Cruel World (18 page)

The social side of university life was not ignored. The Nazis did not at all like the idea of their youth, fresh from night-and-day indoctrination in the Hitler Youth and other organizations, suddenly being released into the traditionally free and wild student life. Now, being in loco parentis, the Nazis were faced with all the problems that this entailed. From the earliest days of the regime efforts had been made to unify all university social organizations into a single Nazi federation. This meant dealing with a myriad of student clubs, denominational associations, fraternities, and the famous Student Corps, regarded as elite organizations out of keeping with the
Volksgemeinschaft
. But this process had to be handled carefully, as many of Germany’s leading citizens were alumni of such groups, among
them State Secretary of the Reichschancellery Lammers, one of Hitler’s closest aides, who in 1934 was given the nearly impossible task of trying to bring them all into line with Nazi requirements. Students being students, the Nazi measures were not always accepted as quickly as Reich officials might have liked by the traditionally secretive and independent groups, even when they were pro-Nazi. Some Corps refused to certify the racial purity of their members and to expel non-Aryan members and alumni. In one celebrated incident, Corps Palaiomachia of Halle threw out its Nazi members instead and its leader declared, “Whosoever wears the colors of my Corps is my Corps brother.… I do not sacrifice my brother for my own sake or for that of my race.”
⁷¹
The confessional fraternities balked at removing religious requirements. All deeply resented giving up the colorful banners, caps, and uniforms their members had worn for centuries. These were to be replaced by a universal, dull, black and red cap. Even harder to suppress were the ancient fencing fraternities, whose members were willing to go to jail rather than give up their duels, which they carried on in remote wooded areas after the ban went into effect.

There was no humor in the handling of the students. In May 1935, students of the ancient and exclusive Saxo-Borussia fraternity at Heidelberg were severely punished for “grave injury to the obligations to People, State and the University which are incumbent upon all students.” Two crimes had brought forth this verdict. On May 21, the students, dressed in dinner jackets, had left their house in the midst of a broadcast of a foreign policy speech by Hitler and proceeded “to an inn in Heidelberg where they entered with much noise, one of them blowing a tune on a champagne bottle.” A few days later, in another inn, “the members of the Corps loudly discussed the question as to how one should eat asparagus, and in particular how the Führer ate it.” The case was reported in the
Völkischer Beobachter
under the headline “
TREASONABLE CONDUCT OF THE STUDENT FEUDAL REACTION
.” Somewhat later, Baldur von Schirach, the Reich Youth Leader, issued a decree calling upon all Hitler Youth members to resign from the Student Corps or face expulsion from the Hitler Youth, which would greatly lessen their chances of advancement in many fields. Von Schirach had not been amused by the asparagus; referring to the incident in his decree, he thundered that it had furnished “a frightful picture of brutishness and lack of discipline, indeed abysmal vulgarity, of a small clique of Corporation students who swagger and carouse while Germany works. When such elements in their depravity do not stop with the, to us, holy personage of the Führer, they let themselves be judged.”
⁷²
Von Schirach’s rules for the Hitler Youth were universalized by a decree of
May 1936 declaring that no Nazi Party member could belong to an existing student fraternity.

The Nazis did not want to destroy the Student Corps entirely; they wanted to transform them into useful units of their youth structure. They envisioned groups of thirty or so students organized into
Kameradschaften
who would live together in one house and there receive group indoctrination and participate in suitable activities. The houses they had in mind were the former Corps houses, and indeed a number of banned Corps happily rented their buildings to the Nazis and continued their meetings elsewhere in secret, while others wanting to go along with the new regime did convert themselves into
Kameradschaften
. These, alas, were not enthusiastic enough for the Nazis and were soon dissolved. It is easy to see why the
Kameradschaften
were not popular with the young, as their schedule of required activities started at 6:30 a.m. with “defense sports exercises” and included “tidying and housework,” a required afternoon nap, and ideological training and “special functions” run by the Nazi Party well into the evening, leaving the students only one hour of free time all day.
⁷³

The rather monastic life of the
Kameradschaften
did not entirely reflect Hitler’s preferences. The Führer apparently felt that men living together too long would become homosexuals. In at least one Nazi institution, rooms with two men were forbidden—triples and singles were fine. To avoid this corruption, he urged more contact with women. This did not mean the drunken semi-orgies often encountered in American fraternities, but decorous events that were described as “exercises in etiquette with ladies.”
⁷⁴

Although the authorities tried to encourage the
Kameradschaften
later in the 1930s by lifting the ban on fencing and other modifications, they never did become the perfect cells of Nazi ideology that the leadership had envisaged. Once the war began, the houses reverted, with caution and a certain complicity on the part of local authorities, to their old ways. The facade of conformity was necessarily maintained, as the Nazis were apt to make surprise inspections. One house, after a frantic search through its own closets, managed to borrow a picture of the Führer from the
Kameradschaft
next door just in time to avoid being closed down. The Nazi fear of the universities and the Student Corps was not entirely unfounded: the members of the famous White Rose resistance group all came from this milieu, and almost all those involved in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler were Corps alumni who had used reunion meetings to exchange information.
⁷⁵

While its gradual transformations of the traditional education system were in progress, the Nazi government had been busily constructing a parallel structure that would not be burdened with the irritating traditions of the past. In the new world of Nazi youth, children would spend as little time as possible in the still private confines of home, where old ideas and books might lurk, and where loyalty to church or local custom could vie with the New Order, whose leaders now set out to fulfill its slogan: “He who possesses the youth, possesses the future.” The “youth” referred to was, of course, limited to totally healthy children of documented pure Aryan descent.

By 1938, Hitler was able to sum up the schedule as follows:

This degree of control, whose success was greatly exaggerated in the Führer’s peroration, had not been achieved overnight. For years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Hitler Youth (HJ) had dedicated itself to the elimination or absorption of other long-established youth organizations. These ran the gamut from the revolutionary Communists to the romantic
Bündische
movement, which sought to renew German life through communal outdoor activity featuring camping and fireside singing, to right-wing groups, including monarchists, some of which were trained in paramilitary exercises by the Weimar Army. Adding to the mix were both Protestant and Catholic church-run organizations. In the last year of the Weimar Republic, violent demonstrations by paramilitary elements of the Hitler Youth had led to their being outlawed in many jurisdictions. Parades and the wearing of uniforms were forbidden in April 1932. This had little effect: the Nazis merely took off their uniforms and renamed themselves the National Socialist Youth Movement. A few months later, hoping to appease Hitler, the weak Chancellor Franz von Papen revoked the ban, and the Hitler Youth was once again able to parade in its full glory. At Hitler’s accession the struggle became moot. All youth organizations were immediately “coordinated” under the leadership of the half-American Baldur von Schirach, who was appointed Youth Leader of the Entire German Reich in June 1933. Suppression of rivals to the Hitler Youth was now only a matter of time.

Three German children wearing Hitler Youth uniforms are taught how to salute
.
(photo credit 5.1)

Resistance to the early Hitler Youth was serious. Middle-class parents
deplored its lower-class makeup, its lack of supervision of coed activities, and its penchant for street violence. Opposition to membership was particularly strong in the Catholic Church, which had its own well-organized youth movement. The issue was not support of Hitler, which was often wildly enthusiastic, but control of the young. In August 1933, after their bishops had thanked Hitler for signing the Concordat with the Vatican and had declared that the new Chancellor had been “appointed by God,” thousands of Catholic Youths pledged allegiance to Hitler in a ceremony at Berlin’s Neukolln Stadium.
²
Many of the other beleaguered youth organizations made strenuous efforts to emulate the Hitler Youth. The Catholics allowed rifle practice on their camp outings and Protestants advocated “militant Christianity.” A Jewish group in Berlin dressed its distinctly noncombative boys in gray shirts and black-edged gray scarves, which looked quite like the Hitler Youth uniform.
³
Another Jewish organization, in Breslau, had full-fledged paramilitary training complete with war games pitting the “Germans” (themselves) against an unknown foe, after which they sat around the campfire singing a mixture of “idealistic Cossack and Nordic songs.”
⁴
Some older Jewish students, full of patriotism, tried to convince Hitler that they should be allowed to participate in the Hitler Youth and, for a time, a few were cynically granted a kind of associate membership as propagandists.
⁵

But the newly powerful Hitler Youth had no intention of sharing. Under the leadership of von Schirach, the competition was gradually gobbled up. Using a full panoply of political dirty tricks combined with the placement of representatives on school councils, heavy propaganda, and, especially, the brilliant cultivation of peer pressure among the children themselves, the Nazis had, by late 1936, gained some five million “voluntary” members, up from approximately 120,000 in January 1933.
⁶
Confident that opposition was no longer a problem, Hitler now promulgated a Law Concerning the Hitler Youth, which declared that “all German young people, apart from being educated at home and at school, will be educated in the Hitler Youth physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism to serve the nation and the community.” Membership was, however, still not compulsory; that requirement would not be instituted until December 1936.
⁷
Meanwhile, those who did not want to cooperate were easily kept in line by such measures as being refused entrance to examinations for the
Abitur
, Germany’s elite high school diploma, if they were not HJ members.

The appeal of the ceremonial activities of the Hitler Youth formations was so seductive that compulsion was hardly necessary. The desire to
belong to something glorious was especially strong in depressed and defeated Germany, whose citizens longed for pride in their country. Melita Maschmann, by now a teenager, never forgot her feelings on the night of Hitler’s accession: