1
Nazi Germany may have been a time of terror, destruction, and war, but it was also a time
of pride and nationalism for the German people. The downtrodden citizens of Germany needed
something to believe in after they were blamed for World War I. Hitler and the Nazi Party
offered the German people a sense of purpose and determination, and easily tapped into the
vulnerability of the Germans to get them involved in both the Party and the war effort. The
Nazis were not content to simply recruit the adult population, however; they had plans to grasp
the attention and excitement of the young people. There were programs installed to gain the
support of the youth in Germany that targeted not only teenagers but young children as well.
Collectively known as the Hitler Youth,1 these young citizens joined programs that sought to
prepare them to be productive, enthusiastic, and healthy members of the state. Though pictures
of the past depict thousands of children participating in Nazi activities, there were many German
youths who were indifferent to the Hitler Youth2 or who openly resisted its ideologies and so
these pictures should not be used to make assumptions about the German public. It is therefore
important to assess the popularity of the Hitler-Jugend3 and to uncover history to discover more
about those members of the organization and about the varying groups in opposition, including
those that were ideological, political, or religious.
Young people were extremely important to Nazi Germany because they were the next
generation of what would supposedly be the fantastical “Thousand-Year Reich.” The Hitler
Youth offered an outlet to not only organize these children into the future leaders of the country
but to also gain their support and trust in order to mold them into ideal citizens. The HJ was also
1
Susan Campbell Bartoletti. Hitler Youth (New York: Susan Campbell Bartoletti, 2005), 9.
For the sake of avoiding redundancy, in this paper the Hitler Youth will be synonymous with HJ, HitlerJugend, and Nazi youth. When just referring to German youth at the time, “German” or “Germany” will be present
in the terminology or description.
3
Hitler Youth
2
2
used to encourage young people early on to pursue careers in many German programs including
the Sturmabteilung4 and other forms of military and public service.
The Hitler Youth came to existence as early as 1922, when the beginnings of many youth
movements erupted across Germany. Though Germany had an extensive history of youth
involvement, after World War I dozens of organizations were created for varying purposes,
particularly in religious, ideological, or political aspects, such as the “Young Conservatives” or
“Young Protestants.”5 The prominence of the youth culture and these organizations made it
easier for the HJ to gain momentum because the young people of Germany were already so
aware of politics and the world around them that many of them were willingly caught up in the
popularity of the Fuhrer.
There were several parts to the overall program of the HJ that were installed as an
extension of the adult programs. The first, and most prominent, was the Hitler-Jugend, which
was a paramilitary organization for males aged 14 to 18. There was the Deutsches Jungvolk,6
which was developed for boys 10-14 as the younger version of the Hitler-Jugend. There was
also the girls section, the Bund Deutscher Madel,7which originally consisted of two groups, the
Jungmadel8 for girls 10 to 14 and the regular BDM for girls aged 14 to 18, but eventually the
girls’ section was consolidated into one part.9
Hitler created a preliminary Nazi youth organization in 1922, and though it did not last
long, it provided a precedent for the creation of the official Hitler Youth in 1926.10 At its earliest
4
5
Storm Troopers, or SA
H. W. Koch. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 122-1945 (New York: H. W. Koch, 1975),
40.
6
German Youth
League of German Maidens (BDM)
8
Young Girls
9
Gerhard Rempel. Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 10.
10
Michael H. Kater. Hitler Youth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10.
7
3
existence, the Hitler Youth had about 5,000 members. The rise of the Hitler Youth slowly grew
along with the rise of the Nazi Party; when the Nazis took power in 1933, membership in the HJ
grew significantly to over a hundred thousand when the previous year had only held about 28
thousand members.11
By 1938, nearly 8.7 million German youths were a part of the Hitler Youth; these young
people account for about 60 percent of the eligible young people in Germany. These numbers
are significant because over half of the youth population was involved in the organization, and at
this point membership was completely voluntary. However, this changed with a law in 1939
making participation for eligible youth compulsory, and so all youth were essentially members of
the Hitler Youth.12 The advent of this law definitely makes the Hitler Youth appear quite large
in number, but it is not an accurate assumption based on “popularity” of the movement. If
membership was compulsory, then it is not fair to say that all members were supportive and
excited about the Nazis and their ideologies. Membership holds even less value when taking into
account that many of the dissenters of the Hitler-Jugend began as enthusiastic members
themselves before swapping sides.
One such pair of dissenters was a brother and sister who began one of the most wellknown German youth resistance movements, the White Rose. Siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl
started as excited members of the HJ, despite their parents’ disapproval. As a teenager, Sophie
was an ardent supporter of National Socialism and also a leader of the Jungmadel, the BDM
segment of the HJ for girls 10-14.13 She was extremely involved, as was her brother Hans who,
after joining the HJ in 1933, became a junior chief in the Ulm section of the Hitler-Jugend.14 By
11
Rempel, 126.
Koch, 115.
13
Bartoletti, 19.
14
Kater, 122.
12
4
1935, however, Hans became disillusioned with Hitler and the Nazis based on their pronounced
racism and “victimization of the weak”15 and began to join resistance movements. Sophie
likewise became a distanced member of the movement and soon dropped out as well.
While at Gymnasium16 in 1941, Hans and his friends Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell,
Christoph Probst, and Jurgen Wittenstein, along with Sophie, began their own resistance
organization by distributing flyers of the Weisse Rose, or the White Rose. Together with their
professor Kurt Huber, the group was able to sporadically print and distribute flyers over the
course of the next few years, until they distributed their sixth and final issue in February 1943.17
While passing out the flyers, they were noticed by a caretaker at the University and were
subsequently arrested, along with their friend Christoph Probst, and the three of them were tried
before the People’s Court where they were sentenced to execution by the guillotine. A few
months later, White Rose members Schmorell and Graf, along with Professor Huber, were
sentenced to similar fates.18
Though Hans and Sophie Scholl were executed for their bravery and resistance to the
Nazi movement, their efforts did not go unnoticed. They had distributed their flyers to thousands
of their fellow students at the University of Munich, and many friends back home in Ulm and
elsewhere remained sympathetic to their cause and the ideals that this pair maintained. The
Scholls showed a sense of courage that did not go unnoticed by those who also disapproved of
Hitler’s regime, but their untimely execution no doubt hindered others’ actions for fear of
receiving similar punishments.
15
Kater, 123.
University
17
Peter Hoffman. German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, Massacusetts: Harvard University Press,
1988), 110.
18
Kater, 131.
16
5
This did not mean that the Scholls and the White Rose Resistance were the sole
opposition group of the Hitler Youth. On the contrary, there were many cases of individuals who
took desperate measures on their own to voice their disagreement with the Fuhrer. Some banded
together with a few friends, while others found like-minded rebels who shared similar resistance
ideals. In the case of Wolf Jobst Siedler and Ernst Junger, the two teenage friends banded
together after having first experienced the brutality of the Hitler Youth’s military machine.19
They recruited others to join their group and discussed the outcome of the war and listened to
enemy radio stations, but eventually both were sentenced to time in prison for their dissidence.
Not all opposition groups began with members who were at one time part of the Hitler
Youth, however. There had always been differences between Nazis and Catholics based on
issues of ideology and dogma, and so many Catholic youth organizations remained despite the
Nazi takeover of all German groups for young people. The Church opposed the Hitler Youth not
only because of its militarism but even more because it was afraid the HJ would take the youth
away from faith.20 Despite the compulsory laws put into place by the Nazis to get more
“volunteers” for the Hitler Youth, the Catholic Church and its young members, especially in
southern Germany, remained staunchly opposed to participation. This resistance was largely due
to the anti-Catholicism ideologies of the HJ, as well as the “immorality” of the entire
movement.21 The Catholic youth organizations were able to withstand the threats that the HJ
made to them about compulsory membership due to the continued resistance by the Church as
well as the fact that there were harsher resisters that the HJ had to deal with first. Because of
19
Kater, 121.
Daniel Horn. “The Struggle for Catholic Youth in Hitler’s Germany: An Assessment.” The Catholic
Historical Review 65 no. 4 (October 1979), 567.
21
Horn p. 569
20
6
their defiance, the Catholic youth organizations maintained a fairly high number of members
despite the Nazi attempt at recruitment within the Church.
Officially, the Protestant youth accommodated and joined the Nazis, though many of
them were not ardent supporters of Hitler or his regime. There were even some groups who
persistently resisted the Nazis despite the official allegiance and complacency. Many Protestants
believed the Hitler Youth and the Nazi government in general to be pagan and therefore opposed
to any and all religious teachings and ideas. There were groups of Protestant HJ and BDM
members who would join together on Sundays, but eventually they were disbanded by Nazi
officials.22 The Confessing Church and several Lutheran churches resisted the integration of all
religious groups into the Hitler Youth by ending their programs so the young people could, for
the time, escape this form of compulsory membership.23 Of the Protestant opposition groups, the
Confessing Church was the most vocal, and, as a consequence, faced the same type of
intimidation that the members of the Catholic youth organizations encountered.24
Not all dissenters of the Hitler Youth were in opposition for religious reasons; many were
distanced by the organization’s highly militaristic formation. Gangs of young men rejected the
compulsory military service part of the HJ and, though some were members of the organization
themselves, banded together to oppose this aspect. Such groups called themselves the Edelweiss
Pirates or the Black Gang, though perhaps the term “gang” is not appropriate in today’s terms
since these groups of young men did little more than gather in pubs and dress in rebellious
22
Richard Steigmann-Gall. “Christianity and the Nazi Movement: A Response.” Journal of
Contemporary History 42 no. 2 (April 2007), 190.
23
Koch, 219
24
Edward J. Kunzer. “The Youth of Nazi Germany”. Journal of Educational Sociology 11 no. 6 (February
1938), 348.
7
clothing. Nonetheless, the Gestapo kept a close eye on these organizations, considering them a
danger and fearing cases of juvenile delinquency.25
Aside from the White Rose Resistance, probably the largest and most well-known youth
resistance group in Germany was the Swing Youths. These usually privileged young people
resisted the militaristic and forceful atmosphere of the Hitler Youth and found themselves
attracted to the swing music that was popular in America and England, liking the sense of ease
and excitement of the 1920s.26 The Gestapo got wind of the underground activities of the Swing
Youth and bans on swing music and dancing were soon enacted across Germany. Many
members of the Swing Youth were arrested, tortured, and detained by the Gestapo, and some
were even sent to “youth detention camps,” a sort of concentration camp for young people.27
These dangers eventually created rifts in the movement because while some youth wanted to
continue in defiance, others believed the consequences were too serious that losing their lives
was not worth the risk. Regardless, the Swing Youth provided an example to the young people
of Germany that resistance without violence was indeed possible.
Taking into consideration those youths who joined the HJ and those who resisted brings
up the question about the German families who neither accepted nor completely opposed the
Hitler Youth. Though these people existed, not much is known about them since they were not
actively joining or resisting but rather remaining neutral.28 Their passiveness shows that some
Germans tried to stay indifferent to the Nazi Party and its extensions, including the Hitler Youth.
Even when membership in the HJ became compulsory, those membership numbers would then
25
Koch, 138.
Kater, 143.
27
Kater, 144.
28
Koch, 204.
26
8
also include these indifferent young people and so would not be an accurate testament to the
popularity of the movement itself.
Another reason to diminish the effectiveness of statistics in regards to the popularity of
the Hitler Youth is that many members of the organization quit the group as the war continued to
wage. One such youth, Willie Schumann, remembered at first enjoying the duties and activities
that the Hitler Youth provided, until the fateful day when, at the age of sixteen, he became a
soldier for Hitler.29 Schumann also described the feeling of discontent within the youth branches
of the military, especially over mundane details such as being forced to wear the HJ armband at
all times. More importantly, Schumann explained that even those who did not readily agree with
Hitler or his policies joined the HJ because they believed they were fighting for a better
Germany, not because they agreed with racism toward the Jewish people.30 Schumann’s
argument personifies the Hitler Youth movement and allows for a better understanding of what
these young people went through and what exactly they thought about Hitler and the HJ.
Another previous member of the Hitler Youth, Alfons Heck, recalled how Germany of
the 1930s was the “land of promise” for everyone except those who were Jewish, gypsies,
homosexuals, or political opponents of Nazism.31 Heck remembered as a small child the
integration of the Hitler-Jugend into the educational system and that involvement in the
movement happened before one even turned 10, the age when a child could officially join. He
also recalled how he watched SS troops destroy Jewish businesses and property on the Night of
Long Knives and how appalled he was despite being a member of the Hitler Youth.32 Heck
29
Willy Schumann. Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1991), 120.
30
Schumann, 8.
31
Alfons Heck. A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days when God Wore a Swastika (Frederick, CO:
Renaissance House, 1985), 3.
32
Heck, 27.
9
claimed to have been victimized by the Nazis and declared that most other former members of
the Hitler Youth were also disillusioned by the apparent wonders of the movement.
These memoirs help to understand why the young people of Germany were enticed by the
Nazi Party and why they ended up joining the Hitler Youth, especially when they did so before it
became compulsory to join. Though most of these ex-members, like Heck, claim that they
simply joined for nationalistic purposes, these young people must have been aware of their
actions and the consequences to some degree. Still, these reflections on the days of Nazi
Germany and on their participation in the Hitler Youth also help to prove that although many
young people of Germany did join the movement, this did not mean that they did so wholeheartedly and without regret.
When studying the Hitler Youth and its effects not only on the young people of Germany
but its entire history as well, it is important to note that there are many factors to take into
account. This assessment is not simply taking a look at the facts and making assumptions based
solely on statistics, for if that were the case it would appear that all German youths at the time
were enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth, which clearly was not the reality. There were
many members of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party who did remain ardent supporters of the
cause until after Germany’s loss at the end of World War II, and many youths who willingly lost
their lives fighting for Hitler. But there was more to the Hitler Youth than just voluntary
participation, however. Intimidation tactics and threats were used to try to convince children and
their parents that the Hitler-Jugend was the path to being successful in the new Germany, and
that failure to comply could result in punishment. Participation in the HJ also expanded under
certain laws making membership compulsory, so these numbers do not solely represent the
enthusiasm of the young people for Hitler.
10
These facts, along with the knowledge of key youth resistance movements such as the
White Rose, the Swing Youths, and several religious organizations, as well as many individuals
about who little is known, tell the story a little differently. These brave young people put their
lives at risk to stand up against what they believed to be morally and ideologically wrong rather
than comply with such a belief system that challenged their rights as individuals. Taking into
account all aspects of the Hitler Youth, those who were ardent supporters, those who openly
resisted, and even those who were simply indifferent to the movement, it is important to note that
the “popularity” of the Hitler Youth is something that cannot be concretely defined. The
evidence shows that membership rates were at one point 60 percent of the population, but at the
same time, the scare tactics of the Nazis forced many youths to join for fear of punishment, and
so many young people declined the opportunity to resist. Therefore, it is safe to say that
although the Hitler Youth was the largest and most powerful youth organization at the time, it
may not have held as much authority as Hitler desired when he created the movement.
11
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Hoffman, Peter. German Resistance to Hitler. Cambridge, Massacusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1988.
Horn, Daniel. “The Struggle for Catholic Youth in Hitler’s Germany: An Assessment.” The
Catholic Historical Review 65 no. 4 (October 1979): 561-582.
Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Koch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 122-1945. New York: H. W. Koch,
1975.
Kunzer, Edward J. “The Youth of Nazi Germany”. Journal of Educational Sociology 11 no. 6
(February 1938): 342-350.
Rempel, Gerhard. Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS. Chapel Hill, North Carolina:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Schumann, Willy. Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany. Kent, Ohio: Kent State
University Press, 1991.
Steigmann-Gall, Richard. “Christianity and the Nazi Movement: A Response.” Journal of
Contemporary History 42 no. 2 (April 2007): 185-211.
12
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Hoffman, Peter. German Resistance to Hitler. Cambridge, Massacusetts: Harvard University
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------. The History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s
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Horn, Daniel. “The Hitler Youth and Educational Decline in the Third Reich.” History of
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------. “The Struggle for Catholic Youth in Hitler’s Germany: An Assessment.” The Catholic
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Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Koch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 122-1945. New York: H. W. Koch,
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Kunzer, Edward J. “The Youth of Nazi Germany”. Journal of Educational Sociology 11 no. 6
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Rempel, Gerhard. Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS. Chapel Hill, North Carolina:
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Contemporary History 42 no. 2 (April 2007): 185-211.
13
Tyldesley, Mike. “The German Youth Movement and National Socialism: Some Views from
Britain.” Journal of Contemporary History 41 no. 1 (January 2006): 21-34.