Children during the Holocaust by Heberer Patricia;

Author:Heberer, Patricia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AltaMira Press
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Lives of Others

“Aryan” Children and the Nazi Regime

The bulk of documentation featured in this book focuses on the lives and fates of children who fell victim to the policies of the National Socialists or their European Axis allies. This chapter reflects on the experiences and viewpoints of “Aryan” children growing up in Nazi Germany. The National Socialist government hoped to capture the imagination and loyalty of Germany’s younger generation. Accordingly, Nazi strategists shaped their youth policy in a way calculated to win young people to their principles and policies. Quite early in its development, the Nazi Party had initiated official organizations for the young, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, which served as conduits to ideological indoctrination and political mobilization. Both formal education and structured extracurricular activities were designed to cultivate the new “civic” virtues of obedience, self-sacrifice, and race consciousness. Nazi propagandists also hoped to win the hearts and minds of German youngsters. In an effort to inculcate an unreflecting political loyalty among the German public, young people became a particular focus of ideological instruction. Nazi propaganda confronted German children everywhere: in the classroom, on the playground, in their bedtime reading. And yet, even as Nazi authorities demanded subservience and allegiance from their youngest citizens, a segment of German youth clearly rejected their complete integration into the Nazi state. The nonconformity of many teens, such as the Edelweiss Pirates (Documents 7-4 through 7-6), suggests that the history of German children and adolescents under the swastika is less a story of uniformity than one of divergence and contradiction. The following documentation illustrates that German youth were at once the benefactors of Nazism and the heirs to its terrible legacy. Young Germans engaged in the daily activities of a country at war: they were its combatants and its targets. They were perpetrators and victims. German “Aryan” children experienced a radically different aspect of National Socialism than did young persecutees of its racialist policies; yet, as witnesses to its national transformation, its conquests, and its defeat, their views and perspectives have much to tell us about life under the Nazi dictatorship.

Youth Organizations in the Third Reich

From the movement’s inception, leaders of the National Socialist Party placed a high priority on winning the hearts and minds of German youth, whom they viewed as the future of the nation and hoped to mold to their purposes. The Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, or HJ) represented the party’s second oldest paramilitary organ, after its adult counterpart, the Storm Division (Sturmabteilung, or SA), upon which it was modeled. The organization began its existence as the Youth League of the Nazi Party (Jugendbund der NSDAP) in March 1922; it was restructured as the Greater German Youth Movement (Grossdeutsche Jugendbewegung) in 1924. In July 1926, this now official youth organization of the Nazi Party became the Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth (Hitler-Jugend, Bund Deutscher Arbeiterjugend), and was officially incorporated into the SA.

By 1930, the Hitler Youth had already recruited twenty-five thousand members.

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