Hitler Youth
by Michael H. Kater
Harvard University Press, 355 pp., $27.95
FACING DEFEAT AT THE HANDS of the Allies in the closing weeks of World War II, Adolf Hitler received, for purposes of boosting morale, a contingent of twenty teenage soldiers in his Reich chancellery bunker. The youngest was twelve years old, and all of them had already perpetrated atrocities against the Soviet army in defense of Berlin, for which they had been awarded the Iron Cross. As Michael Kater informs us in Hitler Youth, his riveting history of the Nazis' use of children, these were no ordinary youngsters but members of the Hitler Youth who were drafted for military duty in the waning days of the Third Reich.
Kater, a distinguished research professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the author of several important books on the social and cultural history of Nazi Germany, has written an indispensable study. Hitler Youth focuses on the methods used by the Nazis to indoctrinate young boys and girls--from ten to eighteen years old--to follow authority and sacrifice for Adolf Hitler. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, there were over 100,000 Nazi Youth. By December 1936, the numbers had reached 5.4 million, and by 1939 membership was compulsory for all teenagers.
The numbers, however, do not reflect the unpopularity of the "Hitler Jugend" among some German teenagers. Kater devotes a chapter to this relatively unknown phenomena, as he details the frequent street battles between youth gangs and the Hitler Youth. The author informs us, for example, that one gang, the Leipzig Meuten, used the slogan, "Beat the HJ wherever you come across them." At the height of World War II, the Leipzig Meuten were estimated to number about 1,500 members.
But despite the existence of some dissidents, the reality was that most German teenagers were zealous members of the Hitler Youth, and they enthusiastically embraced the ideology and martial program of the Third Reich. Hitler's aim in creating the organization was to prepare soldiers to fight Germany's inevitable wars in the East, an objective which he shared with his inner circle from the moment he became chancellor in 1933. Much of the training for the Hitler Youth entailed the use of firearms, and, as Kater notes, weapon training sharpened the boys' attitudes for real-life combat. In addition to being groomed for warfare, the Hitler Youth were also trained to show little mercy for their enemies on the battlefield. In addition to military training, an integral feature of Hitler Youth education was to indoctrinate them to hate Jews.
Although some of the anti-Semitic attitudes German youth were exposed to originated in their homes and schools, joining the Hitler Youth reinforced these beliefs. Through a steady diet of propaganda as well as scheduled "educational" classes, the children were taught to view all Jews as evil. During routine camp and chapter meetings, older leaders taught the younger members that Jews were subhuman, reinforcing their indoctrination with Julius Streicher's semi-pornographic newspaper, Der Stürmer, which depicted ugly Jews with curly hair, always on the lookout for virginal-looking blond German women to seduce. Kater notes, "Those in the younger generation were steeped in this attitude and were socialized as little anti-Semites, who were not so little any more when they were called to fight in the war at age seventeen or less in 1944."
Anti-Semitism was also part of the education of girls in the League of German Girls (the "Bund Deutscher Madel"), the female side of the Hitler Youth. They were taught to believe that their responsibility required them to protect the eugenic purity of German virgins from the predatory designs of Jews. Der Stürmer was used to illustrate images of lustful Jewish doctors taking "advantage" of their young German female patients. One insidious issue of Streicher's paper depicts a German female in her Jewish doctor's office, and the caption reads, " . . . and then the door opens. The Jew appears. . . . Terrified, . . . she jumps up. Her eyes stare into the face of the Jewish doctor. And that face is the face of the Devil. In the middle of that Devil's face there sits a huge hooked nose. Behind the glasses glistens the eyes of a criminal. . . . 'Finally I've got you, little German girl.'"
When war broke out in September 1939, former Hitler Youth aged eighteen or older found themselves members of the Wehrmacht. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, many former members of the Hitler Youth were recruited by the SS and subsequently found themselves participating with enthusiasm in the mass killing of Jews. They were armed not only with weapons of war but also with ideological conviction. They carried into battle the belief that they were the master race and that Jews had no right to life. Kater cites the remarks of one former member of the Hitler Youth on the Russian front who wrote, "As one watches these people, one gets the impression that they really have no justification whatsoever to exist on God's earth."
The twenty teenagers who met with Hitler in his bunker towards the end of the war were a product of a system that taught unquestioned obedience. To meet Hitler in person was the fulfillment of a dream harbored by nearly all Hitler Youth boys and girls. This love and idolization of Hitler explains why some of these teenage soldiers engaged in suicide missions that veteran Wehrmacht soldiers would never have dared to attempt, such as allowing tanks to roll over them and detonating a grenade. In the nearly endless tally of Hitler's crimes, this destruction of a generation of German children must also find its place.
Jack Fischel is emeritus professor of history at Millersville University.