Nazi Youth Movement - Coursework Example

Between 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler created a Hitler Youth program for young boys and adolescents that would serve to prepare them for life in service to the Third Reich. Hitler was himself obsessed with the idea that these young children represented an anchoring of his power by way of investment in the youth by overseeing their training and education and creating a young mind that emerged into adulthood as the human specimen of Adolf Hitler’s own creation of German purity. The path to achieving this goal was to create a curriculum for these young men – and women – and to erase prior teachings in religion and community, and to re-indoctrinate their thinking in the direction of the Third Reich. The Nazi Youth Movement Today, more than 60 years after the end of World War II, people have more unanswered questions about the period than ever before. Chief among those questions is how was Hitler’s Nazi regime able to collect young children and adolescents from Germany’s families and households, which virtually surrendered their children to be collectively nurtured, mentally and emotionally shaped by the state as it assumed the role of surrogate parent to thousands of young German children before and during World War II? The answer is not a single sentence, but a complex series of events and the evolution of a collective thinking that actually preceded the regime of Adolf Hitler. However, the forces under Adolf Hitler quickly recognized the opportunity that existed in exploiting Germany’s young. To understand the answer to the question of how Hitler’s Nazi forces were able to take young children from the safety of their parents’ homes to indoctrinate them into a system of rigid obedience and obsessive hate, the researcher must go back in time to a time just before World War I. A young man named Karl Fischer brought together a group of other young people, liberal thinkers like himself. “They started a fellowship, a romantic and idealistic in character, that because of its passionate championing of “the simple life” and “self-expression” set aflame the minds and hearts of adolescent Germany.1 Fischer’s group grew, and some descriptions of the group are reminiscent of descriptions of the 1960s youths. Fischer’s young followers were soon to be found in “every nook and corner of Germany, tramping through the woods with their guitars twanging, singing peasant songs, wearing loose, simple costume, and sending a fresh breath of naturalism through the stuffy middle class manners of the day.”2 This description by Howard Becker (1946) quickly conveys a lot of information about these young adolescents. First, they were lower middle class, not the children of “stuffy middle class,” means, but the children of lesser means. They were ostracized from the middle class society because of their peasantry, and yet they were connected enough to their homeland to gain a sense of belonging, and were able to come together in a class oriented peer group. They were, at that point in time, young men without political affiliations. However Kaiser Wilhelm had come under the scrutiny of certain political groups, communist groups, which were in fact picketing him.3 Then, World War I, “The Great War did begin over some damn fool thing in the Balkans.”4 The Kaiser, who apparently understood the hearts and minds of Germany’s peasantry as having a strong sense of nationalism and pride, made a call for Germany’s youth to come forward in defense of the “Fatherland.”5 The answer to the call was an overwhelming show of support by young German men. “In the terrible battle of Langemarck thousands of these youngsters marched singing into a hail of lead and iron from which only a handful returned alive. The lifeblood of the old Youth Movement was spilled in Flanders fields.”6 Germany’s history was one of war and imperial expansionism through colonization, especially in Africa. Authors Wilhelm Diest and Annika Mombauer quote Friedrich Meinecke, explaining German expansion from a political and public perception.7 They quote Meinecke as saying, “Given how the world looked at the time, a nation like Germany, in its narrow and, due to its expansion, its increasingly narrowing existence, had necessarily to come to the conclusion that the creation of a larger colonial empire was indispensable to secure its future.”8 The Kaiser’s following amongst young middle and lower middle class people stood in stark contrast to that of the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia; who, in 1918, the same year that the Kaiser abdicated his throne in Germany, would be put to death by revolutionists in Russia.9 Even as World War I was being lost by Germany, the Kaiser still enjoyed the support of Germany’s young men. In fact, Diest and Mombauer quote Meinecke as further saying of the Kaiser’s influence on Germany’s young men, “The Kaiser and his young men seemed apt to fulfill his desire for world power status.”10 However, contrary to the Kaiser’s hopes, he would never return to Germany as its monarch. Meinecke’s remarks demonstrate is that Germany’s youth were of a mind and allegiance such that they were prepared to place their idealistic tendencies into the hands of whatever authority figure was prepared to shape and mold them. This willingness would later take on the descriptive German phrase of Fuhrerprinzip, or leadership principle.11 This descriptive phrase was post Kaiser Wilhelm, after the National Socialist Youth organization was founded in 1924.12. The interpretation of the phrase is “blind obedience to one’s leader and entire responsibility for one’s followers.”13 It is suggestive of the fact that, if nothing else, the revolutionaries understood, as did the Kaiser, that to win the heart and minds of Germany’s youth was the key to leadership in Germany. “The general acceptance of this principle (Fuhrerprinzip) among Germans, of the younger generation in particular, has often been pointed to as the real secret of the strength of the Nazis.”14 The principle is identified as one having been developed and is directly associated with the leadership of young adolescents who were largely influenced by Karl Fischer, dating back to 1896.15 Those same young adolescents were, by the time of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, were adults, raising their own families and children. This would explain why, by the time Adolf Hitler’s Nazi leaders began taking on the collective shaping of young children and adolescents, those young were willing surrendered unto the regime. So, while the nationalistic tendencies of the youth were not unique to the Nazi era, there was a roadmap in that child rearing direction that might have caused parents and their children embrace the roles the young children and adolescents would assume under the Nazi regime. In analysis, one might easily conclude that the parents of these children and adolescents, the young influenced by Karl Fischer, were craving organization, structure, and a pointed direction. Their loyalty to Kaiser Wilhelm, who enjoyed a seemingly bonded loyalty with these young people, more so than he did with his own military commanders; might have indicated not a preference to the monarchy, but the need to be directed along a course that was inclusive of nationalistic belonging. By the time Hitler’s regime began its collective training of Germany’s youth, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls; there was a prevalent thinking in Germany that made possible the further exploitation of these children and adolescents.16 The conditioning of a generation of Germany’s youth by Karl Fischer had created a German characteristic of attitude. “Once more the drive for the union of all the German peoples (which term takes in the Austrians, Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Bohemians, the Flemish, the Swiss, the Alsatians, and many others) is not new among young Germans. . . Members of the old Youth Movement established camps or went as individuals among all the “provinces of the new and greater Germany,” – not merely those lost by the Versailles Treaty – where they zealously propagandized their cause.”17 Hitler’s work was largely one in progress, and he had only to direct the Fuhrerprinzip towards the goals and glory of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. This was probably not an overwhelming task, since many of the parents of those young children and adolescents were probably military enlistees, Gestapo, or other Reich branches and departments. An important credo that came out of Nazi Germany, and that many a historian and other analyst has clung to; is “Youth shall be led by youth.”18 A credo that many would like to believe was a euphemism utilized by monster Nazi girls and boys whose brains had been twisted and who had been so successfully indoctrinated with Nazi bias and hate that they could successfully lead themselves along the path of Hitler’s dream. Howard Becker (1946) writes that the notion of a Nazi youth leading the young population of Nazi Germany could not have functioned independent of the adults along the ladder of the German hierarchy. “Youth is not led by youth, but by the same group which controls the nation as a whole; namely (at that time) the Supreme Command of the National Socialist Party.”19 However, as a symbolic figure of the goals of the Reich, and as a reminder of the party hierarchy, the Hitler Youth group was represented by a Youth Leader of the Reich.20 This individual might evoke a range of thoughts and emotions in the young boys, and in the young girls of the League of German Girls. Their identities became intertwined with the party, as a single one that has a “responsibility” to the group and to the party. Their loyalty to the party would put at a risk a parent or other adult who might speak ill of the party or the government. It would not be prudent for a parent or other adult to disagree with the party in the presence of the Hitler Youth child, or to comment negatively on the youngster’s training. Negative comments about the Reich might cause the parent or adult to be arrested by the Gestapo as a spy, having been reported by their own child or charge. The Hitler Youth numbered 10 million at the height of the Reich’s grip on Germany and as it moved towards incorporating the rest of Europe into the German fold.21 Ranging in age from 10 to 18 years old, the children, Hitler was strongly focused on the thought that to win the youth was to win Germany, was to win the world.22 “I am beginning with the young,” the Fuhrer is quoted by author Gerhard Rempel as saying to Hermann Rauschning in 1933, “We older ones are used up . . . We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters!”23 Hitler’s magnificent youngsters represented to Hitler his ability to mold their minds in his own thinking and to endear them to him, to train their allegiance to him alone, which would ensure Hitler’s place as a world dictator. Baldur von Schirach was charged with overseeing the Hitler Youth, however during the Nuremberg trials, Baldur von Schirach denied that the SS, or more specifically Heinrich Himmler, had wielded a special influence over the Hitler Youth as regards influencing them and educating them in a way that was tantamount to brainwashing; but he claimed no memory as to what the exact nature of the relationship between the young boys and girls and the SS was.24 “It was a tie so strong that even the party secretariat resented it.”25 Baldur von Schirach had been the man to originally organize the youth, but his authority over them was later circumvented by the SS and even by the German Army’s Erwin Rommel, who saw in the youth an opportunity to exploit their youthful ideologies, honed under the guidance of Baldur von Schirach.26 Eventually, Baldur von Schirach lost all control over the youth, and their shaping fell to more distinct party loyals, most notably Himmler and the SS.27 The Hitler Schools, the Land Year and the Child Evacuation Program, which were the source of constant vying for control over them by Baldur von Schirach and others interested in the benefits of controlling the program; were subject to the discretion and decision making of Himmler.28 The educational curriculum in the Hitler Schools placed an emphasis on physical fitness above training the intellect.29 The reason behind this was that the plan was for thse young men and women to become soldiers, to fight, to take orders, to follow a command. Certainly it would not have served the Reich well for the children to be trained intellectually over physically, especially since intellectuals would at some point begin thinking apart from the collective. The full impact of the educational curriculum for these young children, especially the boys, is revealed by Hitler’s own thinking. Rempel quotes Hitler as saying, “I want to see once more in the eyes of the youth the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. Strong and handsome must my young men be. I will have them fully trained in all physical exercises. I intend to have an athletic youth – that is the first and chief thing. In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble material. With that I can create the new order.”30 Their curriculum included lectures on the Reich’s political ideologies, and Hitler’s own goals for the country.31 These lectures would be followed by discussion time, during which the young boys were encouraged to exchange their thoughts and ideas on the points of the lectures.32 “While indoctrination per se took only 14 hours out of a total training schedule of 166 hours, the basic notions permeated the entire curriculum whether it was implemented in the barracks, on the shooting range, or in the exercise area or field. Nothing was left to chance. Even some nine hours of free time was supervised.”33 The training and supervision of the Hitler Youth underscores the importance they served in Hitler’s long range plans for the Reich. That those plans were cut short by the turn of the war in favor of the Allied forces, would spell disaster for these young men. Goebbels’s “total war” effort caused the mobilization of the youth as it did every other able bodied man in Germany.34 After the war, some of the surviving members of the Hitler Youth were able to refocus their lives; but most avoided politics and the spotlight of public life.35 Their lives had been irrevocably altered between 1933 and 1946; and they had lost their youth. “There were some HJ veterans who came to regret that the anticlerical propaganda erased their religious upbringing and turned them into nihilistic pessimists. A few seemed to have found the strength of character to resort to “inner migration” during the Third Reich, steeling themselves against the infection by the conforming majority or maintaining a clandestine religious faith as antidote to the prevailing amorality and irreligion.”36 Hitler could not allow his young to have a faith in God that could possibly cause them to question their faith in Hitler. History since the end of World War II has marks made by these young men; some of them very violent and dangerous, like the Federal Republic of the 1960s and the 1970s, which seems to have been made up of largely Hitler Youth. However, today, Germany has focused on facing its past, and as the world moves towards a world community, it will require all children to be indoctrinated in the concepts of tolerance, diversity, and peace. Annotated Bibliography Becker, Howard. German Youth: Bond or Free. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Questia. 27 June 2007 . This book is a thorough discussion as to the minds and hearts of Germany’s youth and the Organizing of that youth by Karl Fischer. The book supports the discussion of this paper when speaking about organizing German’s youth. This book provides the bulk of the opening discussion in this paper that talks about how the youth became the adults of Hitler’s Germany, which made it easier for Hitler to collectively indoctrinate the children of German World War II into Hitler’s Youth organizations. Diest, Wilhelm, and Mombauer, Annika, The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm I’s Role in Imperial Germany, Cambridge University, 2003. This book helps identify the leadership mind of Kaiser Wilhelm’s relationship with German citizens up to his abdication in 1918. This book is used to set the stage for the mood and mind of the German people. It was Kaiser Wilhelm I who, during World War I, demonstrated the effectiveness of a national youth who would come to the call of the Kaiser in service to their country. Highham, Robin, and Showalter, Dennis E.., Researching World War I: A Handbook, Greenwood Press, 2003. Robin Highham and Dennis Showalter’s book researching World War I discusses the notion of expansion and German identity. It allows the researcher access to readily researched facts on the order of the events of World War I. The book is used to inform this essay with information regarding the German citizens, the Kiasier, and the relationship between the monarchy and the people. Rempel, Gerhard. Hitlers Children The Hitler Youth and the SS. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Questia. 27 June 2007 . Gerhard Rempel’s work is an extensive and detailed study of Hitler’s collective indoctrination of Germany’s young boys and girls into the philosophy of the Third Reich. It discusses. Rempel’s work is used to inform this essay as regards the education of Hitler’s youth, the programs, and the curriculum. Rempel discusses those relationships, and introduces some of the key players in the role of educating Hitler’s youth and designing their academic curriculum. Warth, Robert D. Nicholas II: The Life and Reign of Russias Last Monarch. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997. Questia. 27 June 2007 . Robert Wart’s book is an extensive and detailed discussion on the Tsar Nicolas, as the last Russian Monarch. It is an in depth analysis of the relationship between the Tsar and his subjects, the Russian people. It analyzes the fall of the Russian monarchy, the death of Nicholas and his family, and the subsequent institution of Communism in that country. This book is used on a very limited and peripheral basis to provide a comparison between the relationship of the Tsar and the Russian people; as compared to that of the Kaiser and the German people. It is used in this essay to demonstrate how the German youth responded to the call of the Kaiser in the first World War I. Works Cited Becker, Howard. German Youth: Bond or Free. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Questia. 27 June 2007 . Diest, W., and Mombauer, A., The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm I’s Role in Imperial Germany, Cambridge University, 2003. Highham, R., and Showalter, D., Researching World War I: A Handbook, Greenwood Press, 2003. Rempel, Gerhard. Hitlers Children The Hitler Youth and the SS. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Questia. 27 June 2007 . Warth, Robert D. Nicholas II: The Life and Reign of Russias Last Monarch. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997. Questia. 27 June 2007 . Read More