YOUTH IN NAZI GERMANY

The young people of Germany were the main target of the Nazis. If the Reich were to last for a thousand years, Hitler had to win over and control the minds of the young. Hitler believed that if the youth of Germany could be fed a diet of Nazi ideas from the earliest age then they would stay fanatically loyal to the new Reich.

Until 1933 most schools in Germany were run by the local state governments. After the Nazis took power, control of the schools was taken from the states and given to a Ministry of Education in Berlin. The Nazis soon turned the schools into instruments of indoctrination. In schools, textbooks were rewritten to paint a good picture of the Nazis. Courses in German history, politics and "racial hygiene" were introduced. Religious education was scrapped. The number of P.E. lessons was doubled. Jewish teachers were sacked. Teachers had to belong to the German Teachers League and were made to put across Nazi ideas in their lessons. To make sure they knew exactly what to do, teachers had to go on compulsory training courses during school holidays. Nazis were sent to schools, where they walked into the classes and cross-examined the teacher in front of the pupils. If they thought it necessary they arrested the teacher at once.

Biological "evidence" was regularly produced in lessons to show how non-Aryan races like the Jews and the Slavs were supposedly inferior. Jewish children were constantly humiliated in front of their classmates. All lessons had to begin and end with the Nazi salute and Heil Hitler.

Outside school, the Nazis took over the leisure time of the young. They had to belong to youth organisations which taught them loyalty to Hitler and trained them in military skills. There were five organisations for youngsters to join. Together they made up the Hitler Youth Movement :

THE HITLER YOUTH MOVEMENT

Despite the fact that children were under intense pressure to join the Hitler Youth, in 1938 4.4 million of Germany's total population of 12.1 million had not joined. In 1939 membership was made compulsory.

The young were trained to obey and carry out orders and were made to do hard physical training, to prepare them for war. Every year, Hitler Youth Members had to go to training camps where they learned to read maps, did sports and gymnastics, and were taught Nazi ideas. Camp training was taken very seriously. On one occasion, a 14-year-old sentry standing guard at the entrance to a camp shot a ten-year-old boy who could not remember the password. Every youngster had a "performance book" in which marks for athletics, camping and fighting skills were recorded. Those with the best marks were sent to special schools where they were trained to be the leaders of the future.

The Adolf Hitler Schools took boys from the Jungvolk at the age of 12 and gave them six years of rough training before sending them on to university or the army. The very best of these pupils went on to schools called Order Castles where they were stretched to the limits of endurance. At one of them, students were woken in the middle of the night to do open P.T. exercises during the winter. They played war games with live ammunition. They washed in an icy stream two kilometres away from their living quarters. Students who were not injured or killed by their training graduated to be the very models of Hitler's idea of youth -- swift, tough and very hard.

Between the ages of 18 and 25 a year of Labour Service had to be done and after 1935 there were two years of military service. By 1940 nearly every youngster belonged to the Hitler Youth. But some avoided becoming members and formed their own groups. The largest of these rebel groups was the Edelweiss Pirates. They listened to forbidden Swing music, danced the forbidden Jitterbug, wore tartan clothes, and grew their hair in long side-locks. They alarmed the authorities with "anti-social" behaviour such as writing anti-Nazi graffiti on walls and picking fights with the Hitler Youth.

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