hitler Youth captured near Nartinzell in April/May 1945
History of Sorts 
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