The Hitler Youth Law

On 1 December 1936 Adolf Hitler signed a short law on the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend), just four sections long. Its first sentence read: “All German youth within the territory of the Reich is united in the Hitler Youth.” The second section laid down that, outside the family home and school, young people were to be educated in the Hitler Youth “physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism for service to the nation and the national community”. The third entrusted this task to the Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP, who became a “supreme Reich authority” based in Berlin and directly subordinate to the Führer. The party’s youth organisation was thus raised to the rank of a state institution – the third pillar of education alongside the family and the school.

Some sources state that on this day Hitler “made membership of the Hitler Youth compulsory for all boys aged 10 to 18”. This is not quite accurate. The 1936 law declared that all young people “are” in the Hitler Youth, but it provided for no penalties and no obligation to enrol. Legally enforced service was introduced only by the implementing regulations of 25 March 1939. Moreover, it applied not only to boys but also to girls, who were organised in the organisation’s female branches.

From party offshoot to monopoly

The NSDAP’s first youth wing was founded in Munich in 1922 and was subordinate to the SA. After the Beer Hall Putsch it fell apart, and the name Hitler Youth was adopted in July 1926, at the party congress in Weimar, by an association of several youth groups led by Kurt Gruber. Until 1932 the HJ was a small, plebeian organisation whose members took part in street brawls with communists. The death of fifteen-year-old Herbert Norkus, killed in Berlin in January 1932, became the basis of the 1933 propaganda film Hitlerjunge Quex. According to estimates by the historian Michael Buddrus, at the end of 1932 the HJ had about 108,000 members.

From 1931 all Nazi youth work was directed by Baldur von Schirach. After the seizure of power, on 5 April 1933, his men occupied the office of the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations, which brought together several million members of scouting, sports, religious and political organisations. On 17 June 1933 Hitler appointed Schirach “Youth Leader of the German Reich”. Over the following months, in parallel with the abolition of the political parties, youth associations were dissolved, banned or absorbed into the HJ. “Just as the NSDAP is the only party, so the HJ must be the only youth organisation,” Schirach said. In December 1933 Protestant youth was incorporated into the Hitler Youth. Catholic associations, formally protected by the Concordat of July 1933, survived longer, but were harassed more and more, and in 1937–1939 they were dissolved one German state after another.

Membership formally remained voluntary, but the pressure grew every year. In 1934–1936 members of the youngest groups had Saturdays off school – the so-called State Youth Day – for HJ activities, while the other pupils spent the day in class. Civil servants were given to understand that their children ought to belong to the organisation. 1936 was proclaimed the “Year of the Jungvolk”, and families were urged to enrol the whole year group of ten-year-olds. On 1 August 1936, the day the Olympic Games in Berlin opened, the HJ took over all out-of-school sport for children aged 10–14. The membership figures given by the HJ leadership were propaganda, and scholars assess them differently; according to estimates by Gerhard Rempel, in 1937 about 5.4 million young people belonged to the organisation, roughly two-thirds of those aged 10 to 18.

What the law changed

The law of 1 December 1936 set the seal on this state of affairs. The office of Reich Youth Leader, which Schirach held simultaneously as a party and a state official, was made independent of Bernhard Rust’s Ministry of Education. From then on the Hitler Youth was formally responsible for the entire out-of-school education of young people, including competitive sport. Other organisations, including church ones, lost the right to carry on activities that might compete with it. Those who did not belong were increasingly treated as outsiders: they could have difficulty getting into secondary school, being taken on in a public office or obtaining a craft apprenticeship.

The organisation was divided by age and sex. Boys aged 10–14 belonged to the Deutsches Jungvolk, older boys up to 18 to the Hitler Youth proper. Girls aged 10 to 14 went into the Jungmädelbund (League of Young Girls), and from 14 to 18 into the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls). In everyday terms this meant weekly ideological “home evenings”, at which material on “purity of blood”, “the Jewish warmonger” or “the road to the east” was read out, together with sport, marches, camps, field exercises and shooting. Boys were prepared to be soldiers, girls to be mothers and helpers of the “national community”. Jewish children were excluded from that community, in accordance with the criteria of the Nuremberg Laws.

Compulsion from 1939

Full compulsion came with two implementing regulations that Hitler issued on 25 March 1939. The first distinguished the “Stamm-Hitlerjugend” – the earlier, voluntary members, treated as a party formation – from the rest of the young people. The second, known as the Youth Service Regulation, imposed on all boys and girls aged 10 to 18 the duty of “honourable service to the German people” in the Hitler Youth. Parents had to register a child by 15 March of the year in which it turned ten; admission took place on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. Evasion was punishable by a fine of up to 150 marks or detention, and the police could bring the recalcitrant in by force. The rules were not enforced consistently everywhere, but for most young Germans the Hitler Youth became part of everyday life. In a speech in December 1938 Hitler said openly that a young German would pass from the Jungvolk to the HJ, from the HJ to the party, the Labour Front, the SA or the SS and into the army, “and will never be free again for the rest of his life”.

Significance

The Hitler Youth Law was one of the last stages of the Gleichschaltung (“coordination”) of Germany: after the parties, the trade unions, the press and the army, the state reached for the children. It coincided with other preparations for war. A few weeks earlier Hermann Göring had taken charge of the Four-Year Plan, which was to prepare the economy and the armed forces for war within four years. The Hitler Youth was to supply that army with soldiers raised from the age of ten in the cult of the Führer, in contempt for the weak and in the conviction of the superiority of their “race”.

During the war HJ members collected scrap metal and donations and helped with the harvest and in air-raid defence. From 1943 boys born in 1926–1927 were drafted as auxiliaries to man anti-aircraft guns, and HJ volunteers were formed into the 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend”, which suffered enormous losses in Normandy in 1944 and whose soldiers murdered many Canadian prisoners. In the last months of the war sixteen- and fifteen-year-olds were sent into the Volkssturm and to defend Berlin. Not everyone could be brought into line: groups of nonconformist youth, such as the Edelweiss Pirates or swing enthusiasts, were hunted by the Gestapo and by the HJ’s own patrols. Schirach, from 1940 Gauleiter of Vienna and responsible, among other things, for the deportation of the city’s Jews, was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment at the Nuremberg trial.