“It is important to bring every member of the new generation under the spell of National Socialism in order that they may never be spiritually seduced by any of the old generation.”[1] Adolf Hitler, who was ambitious about the achievement of Gleichschaltung, the Nazi regime’s establishment of totalitarian control and coordination over the society, had emphasized the youth’s conformity to the Nazi regime in his speech. The Nazi Party officially formed the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), the organization of boys whose ages ranging from 14 to 18, in 1926 with 6,000 members under Kurt Gruber as their leader. In 1930, a similar organization for girls named Bund Deutscher Madel (BDM) was formed while the Hitler Youth was in the progress of growth in its membership, which grew more than the doubled amount of its initial membership in 4 years.[2] Besides, the Nazis started to emphasize their ideology in the school education so although the young Germans did not join the HJ or BDM, they were still getting Nazi influence from their schools. The life of German youth got majority of influences from the Nazification of the education I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with this sentence and was viewed in various perspectives, including both good and bad.
The lives of Hitler Youth members were quite militaristic while those of BDM members were focused on housework, but still the physical education was emphasized for both boys and girls. As Hitler wanted young Germans who could “suffer pain” and to be “as hard as Krupp’s steel,”[3] they hiked, went on overnight camping trips and did plenty of other field exercises.[4] The boys often played war games[5] and though they always turned violent, no one stopped it because they were learning to become tough by struggling and fighting for their own survival, adopting the so-called good use “Social Darwinism.” They did plentiful militaristic activities, such as learning about “military formations…how to shoot, throw hand grenades, and storm trenches,”[6] and their lessons got more complicated as they grew mature. It is possible to say that if the boys were focusing on physical fitness for the future when they would fight for their country, girls, though received physical education, tended to focus more on being indoctrinated as they were responsible for the education of young children when they become mothers. This meant that girls had to have a strong Nazi ideology in their minds so that they could inherit their submissive attitude towards the Nazis to their children by teaching them properly at home. In the initial stage, they took gymnastics lessons, studied Nazi ideology and housework, and as they grew older they learned dancing instead of gymnastics and how to look attractive.[7] Parents of these boys and girls liked them being disciplined, physically strengthened and motivated.[8] all parents? Though the members always had to be obedient,[9] many of them were excited and passionate about being members of these organizations by having new experiences that were anti-intellectual, militaristic lessons for the boys and more gymnastics than usual for girls. Marching to the strong drumbeats made the boys look like soldiers giving strong impression to the crowd and the merit badges for good performances made the boys and girls to feel like their status were being uplifted. Young Jews envied the members, saying “not being able to participate was depressing.”[10] don’t use one guy’s quote and make it apply for everyone- this is the proper use of historical sources Nonetheless, their lives were not simply about excitement and enthusiasm. Hitler banning other youth groups few months before banning other political parties was quite impressive proof that Hitler had a solid attention on the youth that his consideration about youth opposition was prior to that of other parties. By the end of 1933, the Hitler Youth membership increased to about 2,300,000[11] which was a large number compared to 6,000 of initial membership but a lot of them joined reluctantly because it was dangerous if they did not and this pressure strengthened as joining the Hitler Youth became compulsory. The control of the organization over the youth life turned out to be more coercive. Karl Schinibbe, who described camping and parades to be “very exciting,”[12] was now saying “the shouting and the ordering no longer appealed to me.”[13] When he disobeyed the instructions, he was received accusations that could bring him to the prison or death penalty.[14] Like what? It must have been for extremely severe crimes, but you don’t bother to explain Being aware of the horrid and lethal aspect of punishment for disobedience, all boys and girls had to be quiet and stay firmly subordinate. Hilmar Von Campe, recalling on his life in the HJ, said “We hated the Nazis… but we couldn’t say it. I just didn’t understand how a regime with such disregard for human life could come into power.”[15] Both boys and girls were having their lives filled with labour, working 7 to 8 full hours per day.[16] With Hitler’s introduction of the Reich Labour Service in 1935, the boys had to work in the service for 6 months, clearing forests and swamps, creating land and building infrastructure which one of them called “muscle-tearing hard work.”[17] William Shirer notes that “Hitler Youth did not neglect the German maidens,”[18] and it is a considerable point that the young Germans whom Hitler wanted to be strong did not exclude female though he was against working women, shown in his election campaign, promising to eliminate 800,000 female employees 4 years.[19] The next year, BDM girls started farm work, the working hour of which even extended to 15 hours during the harvest time.[20] Although what they did in the organization at the beginning looked more like leisure activities, being forced to labour in addition to their physical education almost robotized them and they were indulged in exhaustion. Their school teachers were saying that the students hardly stayed awake at school and their tiredness and antipathy –the product of excessive exhaustion- toward their organization was proved when their meeting attendance fell to 25% in three years.[21] Some parents hated the HJ from the very beginning. Being aware of the horror that they experienced during the Great War, they were afraid of the boys frequently doing war-like activities might incur another war, saying the HJ was “only madness, desperation, fight and unbelievable brutality.”[22] Moreover, the militarism and brutality were not simply inserted in the army-imitating-exercises but put into practical activities. Vandalizing and fighting were part of their activities and there was no limitation on the extent of brutality since the police was prohibited to arrest them.[23] Some HJ members participated in the Crystal Night, in which they killed 236 Jews and destroyed more than 7,000 of Jewish shops, businesses, schools and houses in two days with the SA and SS.[24] The parents of a HJ member called it “Night of shame” and many adults were shocked at the fact that huge damages to which their kids contributed.[25] Though living as HJ and BDM members initially seemed exciting, it was gradually creating harsh living conditions for them but they would have thought it was better to live under the protection of their organization rather than being jailed when they were caught by belonging to other youth groups. Grudgingly living with activities that brought up excessive physical exhaustion made them to get tired of their organizations and though they did not like it, they could not expose any disobeying attitude since they were afraid of what would come next -imprisonment or death sentence. Wow.. what a long paragraph… Could you not have broken it up into an examination of life for boys and another for girls?
The life of those people who did not join the HJ or BDM was distinct from the life of those who belonged to these organizations. Most of them formed Nazi-resistance youth groups such as the Edelweiss Pirates and the Swing Kids. Similar to the Hitler Youth, these groups also held their private meetings. According to Walter Meyer, the leader of the Edelweiss Pirates, the members had small meetings at a café[26]and they also had hiking trips.[27] However, the hiking trips were different from those of the HJ and BDM. The trips incorporated boys and girls together and while the HJ and BDM were taken to the trips with the purpose of indoctrinating them, the Pirates’ trips gave opportunities for themselves to have a free space without any pressure from the Nazi party.[28] The Pirates, mostly from working classes, usually worked in mills or factories but were recognized as social outcasts or lazy naïve people[29] why? and though unsure how much lazy they were who was unsure? I don’t understand, many of them did have hard lives for not having parents since they were arrested or murdered for being communists.[30] Although they had freedom in their activities and ways of thinking, such as anti-Nazism, this freedom was always a threat to their safety. The Hitler Youth Patrol always looked out for the Pirates[31] and the Gestapo also often arrested them.[32] Some of them who were caught were even sent to the concentration camps or prison[33], so living as youth gangs were risky. Nonetheless, those who won in the fight against the Hitler Youth Patrol were proud of themselves.[34] And this, by boosting their self-confidence and eagerness and bravery to stand against the Nazis, led to more beatings of Hitler Youth leaders. Their hiking trips gave them chances to beat the Hitlerjugends[35] and as Walter Meyer said, they also stole or vandalized their property.[36] Moreover, they started going on army camps, to get weapons and explosives that they could use to attack the Nazi-related groups and it was an astonishing fact that the head of the Gestapo in Cologne was one of the victims.[37] That was amazing. The Swing Kids, a youth group who wanted cultural freedom, always listened and danced to Jazz music. Girls who belonged to the Swing Kids were always being spied by Hitler Youth members, who claimed it as a protection but in fact were looking for the girls making out with their boyfriends.[38] huh? Since anyone under 18 was prohibited to go out to the streets in the evening, they started to make fake identity cards and they could get into bars, cafés and concert halls, where they gathered together.[39] However, the pressure of police was still available on them, so they went to much smaller Swing dances and only 20~30 of them could meet together while hundreds of them could before, so sometimes they held meeting secretly in church. The Nazi-resistance youth groups, under the pressure of the Nazis, especially after Hitler’s announcement of banning their groups, started to feel more difficult to have freedom in their activities. They were always looked out by the Hitler Youth members and the Gestapo but still these members were proud to have their own living style, which HJ and BDM could not have, and got more confidence when they beat up the Hitler Youths. Although the Nazis influenced the entire German youth, they could not influence the thoughts of such youth who joined the groups like the Edelweiss Pirates but only place some restriction physically, such as disabling them to have exposed meetings.
At schools, students had to receive the education greatly affected by the Nazis. A wide range of aspects of education at that time were influenced by the Nazi principles. According to William Shirer, the consequence of Nazification was “catastrophic” for the education in Germany.[40] The comparison between the Nazificated (Nazification?) education and the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) enables the German education under the Nazis to seem more constrained and too ideological that it looked unreasonable. Nice comparison In IB/DP, students choose six subjects to study and the German schools, thought not exactly the same, also had various subjects but their ways of education were extremely different. The main aim of IB programme is to teach the students to think in different perspectives which can also contain critical view whereas the Nazis’ youth education aimed to stamp the Nazi Weltanshcauung (world-view) in students’ minds. For instance, the IB students have to learn two languages during their two-year course and they learn how to criticize and have various perspectives[41] but the students under the Nazi education only had to learn their own language[42] and the literature was simply one of the media that attempted to brainwash them,[43] on which they could not criticize but forced to accept. Similar difference exists in another subject, history, which gives the students opportunities to analyze critically and evaluate sources in the IB programme but in German schools was merely a subject that emphasized ‘concept of heroism in its Germanic form, linked to the idea of leadership.’[44] Richard J. Evans notes “Central themes in the new teaching included courage in battle.”[45] Analogous to Hitlerjugend mentioned in the previous paragraph, the entire German school education was also turning militaristic and focusing more on physical education, 3 hours of PE everyday before school in 1936 increasing to 5 hours in 1938.[46] Moreover, similar to CAS requirement in the IB, community service was required for the German students but while CAS meant to be the interaction of students with the society, the community service in Germany was even partly used to provide cheap labour.[47] Under the pressure of too much Nazi ideology being indoctrinated to them in the schools, students were forced to study the subjects, all of which were biased and not intellectual but yet did not deserve any criticism from the students. The militaristic practices and increasing physical education hours were enough consuming students’ physical strength and when all of them were forced into the Labour Service for their community service requirement, it seemed to be harming their bodies rather than making them strong. The society within the schools was being ruined. People in schools were losing interaction among them. In some schools, the boys were growing too tough that the bullying of younger students by the older boys was rampant.[48] Teachers were afraid of their own students who possibly would accuse her for not teaching Nazi-ideology and be forced into concentration camp,[49] just like the teachers in China feared to get beaten or sent to a forced labour by their students who strongly supported Mao Zedong.[50] Students thought the education was useless and many of them said that they could pass the examination though they made negligible amount of intellectual efforts.[51] A German teacher had said the student leaders were lack of etiquette and were idlers at school that school discipline “declined to an alarming extent.”[52] This was clearly proved after their high school graduation. By 1939, the number of university students dropped by more 50% and the enrolment at the institutes of technology had greater decrease than in the university students.[53] The declining quality of education was causing a decline in the qualifications of the students. The employers were saying that the graduated students were deficient in their knowledge of language and arithmetic,[54] and the scientists were blaming the recruitment of graduates for disrupting the development of new weapons.[55] Unlike Weimar Germany, girls in the Nazi Germany had to learn domestic skills and were being less educated than the boys at school,[56] creating gender discrimination in educational aspect. The Nazi elite educational institutions did not accept any female student and in 1937, they were disabled to enter college while domestic education became compulsory.[57] The dramatic decrease in the number of college students mentioned above could be largely due to this abolition of female students entering the university but still it was clear that the education standard was remarkably declining. The German education under the Nazis was mainly about indoctrinating the students and there was no enthusiasm for studying remaining in their school life.
The life of German youth under the Nazis was hard to define in a unified viewpoint since there were various types of them: those who were supportive to the Nazi ideas in the education, those who resisted and others who had to receive education reluctantly. The people who joined the Hitlerjugend or Bund Deutscher Madel had lived in the strongest Nazi-approved environment which gave excitement to them at the beginning but started to make them get overwhelmed with physical exhaustion. While they kept being indoctrinated, the youth resistance groups such as the Edelweiss Pirates were acting in a way they wanted but as the time went by, they experienced restriction on their movement but still they did not get their minds controlled by the Nazis. At schools, the students received Nazi education and the teaching of Nazi ideology was a disturbance in German education as it had alienated the students from intellectuality. Whether it seemed good or bad in the eyes of adults, some students enjoyed their life under the Nazis and some found it loathsome and the introduction of Nazi ideologies in the education was the most significant factor that influenced their life and their opinions about it.
20/20 Although at times you raise some points with explaining them, or using selective quotes to describe the majority, this is a very strong effort and I’m very impressed with your knowledge. I was concerned about your page-long paragraphs but felt in the end they were justified considering the great scope of your investigation.
[1] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg. 32
[2] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg. 160
[3] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/hitler_youth.htm
[4] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg. 28
[5] http://www.ittookawar.com/Interviews/Briegel%20Interview/Briegel_Interview.htm
[6] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.29
[7] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.29
[8] ibid, pg.30
[9]ibid pg. 27
[10]ibid pg.26
[11]ibid pg. 160
[12] ibid pg.23
[13] ibid pg.35
[14] ibid pg.35
[15]http://media.www.bcheights.com/media/storage/paper144/news/
[16] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.63
[17] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.63
[18] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books, 1998, pg.254
[19] http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERwomen.htm
[20] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.63
[21] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/hitler_youth.htm
[22] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.30
[23] http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/saviors/others/edelweiss-pirates-story.3518.htm
[24] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.54
[25] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.55
[26]http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005208&MediaId=1236
[27]http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3059255
[28]http://libcom.org/history/articles/edelweiss-pirates
[29]http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/saviors/others/edelweiss-pirates-story.3518.htm
[30]http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/saviors/others/edelweiss-pirates-story.3518.htm
[31]http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/saviors/others/edelweiss-pirates-story.3518.htm
[32]http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3059255
[33] http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelweiss_Pirates
[34] http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/saviors/others/edelweiss-pirates-story.3518.htm
[35] http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3059255
[36] http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005208&MediaId=1236
[37] http://libcom.org/history/articles/edelweiss-pirates
[38] http://www.return2style.de/amiswhei.htm#einstell
[39] http://www.return2style.de/amiswhei.htm#einstell
[40] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books, 1998, pg.249
[43] http://histclo.com/schun/country/ger/era/tr/book/ned-book.html
[44] Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Group, 2005, pg.261
[45] Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Group, 2005, pg. 262
[46] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Scholastic Nonfiction, 2005, pg.45
[48] Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Group, 2005, pg.288
[49] http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-prelude.htm
[51] http://histclo.com/schun/country/ger/era/tr/nazi-ed.html
[52] http://histclo.com/schun/country/ger/era/tr/nazi-ed.html
[53] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books, 1998, pg.252
[54] Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Group, 2005, pg. 289
[55] http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-prelude.htm
[56] http://histclo.com/schun/country/ger/era/tr/nazi-ed.html
[57] Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Group, 2005, pg. 297
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