My chains are gone, I am set free: 2012

In college, the most insightful and life changing thing I did was sign up for one of the most difficult classes of my entire school career-- The Holocaust with Dr. Katherine Lewis. I (nor my uninformed friend who took it as an elective) did not know how hard it would be, but I also didn't know it would give me the most important piece of research and writing experience I'd ever be able to have. I credit my high school literature teacher and Dr. Lewis for my ability to write a cohesive paper that makes people understand something.

Only a few people have read this paper-- my professor, my friend in the class, 2 other classmates, and my husband (then boyfriend). Now, I'm posting it because it seems relevant and because I just found the graded version and edited it on my computer. I am proud of this paper because I worked hard, researched primary sources, and learned SO much, not just about the Holocaust, but about humanity and the way the world works. It's really long--25 pages including endnotes (which you should browse if you want to learn more about any of the points I present)--but if you have the time, read it and tell me what you think. I intended this paper to be a warning to youth--the college student that I was--that what their generation does can literally change the world.

School and Hitler’s Youth: The Scaffold and Scalpel of the Third Reich

In the early years of the Nazi Party’s growing dominance, its leaders realized that even the youth of Germany were unimpressed with the declining Weimar Republic. Nazi party leaders recognized that their revolutionary movement, just like any other revolutionary movement, would grow most rapidly if supported and carried along by the new generation. While young people may not have had a lot of money or social clout to contribute to party membership, they did have two common and necessary characteristics: passion and numbers. The age bracket ranging from age ten to age thirty normally comprises the largest percentage of any society and those individuals will be the most influential in the future. Hitler himself, on September 10, 1938, declared to a Nuremberg crowd of eighty-thousand children, “You, my Youth, are our nation’s most precious guarantee for a great future… And you are destined to be the leaders of a glorious new order…”[i] Between the initial stages of the Nazi rise to power in 1929 and Hitler’s speech in Nuremberg in 1938, the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) had grown exponentially in size and become an integral part of propaganda and security in Germany. Before the war, the Hitler Youth were recruited to confront local opposition groups, such as communists, and distribute propaganda.[ii] By the end of the war, many of the Hitler Youth members were recruited to assist German troops in Normandy and in defending Berlin.[iii]

The activities of the Hitler Youth are well documented all throughout the rise, duration, and fall of the Nazi party, but daily activities of the group are not of primary importance. The Hitler Youth, along with sweeping educational reforms across Germany, radically changed the educational experience of all students in Germany. However, the changes were not identical for all German youth. On the contrary, boys and girls had a completely different experience in the Hitler Youth. They were taught the same ideology, from anti-Semitism and anti-communism to racial purity, and instructed in the importance of hygiene and physical fitness, but their roles and spheres of influence were completely separate and distinct. Hitler’s primary purpose for his youth organizations and educational reforms was to capture the minds and passions of the young and shape them into loyal citizens and leaders in the Nazi regime. Hitler’s idea of a loyal citizen, though, was not as benevolent as what one would commonly think of when defining “good citizenship.” Though the idea of youth groups was not his original creation, after his rise to power Adolf Hitler outlawed all other German youth groups and used the Hitler Youth to replace the family, the church, and schools as the primary social structure of the state. The Hitler Youth indoctrinated students in National Socialist ideology, and relied heavily upon conventional gender roles to build the thousand-year reign of the Third Reich.

Like the Nazi party itself, the Hitler Youth was truly a grassroots movement. The idea of socially constructed youth groups did not begin with the rise of the Nazi party; they were common in German society before the beginning of National Socialism. Before World War I, the youth of Germany had already become dissatisfied with the state of the German nation and had begun to form their own idealistic groups and communities focusing on themselves, the youth of Germany. This movement became known as the Wandervogel, or “Wander-Birds.”[iv] It’s members organized their opposition against “older people [who] asked nothing better than to be lost and smothered in details… bound and strangled by city civilization; wrapped up in stuffy belongings… they were, in short, pretty tiresome.”[v] These young people left behind their families and university studies and wandered around the countryside and mountains living in tandem with nature and creating hostels in which they could live together without the oppression of “old people.” After many of these Wander-Birds were conscripted to defend their country during World War I, they returned to their fellow “Birds” and revivified the movement. Members of these wandering groups exceeded four million in number by 1931. By then, though, they were not the only group comprised of unsatisfied youths—the Catholics, Lutherans, and Nazis had formed youth groups modeled after the Wander-Birds.^{^[vi]} Just after his appointment to chancellor in 1933, Hitler ordered that all German youth organizations, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or sport related, would become Hitler Youth organizations.[vii] With this decree, Hitler and the Nazi party had begun to obtain control over the next generation of Germany.

Unlike the loose federation of groups in the early twentieth century, the Hitler Youth was a hierarchical and highly regulated organization that closely mirrored the government that created it. On June 17, 1933, the Hitler set Baldur von Schirach at the head of the newly created office of Federal Youth Leader. Schirach was young, only twenty-seven at the time of his appointment, and passionate in his support of the Nazi party.[viii] According to Kenneth Roberts’ June 2, 1934 Saturday Evening Post story on the Hitler Youth, Schirach joined the Nazi party in college and headed up the Nazi Students’ League. He became a member of the party’s Reichstag in 1932 and was the youngest member. Upon his appointment, he gathered leading members of all Germany’s prominent youth groups and created a “Ring Council of German Youth” to facilitate the adoption of these other groups into the Hitler Youth. Schirach encountered opposition in the consolidation efforts from many older directors of these former groups, as well as from the ideology of some groups such as the conservative Greater German Youth.[ix] The only groups to not be immediately incorporated were the Catholic Youth and the Protestant Youth. The Protestant Youth were later incorporated and allowed only a limited number of days to attend church services and instructional meetings, while the Catholic Youth groups were allowed to remain intact as a result of the church’s direct negotiations with Hitler.[x] Hitler only allowed this exception to maintain peaceful relations between the powerful Catholic Church and the National Socialist Government. But, as of Robert’s 1934 article, the ideology of the party was beginning to erode the hold that the Catholic Church maintained on Germany’s youth.

As the Hitler Youth incorporated all other German youth groups, the primary aim of the initial German youth group, Wandervogel, which was to forsake materialistic civilization and commune with nature and likeminded individuals, was lost. Kenneth Roberts states in his Post article, “The changes in the German youth movement in twenty years’ time have been… striking. Twenty years ago it was a movement toward truth and liberalism and away from mechanization… from conflicts and from war… Today it is a marching mechanization; a movement dressed up in all the stupid panoply of war.”[xi] On December 1, 1936, Hitler made membership in the Hitler Youth mandatory for all German children, and soon afterwards passed stricter laws promising punishment to parents who did not allow their children to join.[xii] The only shred of the Weimar youth movement that was evident in the Hitler Youth was the disregard for parents and the traditional familial structure. In a speech on November of 1933, Hitler voiced his personal apathy towards to adults who opposed his youth organization and educational reforms: “Your child belongs to me already… You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.”[xiii] With this statement, Hitler essentially said that he did not care what personal beliefs parents held; they were obligated to accept the new government regardless of their sentiments for or against its ideology. And, this new government was creating a society that was not for them; it was creating a society that would be built by their children.

If children chose not to officially join the Hitler Youth after forsaking a former group, or were lax in their participation after membership became mandatory, they could still not escape indoctrination in the Nazi Party ideology through their schools. Along with massive reforms in the social structure of Germany, Hitler and his agents drastically revised its educational system. The first most notable change came with a mandate for teachers to choose either joining the National Socialist Teacher’s Alliance to preach Nazi ideology to their classes or cease teaching. Emphatic Hitler Youth were often credited, or rewarded, for discovering disloyal teachers or intimidating uneasy faculty into compliance with the state.[xiv] Hitler’s emphasis on competition further encouraged members to turn in uncooperative teachers. Conversely, teachers were told to strongly encourage their students to join the Hitler Youth and often pitted members and non-members against each other to pressure students into membership.[xv]

Along with the injection of National Socialist political ideology and propaganda into the classroom, students also encountered changes in the content of their studies. Teachers advanced certain subjects, such as eugenics and racial sciences, which indoctrinated students to believe in the superiority of the Aryan race and the necessity of maintaining racial purity. Students were also indoctrinated in anti-Semitism and instructed in physical identifications of Jews, as well as other inferior groups. This education naturally led to the institutionalized discrimination of students who were all or part Jewish as well as others who were considered to be racially impure, such as Slavs and Afro-Germans.[xvi] Students also shifted from learning about traditionally ideal character traits, such as decency, kindness, and tolerance, to being “nurtured in vindictiveness and hate.”[xvii] Stressing these character traits was the first step in forming students into mechanized members of the National Socialist party.

Knowledge in the liberal arts, like the classical education German students were used to, undermined Hitler’s goal of having a state populated by obedient servants, so he implemented many educational reforms under the National Socialist system. In his 1939 article in the Journal of Educational Sociology, Edward Kunzer argues that the education children and young adults were receiving in Germany during National Socialist control was not a typical classroom education. Kunzer, to support his point, quotes a section from Mein Kampf in which Hitler explains his personal educational philosophy. Hitler believes that “Education in general is to be the preparation for the later army service… the state through this realization has to direct it’s entire education primarily… at the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies.”[xviii] Kunzer, in his analysis of this quote, states his belief that “the highest goal of Nazi education is to develop those attitudes, habits, and skills that will ensure perfect soldiers for the state, to the extent that it takes precedence over intellectual growth.”[xix] He understood, already in 1939, that Hitler was not making educational reforms to create a society of German scholars; Hitler, through his educational reforms, was moving to create a society of passionate and loyal Nazis. Hitler desired for the educational system to form the youth of Germany into citizens who were full of pride in their country and support for their government, and not “half a pacifist, democrat, or something of that kind…”[xx]

While Hitler did not abolish schools as a whole, he did diminish the fundamental importance of a liberal education and created a rift between the Hitler Youth and many German schools and teachers. Even before his party was in power, Hitler created his youth organization and “pitted [it] against schools and teachers.”[xxi] Hitler, from the beginning, did not support the school system and his distaste for traditional education was evident in the structure of the Hitler Youth program. None of the men he appointed as leaders of the Hitler Youth were exceptional students, and the first man he appointed, Baldur von Schirach at age twenty seven, was considered a “youth” himself.[xxii] Hitler encouraged the activism and revolutionary attitudes the youth of Germany had already been expressing since the beginning of the Weimar Republic. This radical support further restricted German schools’ ability to properly function.[xxiii]

Not only were students in the Hitler Youth disrupting the functionality of the German school system, but the Hitler Youth leaders were also consistently asserting their authority over schools. When youth activities conflicted with school schedules, children were given license to abandon school responsibilities in order to attend Hitler Youth functions.[xxiv] Daniel Horn, a scholar of German education and the Hitler Youth, quotes a member of the League of German Girls, the female chapter of the Hitler Youth. She explained that she enjoyed the plethora of extracurricular activities she was able to participate in, but “it had a bad effect on our school reports. There was hardly ever any time now for homework.”[xxv] Schools were at a loss when they encountered conflicts with Hitler Youth scheduling and insubordinate Hitler Youth members; teachers were accused of “fail[ing] to act as ‘real youth leaders’” and were forced to defer to Hitler Youth priorities. Many students developed negative attitudes toward school and the Nazis exacerbated such negative attitudes by limiting university enrollment and voicing fundamental disproval of higher education.[xxvi] Gradually, the Hitler Youth became so intertwined with schools that its activities and ideals determined school scheduling.

The Hitler Youth was, in essence, the perfect avenue for the National Socialist government to craft and control the next generation of Nazi soldiers and thus create obedient citizens of the Third Reich. On weekends students went on camping, hiking, and marching outings, but during the week members of the Hitler Youth were trained in military and civil service operations.[xxvii] Young men had more intense military training than younger boys, and girls engaged in an entirely different category of training, domestic engineering. In general, though, the training they received was intended to shape them into passionate, loyal, and productive citizens of the Third Reich. The Hitler Youth groups were the first step in ensuring Germany’s victory in World War II as well as success in the next thousand year Reich. The ideology of the Hitler Youth organization as a whole can be summed up in the refrain of its theme song:

Our banner leads us ahead!

We March into the future, man by man,

We march for Hitler through night and distress

With the banner of youth for freedom and bread.

Our banner leads us ahead.

Our banner is the new age!

And our banner leads us into eternity!

Our banner is greater than death![xxviii]

Throughout their years of involvement in the Hitler Youth, both boys and girls were submerged in ideology that taught them to believe that their country, their race, and their Fuhrer were worth more than their lives, and this ideology was at the core of all Hitler Youth activities. Yet, it was the official training activities of the separate boys’ and girls’ Hitler Youth groups that best displayed the Nazi intentions for Germany’s youth.

Boys and girls experienced different types of training that were circumscribed by gender and the skills they learned in the Hitler Youth were intended to prepare them for life in the new Nazi government. Both groups, though, were trained to support and sustain the Third Reich through conflict or prosperity. Boys were the most rigorously prepared for the new order since they would later be the soldiers responsible for fighting for the Reich. For a firsthand account of Hitler Youth military training, the American reporter Kenneth Roberts visited Germany in 1934 on an assignment from the Saturday Evening Post. Mere hours after he arrived, he got his first taste of the Hitler Youth culture. His first encounter with the Hitler Youth occurred on his first night in the small German town of Julich. Roberts witnessed what he thought was an odd sight: a group of uniformed boys marching in perfect time through the town streets and then disbanding to their homes.[xxix] The next morning he was awakened by their melodic assembly and uniformed marching and spent the remainder of his trip learning all he could about the Hitler Youth. He saw many more marches and training operations, but it wasn’t until near the end of his tour of Germany that he realized the magnitude of the Hitler Youth operations.

German boys in the Hitler Youth were trained in all aspects of military life. Even the youngest members of Hitler Youth organizations were trained on the proper way to march, but as boys got older they were trained in more strenuous and strategic military operations. Just like all armed forces branches, the Hitler Youth was organized in a hierarchy. There was the “junior Jungvolk” for younger boys and the “Hitlerjugend” for older boys. Both were organized into army-like groups of squads, platoons, companies, etc.[xxx] Alfons Heck, a famous member of the Hitler Youth, remembers the activities of the group, before the beginning of World War II, being much like Boy Scouts activities: “We had two rallies a week, usually on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and often a parade on Sunday… Team sports were always emphasized, and there seemed to be some sports festival every month. In the summer, we often went on camping trips.”[xxxi] Heck also mentions, though, that included in these rallies, parades, team sports, and camping trips were war games, movies filled with Nazi idealism, and military-style drills and marches.

Young boys also underwent intense and specialized military training in Hitler Youth camps. Kenneth Roberts was able to investigate firsthand and report on one such camp in Trebbin, Germany, about forty kilometers southwest of Berlin. Roberts had to apply for special permission to see this site, but was given an enthusiastic tour of the areas where boys were trained in building glider planes before they were instructed on flying them. Roberts points out that while these camps are doing an exceptional job providing vocational training as well as giving boys a safe and productive place to spend their time after school, this camp, along with all other Nazi operations, had only one fundamental motivation; its main goal was to “provide Germany with thousands and hundreds of thousands of boys qualified to enter an airplane factory tomorrow…. [or] be made into efficient pilots in record-breaking time.”[xxxii] Just like Hitler’s emphasis on new media was really a pitch for his own propaganda, his mandatory Hitler Youth membership requirement was really a large-scale compulsory military training operation. This military operation was not only for the present health and security of Germany, but more importantly it was for the future security of the Reich.

Alfons Heck, probably one of today’s most well known members of the Hitler Youth, recalls in his memoirs and interviews, which Eleanor Ayer republishes in her book Parallel Journeys, both practical and ideological aspects of life in the Hitler Youth.[xxxiii] Heck joined the Hitler Youth at age ten and five months later was chosen to be one of two representatives for his district at the Nuremberg Party Congress in the fall of 1938.[xxxiv] Like the other Hitler Youth members, Alfons Heck’s participation in Hitler Youth activities increased with the beginning of World War II in 1939, despite his family’s lack of support for the movement. In his town of Wittlich, Germany, the Hitler Youth were in charge of ensuring that everyone complied with night time blackout rules, and they fulfilled their duties with great zeal. Heck and his comrades also enthusiastically supported the Nazi party in their invasion of Russia and in their increasing use of Jews as slave labor.[xxxv]

Heck’s zealous support of the Fuhrer was only strengthened between 1942 and 1944, the time he names as “the two best years of my life,” when he graduated to the upper division of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) exactly three years after he was initially sworn into the Jungvolk (younger division of the Hitler Youth).[xxxvi] Heck was even given the opportunity to join the most elite class of the Hitler Youth—the junior Air Force—which he reluctantly accepted and was immediately ordered to report to a glider training camp in the summer of 1942 to begin his training. This flight training, which he excelled at, ousted former dreams of becoming a priest and replaced them with the passionate ambition to follow the advise of a teacher and join the Luftwaffe.[xxxvii] The next summer, after a year at home learning how to use a vast array of weaponry, Heck returned to his flight training camp and attained the highest flight rating the junior Air Force offered. Only months after he returned home from his second summer of junior Air Force training, at the age of sixteen, he became the leader of over 150 young men who were sent to be the first defense against the allied forces at the “West Wall,” German western front.[xxxviii] Heck eventually rose in ranks, commanded greater numbers of boys, and was even privileged enough to attend a meeting with Hitler in which he was reminded of his unparalleled task of protecting the fatherland.[xxxix]

Heck’s life story continues, ending with capture by the Allies and finally immigration to Canada, but it was his time as a leader in the Hitler Youth that has the most profound impact on his life as well as gives the most critical insight into the Hitler Youth experience. After the summer of 1941, which Heck spent running fundraising operations for the German war effort in Russia in the coming winter, neither the German army’s highly public failure to reach Moscow and dire situation en route to the Ukraine did not deter Heck or his comrades from proclaiming their full devotion to their fearless leader.[xl] Even when Hitler’s new Jewish laws caused him to lose his best childhood friend and his family began to doubt the wisdom of the Fuhrer’s choice to send Germany to war with Poland, Heck did not doubt his beloved Fuhrer.[xli] Heck, like many other Hitler Youth members of all ranks, felt a greater obligation to be faithful to their Fuhrer than the obligation to be faithful to their families. It was this blind, enthusiastic devotion that earned him a position as a Hitler Youth commander. Heck reflects on his beginnings as a commander by saying: “At sixteen I, too, had become tough and hardened. I loved my position of authority…. That power would soon increase by leaps and bounds.”[xlii] His devotion to the war and Nazi success would increase all the more and his swift rise in the ranks of the Hitler Youth made him an exceptional example of the intended result of Hitler Youth indoctrination and training.

Alfons Heck’s life clearly demonstrates the Hitler Youth’s twofold purpose of creating effective agents of the state and replacing family as the primary social unit of society. This was achieved with overwhelming ease while simultaneously reprogramming boys in the Hitler Youth to operate in a militaristic mental system that was numb to violence. Heck was, like all other children his age, fully immersed in National Socialist ideology from the age of five when he entered kindergarten, and never knew a time without Nazi controls. From Heck’s perspective, the Nazis, led by Hitler, were the rightful leaders of Germany and would lead them to certain Aryan domination. In Heck’s autobiography, republished in Eleanor Ayer’s book, he recalls his emotional response to Hitler’s speech to 80,000 Hitler Youth members at Nuremburg in 1938 reminding them of their destiny to rule the future. Heck recalls: “For minutes on end, we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!” From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler mind, body, and soul.”[xliii] For the remainder of Heck’s young life, the Fuhrer could do no wrong in his eyes, and this emotional response is exactly what Hitler intended. Hitler’s rallies, speeches, and increasing dependence upon the assistance of the Hitler Youth were meant to instill in blooming Nazis an unquestioning devotion to authority that resulted in blind yet impassioned loyalty that was not void of heroic actions.

The League of German Girls had goals that were complimentary to the goals of the boy’s Hitler Youth groups, but aimed to achieve a different end for young women. Young men were trained to be agents of the state who were fully immersed in the political ideology and processes of the government, unaffected by violence, and ready to defend the purity of the Aryan race and their beloved Fuhrer at any moment. Women, on the other hand, were, primarily trained to be mothers. Very few women were ever privileged enough to be appointed leadership positions in the Third Reich and even the most notable, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, was only given leadership over other women within the League of German Maidens (BDM). Scholtz-Klink, in a speech to a group of Nazi women provokes them to forsake the 1920’s view of motherhood as a burden and “awaken once again the sense of the divine, to make the calling to motherhood the way through which the German woman will see her calling to be mother of the nation. She will then not live her life selfishly, but rather in service to her people.”[xliv] She implores women, young and old, to remember that being a mother was not simply about bearing children, but also caring for the future of the nation as a whole. Scholtz-Klink urges women to view hospital work, a factory job, participating in the labor service, or going abroad a way in which one could perform well as “one of the Führer's little helpers.”[xlv] She ends her speech by encouraging women to be strong, and to find that strength in selflessly giving their lives, and working hard to build a future for Germany in a time of war. Her provocative language was supported by programs and activities of the BDM which promoted motherhood and feminine strength to young women.

While the boys division of the Hitler Youth was not revolutionary in its military focus, nor was it unusual for boys to belong to politically supported youth groups, the girls’ participation in the BDM was truly revolutionary. Before the National Socialist reconstruction of education and familial traditions, most girls, especially of lower classes, were limited to a primary school education and a small, domestic sphere of influence.[xlvi] The BDM offered girls of all social backgrounds a chance to participate in political, athletic, and educational activities in which boys had been participating for many years. The social aspect of the activities was indeed revolutionary, but the educational content the girls in the BDM encountered was simultaneously revolutionary and historically conservative. Through BDM activities, girls exercised regularly and were educated in proper hygiene, sexual orientation and attitudes, and political propaganda. This educational curriculum, which was a mixture of traditional conservatism and revolutionary ideas, gave members a “sense of national responsibility: fit girls would develop into healthy women, bear healthy children, and therefore preserve the future health of the nation.”[xlvii] For girls, education in health and fitness was the most important since they were to be the “bearers of the next generation.”[xlviii] Jutta Rudiger, a BDM leader from 1937-1945, helped Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth, expand the physical fitness aspect of the BDM in order to help young women properly develop. This physical fitness aspect mainly focused on gymnastics, which, along with being excellent exercise, helped young women grow in harmony and grace.[xlix] Along with simply being fit and healthy, women were continually warned of the dangers of mixing, or even interacting, with those who were inferior since they were responsible for maintaining a pure bloodline. [l] In the educational structure of the BDM, the future focus of the Nazi party is overwhelmingly evident.

In the BDM, girls were taught how to preserve themselves to further the future of the Reich, but they were also strongly encouraged to pursue marriage and motherhood. Young women in the BDM were taught by their leaders that marriage was a “dutiful, moral obligation” and they were to pursue motherhood within their marriages.[li] Contrary to popular perversions of the acronym BDM, which loosely translate to “squeeze me, laddie,” “make use of German girls,” and “league of German milk cows,” girls were taught purity and in no way encouraged to pursue sexual relationships outside of marriage. In fact, engaging in extra-marital sexual relationships, openly expression of ones sexuality, and even general sexual discussion was considered highly inappropriate.[lii] Through the BDM focus on marriage and motherhood, contradictions in the Nazi’s view of women become very obvious; the BDM was revolutionary in their admission of women into the “public” sphere through activities in the BDM, but the BDM activities and education thrust them once again into the private sphere of domesticity where the Nazi’s intended to keep them.

To aid girls in one day running their own households, participation in the Women’s Labor Service was made mandatory for young, unmarried women in January of 1939. The Labor Force had been an effective tool of the German government for many years before Hitler assumed power and it had done much to reduce unemployment and increase services, such as roads, in Germany. But, as he had done with radio and youth groups, Hitler used the labor force as an opportunity to further indoctrinate and train women in household and agricultural work.[liii] Unlike most of the BDM activities, the Women’s Labor Force had very practical applications and it was the only area in which women had any physical impact on the war effort in Germany. These young women worked in either agricultural or domestic roles and were housed at camps where they were educated in household management. While they did offer some aid the communities in which they were situated, the focus of the women’s service was still to be primarily on education, and therefore their impact was less than significant.[liv]

While the Women’s Labor Service did not have a significant impact on increasing farm or factory production, it did prove that the BDM’s ideological education was successful. Jill Stephenson in an article discussing the Women’s Labor Force claims that through women’s participation in the labor force it became evident that “the only training which they consistently had was in “political education,” and that did not help to bring in the harvest or release male labor for the armed forces.”[lv] Even though Germany desperately needed more laborers in agriculture and manufacturing, the Women’s Labor Force’s focus on educating the next generation of German wives and mothers made productivity a second priority. The main priority was twofold: education and health. Stephenson adds, at the end of her discussion of the unproductive nature of the Women’s Labor Service, that health was always the primary concern of BDM leaders for the women participating in the labor service, since “[women] were, after all, to become the mothers of a new generation of Germans.”[lvi]

Women were also fed propaganda that was tailored to strengthen their resolve to become good mothers and housewives. The publication Frauen Warte, translated literally “women wait,” was a National Socialist magazine published on a biweekly basis that dealt with issues of motherhood, domestic activities, fashion, and later, the feminine responsibility in the war effort. Calvin College, a Christian college in Michigan, has made a few translated articles available online. Most of the translated articles focused on the primary responsibility of women to be mothers, but also charged women to go to work if it would best benefit their country. In a 1940 issue, what seems to be a benevolent story about an overwhelmed newlywed turns out to be a plug for the “Reich School for Brides,” which was a six-week course for women exiting the working world and entering the domain of housewife. The anecdote follows the overwhelmed woman’s thought process in recalling all the things she learned from the school—cooking, sewing, shopping, budgeting, and childcare—and how invaluable such an education was to her.[lvii]

In articles from of the earlier volumes of the Frauen Warte the subjects are more idealistic and educational than they are practical applications or advertisements. In an article in the second volume of the magazine, the author instructed her readers that “the task of the woman is to replace the spirit of money and of self-interest with the spirit of the mother and the farmer. With this spirit, we women will be able to spread warmth and depth anywhere that our jobs may place us.”[lviii] The author also reminded women that their efforts and attitudes at home directly affected their families, and even more importantly, the state. She states: “The education of the youth is in our hands. Though our spirit, they become part of the nation.”[lix] She is, through this tailored publication, immersing women in the Nazi ideology that their only true place, supposedly a place of unparalleled importance, was at home educating their children in the ways of National Socialism. An article in a later publication explicitly lays out the educational reforms of National Socialism and informs them of the “four iron pillars of the national school and educational system… race, military training, leadership, and religion.”[lx] This article was essentially study guide for German mothers to ensure that they were correctly instructing their children in Nazi ideology. While Frauen Warte was not necessarily intended for young women who were in the BDM, its outline for appropriate feminine behavior in the National Socialist system gives a broader context in which to understand the BDM’s transmission of these same ideals to young women.

While Frauen Wart was an important source of ideological education for women in Nazi German, the most influential ideological education women received was that of the BDM and the Jungmadel, the junior BDM. In her book, The Shame of Survival, Ursula Mahlendorf presents her experience in the Hitler Youth and the impact it had on the rest of her life. Now a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, Mahlendorf spent all of her childhood in Germany and offers an important perspective on the experience of childhood in Nazi Germany. Mahlendorf was born in Strehlen, Germany, now Strzelin Poland, on October 24, 1929. Economic calamities and the death of both grandmothers and her father thrust her, her mother, and brothers into near poverty by the time she turned eight. Mahlendorf’s mother worked as a seamstress to provide for her children, but she had to rely on the assistance of her unmarried brother and distant cousins for childcare during school vacations by the time World War II began.[lxi] At the age of ten, Mahlendorf joined the Hitler Youth where she “absorbed the national rationalization game like a sponge.”[lxii]

For Mahlendorf, and other girls involved in the BDM, graduation to leadership positions was a dream that exhibited the effectiveness of their absorption of ideological instruction. In July of 1941, Mahlendorf was chosen to begin training to be a Jungmadel leader upon her graduation to the BDM. She successfully completed the training and became a group leader in the spring of 1942.[lxiii] After being a group leader for nearly two tears she was selected to attend a teacher training program in Obernigk about twelve miles from her hometown.[lxiv] Her education there was interrupted when debilitating headaches sent her to a hospital for surgery then a health spa for recovery, but she was able to return to her training after a few months until the Russian invasion ended the program and she returned home.[lxv] After traveling to the Silesian mountain town of Lomnitz in 1945 with her mother and younger brother, Mahlendorf left her family to attend Red Cross training and upon it’s completion was sent to the infant ward in a mountain lodge villa, which had been converted into a hospital, where she and her BMD comrades were utilized as mother-baby nurses.[lxvi] The doctors and the SS men that guarded the facility vacated and left the nurses and new mothers to fend for themselves if and when the Russians attacked. Before an attack occurred BDM leaders moved the girls to an army hospital nearby which they soon abandoned when the Russians overtook the area. Mahlendorf eventually made it back to her hometown, which was soon under Russian occupation, and was gradually reunited with her family.[lxvii]

Before Mahlendorf became a leader in the BDM, was accepted into the teaching program, or was deployed as a state caregiver, she first had to absorb and enthusiastically act upon the ideology she had been fed since childhood. She was first introduced to Nazi ideology in nursery school, but doesn’t recall noticing anything in particular until Kristallnacht in November 1938, the first widespread Nazi effort to involve the public to destroying Jewish synagogues, businesses, and stores.[lxviii] Mahlendorf believes, though, that it was through school, where her teachers preached Nazi ideology, love for the Fuhrer, and closely followed the advances of the German army up until 1943 that she came to fully support the Nazi’s and their involvement in World War II.[lxix] One particular school memory that stands out for Mahlendorf is her teacher’s replacement of the traditional saying “God protect this house,” that hung above their classroom door, with the Nazi slogan, “You are nothing, Your people are everything.” Her response to this slogan shows just how entrenched in Nazi ideology students became at a young age. Mahlendorf states: “I did believe that I was nothing, unimportant, as the sign in our classroom said. All that mattered was the fatherland.”[lxx] Her Hitler Youth participation, though, helped combat the feeling of nothingness while still supporting her love for the fatherland.

Mahlendorf, like others who were in the Hitler Youth, discovered through continued education after the war that much of what she learned in the Hitler Youth and did through its activities was much more significant than she understood as a child. The most striking example of this is the work Mahlendorf and her BDM comrades did at the converted mountain lodge villa. She and her comrades found it odd, and even infuriating, that the women refused to care for their babies.[lxxi] Mahlendorf later came to believe, through her research, that this “hospital” was actually an facility in which Hitler’s eugenics program, Lebensborn, was being tested. Lebensborn, which was never officially confirmed as being fully operational, encouraged the forcible impregnation of pure Aryan women by superior SS officers to produce children that would essentially become agents of the state when they began schooling,. Mahlendorf was appalled that “We… had been their stooges. No one had explained to us what it all meant, and we, obedient as we had been taught to be, had asked no questions.”[lxxii] The willing and unquestioning participation of these young girls clearly displays the effectiveness of the indoctrination they received in their years of Hitler Youth training. It also shows the two-fold nature of their training; they were trained to be effective caregivers, but they were also trained to be unquestioning agents of the state just like the children they were sent to care for.

A comparison of the day-to-day activities of the Hitler Youth and the BDM shows the stark contrasts between the male and female experience in the Hitler Youth. First, one must look at the overall experience for Hitler Youth in general. Boys and girls both marched in the streets, participated in sporting events to promote physical fitness, were educated in racial purity, and had at least token interactions with the war effort. These obvious commonalities can be misleading, though. It is important to see that both the male and female branches of the Hitler Youth were created to form a foundation upon which the Third Reich would be built. It is equally important to see that young men and young women had completely different roles and experiences in the Third Reich. Looking at their separate training programs and activities clearly displays that keeping boys and girls in separate groups during childhood and educating them in their specific roles in the Reich led them into their appropriate social spheres in adulthood. These spheres were completely separate and were possibly more unequal than conventional gender roles. Hitler, beginning in the ideological training of the Hitler Youth, raised men to the status of defenders and agents of the Reich while confining women to the restricted role of bearing children who would ultimately become the property of the state.

A cursory review of all the firsthand accounts and educational materials produced by the Hitler Youth suggests that the Hitler Youth was nothing more than an overly-zealous generation of particularly dedicated boy scouts. But when these accounts and materials are paired with Hitler’s own words, in speeches and Mein Kampf, the political instruction children were subjected to, and contemporary scholarly analysis, a more sobering reality emerges. The intended end of the Hitler Youth was, much like the boy scouts, to produce good citizens who were well educated both in practical applications as well as socially. But, where the Hitler Youth differs from the boy scouts or other well known youth groups, is in its definition of a good citizen. Boy scouts sell popcorn, learn how to build fires in the rain, and help elderly people cross the street; members of the Hitler Youth, however, learn how to maintain racial purity, shoot machine guns and launch grenades, fly airplanes, and firmly believe that their utmost purpose in life is to serve their Fuhrer at all costs. Also, while there are obvious differences in the boy scouts and girl scouts, the differences between the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were more fundamental and dramatic. Both of these programs, though, served Hitler in starting from scratch, with a young generation, and building his thousand year Reich on their foundation. His plan for young boys was to mold them into agents of the Reich who, at any moment, could serve him in one or many military positions. His plan for girls, however, was to protect and preserve the pure Aryan race; if Hitler had discovered a method to continue his perfect race without the use of women, he probably would have enthusiastically used it.

At it’s core, the Hitler Youth was just like anything else utilized by the Nazi party in the Third Reich: it’s purpose was to build for the future and prosperity of the Reich and protect the purity of the Aryan race. It was a highly gendered movement that embraced a dangerous and ultimately deadly form of social engineering that has broad implications for the post-war era. It’s revolutionary admission of young women into public life through the BDM, though, is a significant aspect and deserves a study of its own. In fact, research of many of the aspects of the Hitler Youth, such as its roots in the Wandervogel, its hierarchical structure mirroring that of the army, its authority over schools, its uses as a recruitment base for the German armed forces, and its efforts to grow ideologically and physically healthy young women to raise the next generation of Aryans, could fill books of their own. But looking at its roots, its structure, its authority over schools, and its separate intentions for boys and girls in one study displays how invasive its ideology was. Nazi ideology required a new generation that knew nothing of the German democratic past, therefore the Hitler Youth was created. In order for the Hitler Youth to be effected, schools must not interfere with its activities, and therefore its leaders infiltrated the German education system. In order to ensure that the next generation would be pure, safe, and obedient, Hitler’s gravest concerns, girls were instructed to remain pure and bear many children, boys were taught how to fight, and both were immersed in ideology from a young age. By looking at all of these things as a whole, it is easy to see how first Hitler, through the revolutionary Hitler Youth, built the unified scaffolding of the Third Reich, and then used separate but complimentary gender roles as a scalpel to once again place men an women into conventional roles in separate social spheres.

[i] Geglen, Willhelm and Don Gregory. “Babe in Arms.” World War II. Oct/Nov2008. Vol. 23. Issue 4. p.48-53. 1 October 2009. http://proxy.kennesaw.edu:3224/login?url=http:// proxy.kennesaw.edu:2775/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=34687967&site=ehost-live. Pg. 49

[ii] Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow. New York. Scholastic. 2005. Pg. 10

[iii] Geglen, 52

[iv] Roberts, Kenneth. “Hitler Youth.” Saturday Evening Post. 26 May 1934. Vol. 206. Issue 48. p8-104. 1 October 2009. http://proxy.kennesaw.edu:3224/login?url=http:// proxy.kennesaw.edu:2775/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=18147189&site=ehost-live. pg.100

[v] Ibid, 100.

[vi] Ibid, 101.

[vii] Ibid, 104.

[viii] Roberts, Kenneth. “Hitler Youth (Part 2).” Saturday Evening Post. 2 June 1934. Vol. 206 Issue 49, p23-38. 1 October 2009. http://proxy.kennesaw.edu:3224/login?url=http:// proxy.kennesaw.edu:2775/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=18148033&site=ehost-live. pg. 23.

[ix] Ibid, 30. Some of these former leaders as well as senior members found themselves in concentration camps and their infrastructure was completely destroyed. The Professional Youth, another one of the incorporated bodies, eagerly joined and became a large part of the Nazi Labor Front.

[x] Ibid, 30.

[xi] Ibid, 32.

[xii] Bartoletti, 35

[xiii] Horn, Daniel. “Hitler Youth and Educational Decline in the Third Reich.” History of Education Quarterly. Vol. 16, No.4. Winter 1976. P. 425-447. 20 October 2009. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/367724. Pg.428.

[xiv] Bartoletti, 39.

[xv] Bartoletti, 40.

[xvi] Bartoletti, 42.

[xvii] Kunzer, Edward J. “’Education’ Under Hitler.” Journal of Educational Sociology. Vol. 13, No. 3. November 1939. P. 140-147. 1 October 2009. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2262306. Pg.146.

[xviii] Ibid, 142.

[xix] Ibid, 142-143.

[xx] Ibid, 144.

[xxi] Horn, 426.

[xxii] Ibid, 426.

[xxiii] Ibid, 427, 429.

[xxiv] Ibid, 428-429

[xxv] Ibid, 429.

[xxvi] Ibid, 430.

[xxvii] Bartoletti, 29.

[xxviii] Mahlendorf, Ursula. The Shame of Survival. Pennsylvania State University Press. Universty Par, PA. 2009. Pg. 101.

[xxix] Roberts (26 May), 9.

[xxx] Heck, Alfons. “A Child of Hiter: Growing up in the Third Reich.” 1 February 1983. Boston Pheonix. 30 January 2008. 1 October 2009. http://thephoenix.com/ Boston/News/55446-child-of-Hitler/. Pg. 3.

[xxxi] Ibid, 3.

[xxxii] Roberts (2 June), 38.

[xxxiii] Ayer, Helen, with Alfons Heck and Helen Waterford. Parallel Journeys. Aladdin Paperbacks. New York. 1995. Ayer interviews both Heck and a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Helen Waterford in order to display the parallel yet directly opposite experiences of Hitler Youth and Jewish children in Nazi Germany. In the book, Ayer directly quotes large sections of Heck’s autobiography and puts it in context with her own research. She begins with Heck’s early years through his capture after the fall of Germany and ending with his move from Germany to Canada, while, alternating chapter by chapter, following Waterford’s life from her teenage years in Frankfurt Germany through her liberation at Kratzau, ending with her immigration to the United States. Information from this source cited in this paper is solely from the excerpts of Heck’s autobiography, unless otherwise noted.

[xxxiv] Heck, 2.

[xxxv] Ayer, 45, 53-55. Heck claims that his understanding, at the time, of Hitler’s “Final Solution” was simply more forced labor. He states on pg. 54 “We were desperate for laborers, so why would we kill people who were able to work for us?”

[xxxvi] Ibid, 71.

[xxxvii] Ibid, 73-74.

[xxxviii] Ibid, 77, 111.

[xxxix] Ibid, 120.

[xl] Ibid, 56-57.

[xli] Ibid, 25-26, 58.

[xlii] Ibid, 114.

[xliii] Ibid, 23.

[xliv] "Deutsch sein — heißt stark sein. Rede der Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink zum Jahresbeginn (To Be German Means to be Strong: Speech by the Reich Women's Leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink)." N,S. Frauen-Warte Volume 4. 1936. pgs 501-502. 10 November 2009. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ scholtz-klink2.htm. The acronym BDM stands for Bund Deutscher Mädel, the German translation of “League of German Girls” and will be used in its place for the rest of the paper.

[xlv] Ibid.

[xlvi] Pine, Lisa. “Girls in Uniform.” History Today. March 1999. Volume 49. Issue 3. Pgs.24-30. 20 October 2009. http://proxy.kennesaw.edu:3224/login?url=http:// proxy.kennesaw.edu:2775/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=1620237&site=ehost-live. pg. 25.

[xlvii] Ibid, 25.

[xlviii] Ibid, 26.

[xlix] Steinhoff, Johannes, Peter Peehel, and Dennis Showalter. Voices from the Third Reich: An Oral History. Da Capo Press, Inc. New York. 1994. pgs. xxvii-xxviii.

[l] Pine, 26.

[li] Ibid, 27.

[lii] Ibid, 27-28.

[liii] Ibid, 29.

[liv] Stephenson, Jill. “Women’s Labor Service in Nazi Germany.” Cambridge University Press. Central European History. Volume 15. Number 3. (September 1982). pgs. 241-265. 20 October 2009. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545961. Pg. 243.

[lv] Ibid, 244.

[lvi] Ibid, 260.

[lvii] "Gelernt ist gelernt: Mit Bildbericht aus der Reichsbräuter- und Heimmütterschule Husbäke in Oldenburg(An Illustrated Report from the Reich Brides' and Housewives' School at Husbäke in Oldenburg).” NS Frauen Warte. Volume 8. Issue 22. Number 2. May 1940. 10 November 2009. http://www.calvin.edu/ academic/cas/gpa/fw8-22b.htm.

[lviii] Günther, Erna. "Wir Frauen im Kampf um Deutschlands Erneuerung (We Women in the Struggle For Germany’s Renewal)." NS Frauen Warte. Volume 2. Number 17. 25 February 1934. p. 507. 10 November 2009. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/ cas/gpa/ fw2-17.htm.

[lix] Ibid.

[lx] “Die Erziehungsgrundsätze…”

[lxi] Mahlendorf 82, 85.

[lxii] Ibid, 85.

[lxiii] Ibid, 112, 135.

[lxiv] Ibid, 162-163.

[lxv] Ibid, 171-175, 181-182.

[lxvi] Ibid, 189-190,193-195.

[lxvii] Ibid, 198, 212, 216.

[lxviii] Ibid, 62, 65-68.

[lxix] Ibid, 82-83.

[lxx] Ibid, 83.

[lxxi] Ibid, 195-196.

[lxxii] Ibid, 198.

PS. I was advised to add a note stating the following: This is my original research, supported by the documents listed above. The work has never been published so is not a "peer reviewed" or "scholarly" source. However, if it assists in further research, please use the following citation:

Hollis (Wood), Emily. School and Hitler Youth: The Scaffold and Scalpel of the Third Reich. November 2009. Written under the guidance of Dr. Katherine Lewis, Kennesaw State University.

My chains are gone, I am set free

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Thursday, April 19, 2012

In honor of those whose lives were forever changed...