Report on DJ & HJ I (1/3)
Walter Felscher (walter.felscher@UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE)
Mon, 3 Nov 1997 18:42:24 +0100
Preface
Last February, a young lady asked here about memories and information
concerning the NS youth movement HJ = 'Hitler Jugend'. I started to write a
longish reply which, in the end, I did not complete. More recently, some
American schoolchildren have asked more specific questions on this matter,
and so I shall publish, in three sections, the first part of my report
as it has been resting in my files since March.
The report is based on my own memories, but I have tried to avoid
personal story telling and attempted to give a historical and social
analysis instead. The purpose of this presentation is not to answer the
necessarily naive questions of schoolchildren, but to enable their
teachers to acquire an understanding of those years, with their social and
administrative/governmental environment so completely different from what
we are accustomed to now. To understand the past it will not do to simply
depict it from today's point of view which, of course, leaves it only to
appear as most unpleasant, if not horrible.
*
Youth organizations earlier this century
Youth, or really boys', organizations, with uniforms, field
games, leadership and submilitary paraphernalia were not new
by 1930 ; as organizations some of the earliest may have
been in England the Boy Scouts, founded by Baden-Powell in
1907 , and in Germany the S(ozialistische)A(arbeiter)J(ugend),
founded in the same year, though there is a somewhat longer
tradition of youth movements, in Germany particularly that
of the 'Wandervogel'. In general, these movements were
viewed positively: keeping the boys from the streets,
preventing their natural incliniation to develop into
subcriminal gangs, filling them with socially positive
values instead, and diverting, by directing them towards
activities in sports, too early sexual interests. In such
organizations, young boys were led and directed by older
boys, and youth appeared to be led by youth (Baldur
v.Schirach: Jugend muss durch Jugend gefuehrt werden), not
by the stuffy old men it experienced as teachers in school.
Of course, a certain involvement of grown-ups was necessary
just to set up the organizational aspects, or to provide
some funding, say to acquire the tents in which to sleep
during a weekend's outing, or an entire week's stay in a
quiet valley during the summer vacations. And as it were
the grown-ups who defined the socially positive values, it
was only natural that the representatives of value systems,
be they churches or the various political parties, stood it
the background and, one by one, created their youth
organizations, educating towards the values for which they
stood.
Such was the situation by 1930 : Catholic youth movements
whose boys would celebrate mass together, Lutheran movements
who would pray together, conservative-national movements
splintered into various sections, the SAJ from the
social-democratic party, a communist youth movement wearing
blue shirts as its uniform, and the NS youth movement, the
Hitler-Jugend or HJ , wearing brown shirts. Clearly, the
claim was shallow that youth here was led by youth; to the
larger part, the decision to join a particular movement was
influenced by class and parental environment, though there
was a quite small number of cases where the choice was
influenced by schoolmates and as an expression of opposition
against parental values.
Particularly the communist and the NS youth movements were
under direct influence of their supporting parties, using
their members for minor party activities such as the
streetwise distribution of election propaganda into people's
mailboxes. By 1932, the enmity between the communist and
the NS party had heated up to such an extent that, in larger
towns such as Berlin, the two fought each other not only with
bats and chains, but also with firearms, resulting in civil
war like situations in which the governmental force of
order, the police, could only stand by helplessly. On one of
these occasions, a boy from the HJ, Herbert Norkus, was
killed by his communist adversaries, giving to the HJ the
chance to celebrate its first martyr.
[Aside 1 . There is a famous movie, "Kuhle Wampe" made
1931/32 upon a script of Bertolt Brecht by the director
Slatan Dudow, about the communist youth movement, its daily
adventures, and ending with a depiction of one of its large
meetings in the Mueggelberge. Of course, the film was not
shown under Hitler, but was locked away in the archives.
But after 1945 it remained locked away, now in the archives
of the DDR, and only in the eighties it finally was shown
in the West at least. An old film, of course in black and
white, no tone for spoken words. And watching it, it became
clear why, after 1945, it was not shown to the generations
who had experienced the HJ : the beautiful shots of boys,
running through the dangerous streets, or sitting peacefully
around the campfires in the evening: they could not depict
that their shirts were BLUE, not BROWN ! And so it could as
well have been viewed as a propaganda film for the HJ . Or
created unwelcome thoughts about the apparent similarities
between the communist and the NS organizations.]
The HJ from 1933 onwards
Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933 ; he did
not have a parliamentary majority, but was moved into his
position by certain, originally conservative politicians who
believed that, although being the minority in a in a
coalition government, they could tame him and make use of
him. Yet a few weeks later, having taken hold of the police
forces and having eliminated by ruthless persecution its
only serious enemies, the communists, Hitler's government
dissolved and interdicted all political parties and
organizations (even the conservative veteran's association),
as well as all those value-educating youth organizations
different from the HJ - with the exception of a few Catholic
youth groups. Members of non-communist youth organizations
were encouraged to join the HJ, and partly by opportunism,
partly from the belief that a new start should be attempted,
the HJ's membership soared withoin a few months from around
100 000 to more than a million.
Three years later, by december 1936, the by now mock-parliament
was made to pass a law, making membership in the HJ obligatory
for all boys and girls between 10 and 18 years of age. From
that time on, therefore, whether somebody wanted to join or
not, whether the parents approved or not, was not a question
anymore. I remember a boy who early in March 1941, half a
year before he turned ten, found a tiny, hand-pencilled slip
of paper in his parents mailbox, saying that he should
report next wednesday at 14.00 at a certain schoolyard for
his first HJ-exercise. He showed it to his parents, but his
father had bought already tickets for an acrobatics show
(in the 'Scala') for that particular wednesday and said he
needn't follow that summons. He did not, and on the friday
following that wednesday a new slip appeared in the mailbox,
asking him to appear next wednesday. Once more, his father
had planned already differently for that afternoon, and
again he did not follow the summons. Two days later, a new
notice was in the mailbox, this time printed and with his
name filled in; it said that, according to paragraph
so-and-so of the law such-and such, he was to appear next
wednesday - and if he should not then he would be
'polizeilich vorgefuehrt' - meaning that a policeman would
come and escort him there. This time, he went, as he would
do now in future.
I cannot describe life in the HJ when it was voluntary
before 1937; just as the boy above, I experienced it only
for the four years from March 1941 to April 1945 . Also, I
experienced it in one particular town: an industrial (hence
mainly proletarian) one of about 100 000 inhabitants,
situated in Northern Germany (and therefore without any
Catholic counterbalance). The particular social
relationships would have been different in a village, and
they might have differed otherwise in solidly Catholic parts
of the country. There were further differences of class,
unknown to the American reader and unknown also to German
readers having grown up during the last decades.
[ to be followed by (2/3) ]