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Hitler Youth
Learning About the Holocaust, 2001
From World History in Context
Hitlerjugend, or The Hitler Youth (HJ), was the National Socialists’ organization for children and young
adults. The HJ had its origins in the Jungsturm Adolf Hitler (Adolf HITLER Boys’ Storm Troop), an offshoot of
the SA (Sturmabteilung; Storm Troopers) that was founded in 1922 and changed its name to Hitlerjugend in
1926. Originally a movement for boys only, it began to admit girls in 1928 in a separate organization. In
1930, this organization became known as the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls; BDM).
In 1931, Baldur von Schirach was appointed Reich Youth Leader (Reichsjugend-führer) of the Nazi
movement. Schirach’s immediate goal was to bring the different youth organizations in the party under a
single authority. In addition to the BDM, these organizations included the League of Nazi Students and the
German Young Folk (Deutscher Jungvolk), which inducted youngsters at the age of ten. Schirach achieved
his goal when he was appointed Jugendführer des Deutschen Reiches (Youth Leader of the German Reich)
in June 1933. By 1935, the HJ was a huge organization, comprising 60 percent of the country’s youth.
Like the Deutscher Jungvolk, the HJ admitted children at the age of ten. Its membership was organized into
two age brackets, from ten to fourteen and from fourteen to eighteen. The organizational chart devised by
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Schirach followed the military pattern, involving squads, platoons, and companies. The companies were
within territorial formations based on districts that corresponded with the NAZI PARTY’S geographic divisions.
They were all subject to the authority of the Reich Youth Leadership.
The HJ and its organizational form were expressions of Hitler’s ideology, in which children represented the
reserve manpower that would ensure the continued existence of the “Thousand-Year Reich.” Nazi
educational doctrine was based on Hitler’s anti-intellectualism and on a preference for body building at the
expense of the mental and intellectual development of the individual. One of the guiding principles of Nazi
education was to keep young people in constant action and to constantly spur them to activism. This was
the system to which a boy was subjected from the moment he entered the HJ until he became a soldier or an
SS man. He was equipped not only with a uniform, but with a bayonet as well. When boys reached 19, they
were drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service), which stressed physical work and iron
discipline. Thousands of these youngsters were put to work on the land. As soon as they had completed the
compulsory term in the Labor Service, the young men enlisted in the armed forces. This process enabled
the Nazi party to control and supervise German youth from the ages of ten to twenty-one.
The objectives of the girls’ organization, the BDM, were based on becoming the Nazi ideal woman. The
values girls were to learn included obedience, performance of duty, self-sacrifice, discipline, and physical
self-control. Two-thirds of the time that girls spent in the BDM was taken up with sports and one-third with
ideology. German girls were taught that their primary role in life was to become mothers of genetically
healthy Aryan children, whom they would educate, in turn, in the spirit of National Socialism. The BDM
members were indoctrinated with “racial pride” and with the consciousness of being pure “German women”
who would shun any contact with Jews.
During the war, the BDM became increasingly involved in the war effort, at the expense of ideological
training. In the HJ, political and ideological indoctrination played a much larger role than in the BDM. The
activities in which the HJ members were engaged overshadowed the formal education that they were
receiving and estranged them from their families; quite often the youngsters became their family’s Nazi
propagandists—not to mention their ideological supervisors. The propaganda used for the implanting of
Nazi ideas also drew on the mass media, and sophisticated methods were employed to gain the support of
German youth for the HJ ideals. The film Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex) is a typical example of the
Nazi style of brainwashing. Produced in 1933, the film tells the life story of a boy who is strongly influenced
by Nazi ideas.
Many of the young men who were converted to Nazi ideology during their membership in the HJ absorbed
the poison of hatred through their training and activities. When they grew up, they became agents of the
“Final Solution”—murderers by conviction.
SUGGESTED RESOURCES
Dvorson, Alexa. The Hitler Youth: Marching Toward Madness. New York: Rosen Pub. Group, 1999.
Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth [videorecording]. Ambrose Video Publishing, 1991.
Heyes, Eileen. Children of the Swastika: The Hitler Youth. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1993.
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Keeley, Jennifer. Life in the Hitler Youth. San Diego: Lucent Books, 2000.
Rempel, Gerhard. Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Macmillan Reference USA, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale.
Source Citation
"Hitler Youth." Learning About the Holocaust: A Student's Guide. Ed. Ronald M.
Smelser. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2001. 97-99. World History
in Context. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
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