A Social History of the Third Reich by Richard Grunberger

Author:Richard Grunberger [Grunberger, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780226262
Google: dpE8Qa09ltsC
Published: 2013-04-11T02:33:42+00:00

18

Youth

In the young generation the regime found the population group that was the most malleable to its own purpose and one that returned the highest yield of self-sacrificing allegiance for the blandishment invested. The Nazis in opposition had been the part of Youth versus Age less by championing youthful causes than by uninhibited assault upon the staid Republic; when in power they instantly called off the age-war and managed to make their subsequent manipulation of the young serve two ends that were not readily reconcilable: liberating the full potential of juvenile aggressiveness, while at the same time impressing the adult public with the degree of discipline to which youth could be subjected.

Thus liberation and regimentation can be said to have formed the poles of the magnetic field in which German youth moved after 1933, a paradox that was finally exemplified by fifteen-year-old Hitler Youth soldiers, who were debarred from evening visits to the cinema on age grounds, barring the Red Army’s advance into the Reich.

Nazi liberation of youth took various forms: interposing the Hitler Youth amid family and school as a rival court of appeal, bestowing uniforms (and daggers) on all the young (but only on selected grown-ups), making children guide ill-adapted parents into the new age, and arousing expectations of an inheritance no previous generation had been promised.

Yet each of these glittering newly minted coins had its obverse: emancipation through the Hitler Youth meant a harsher form of tutelage; the ubiquity of uniforms spelt total uniformity; the child that had to guide its elders forsook child’s estate, and many hopeful inheritors eventually had a lifespan far briefer than their parents.

The Third Reich’s young people should not only be looked at under the aspect of family, school or Hitler Youth; work, too, was a predominant factor in their lives. Its predominance was borne out by the education statistics for 1938–9, which list 877,849 fourteen-year-old school leavers, 88,492 sixteen-year-old junior matriculators, and 45,150 candidates for the Abitur certificate;1 this meant that on average seventeen out of every twenty youngsters were educationally predestined for work as distinct from professional, civil service or academic careers. (For some of the fourteen-year-old school leavers, work was not a complete novelty, either, since child labour formed an integral part of agricultural production and of the cottage industries – such as garment-making, weaving or toymaking – which provided subsistence for up to a million people in economic backwaters.)*

In industry itself, child labour was banned (but factory inspectors could sanction the employment of youngsters of over ten years of age for up to four hours per week).2 Normal working-time for young persons (between fourteen and eighteen) amounted to forty-eight hours a week. It was obligatory to grant young employees one free afternoon per week, a measure which aroused a certain degree of opposition from employers. In the course of intensified industrial mobilization, young people were inevitably exploited more. A government decree on shift work in December 1938 stipulated that lads under sixteen could work until ten o’clock at

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