Cruel World (19 page)

At age ten, boys—called cubs, or
Pimpfs
—became candidates for the Jungvolk, the lowest level of the Nazi youth movement. Girls went into the Jungmädel. The boys wore spiffy uniforms with brown shirts and black shorts, swastika armbands, and military-style caps. The girls’ plumage was limited to a more conservative blue skirt and white shirt, but no less adorned with badges. Clothes were not all. Each child was given a fat training manual that emphasized military activities, and a report book, in which his achievements, or lack thereof, would be carefully noted throughout his youth. Activities were strenuous and time-consuming.

Wednesday night, nationwide, was reserved for indoctrination sessions known as Home Evenings, even though they were held in Hitler Youth facilities. The younger children were sometimes treated to exciting light shows in rooms draped in red and black. Other offerings included a sixteen-week German history course that was “calculated to strengthen … national faith.” For the convenience of German youth groups abroad, the course was repeated in special broadcasts aimed at Africa, Asia, and the Americas. An excerpt published in the German press gives an idea of what the children heard:

Despite such stimulating dramas, the Home Evenings frequently degenerated into somnolence. More sophisticated teenagers were soon
bored by silly propaganda pamphlets and worse movies. The endless and often repeated speeches soon lost their interest, discussions of
Mein Kampf
tended to “fizzle out,” and in general the meetings were “fatally lacking in interest,” which led some leaders to allow the time to be spent on games and songfests.
¹⁰

Saturdays, set aside as State Youth Day, were different. On these days, spent outdoors, even the youngest children routinely marched ten to twelve miles in training exercises. Weekends were filled with exciting, if grueling, terrain games, generally beloved by boys of any nationality, which involved map reading, espionage, and team competitions for “victory.” These field exercises would become more and more military and chauvinist in nature as the child progressed through the system. The Jungmädel, whose Home Evenings were more oriented toward domestic science, had equally strenuous and practical Saturday outings. In one “espionage” exercise an entire troop was sent to track down two “spies,” one German and the other foreign, in a crowded department store and prevent them from exchanging secret documents. This had to be done without attracting the attention of the store personnel or the customers. The game, which was successfully carried out, was considered good practice for the “time when they might have to catch real spies.”
¹¹
Such activities were even more serious at the innumerable summer camps and Outward Bound–type excursions that took the young people away from home for weeks on end with the object of building up their group loyalty and suppressing individualism.

Transitions were fraught with anxiety. Induction ceremonies for the Jungvolk were scheduled each year on Hitler’s birthday, April 20. All through the preceding night the boys were, typically, marched to a dramatic site, preferably a medieval castle lit with flickering torches. There, in the breaking dawn, they would be exhorted to become soldiers “hard as iron” who would “make Germany what she should always have been” and to join “our great community of loyalty.”
¹²
There were fanfares of trumpets and the singing of “Deutschland über Alles,” after which the boys would surround a Nazi banner and each take an oath to “devote all my energies, all my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing to give up my life for him, so help me God. One People, one Nation, one Führer!”

Final acceptance was not automatic. Six months later the boys were required to pass the
Pimpfenprobe
, an extremely tough series of tests, both on the contents of their fat training manual and of their physical prowess, which culminated in the dreaded
Mutprobe
, or test of courage,
in which they were asked to perform such daunting feats as jumping from second-story windows in full battle gear. Only then were they given their special daggers, embossed with Hitler Youth symbols; these were objects that every German boy, Aryan or not, deeply coveted.
¹³

The dagger was worn on a leather Sam Browne belt. The basic Jungvolk uniform was thus embellished with the badge of full membership. Those who rose to leadership positions got more badges and caps with gold eagles.

Uniforms were of extreme importance in all of Nazi life, permitting easy identification by superiors, pride on the part of the wearer, and humiliation for the excluded, who were condemned to drab civilian clothes. The new Nazi-wear also compensated some children for the loss of traditional uniform elements such as the elegant visored caps, a different color for each grade, formerly worn by students of the elite schools. These had been banned and burned in ceremonial bonfires by the new government in an attempt to erase class differences. Uniforms of other youth organizations, such as the very fancy ones of the monarchist German National Bismarck Youth, were actually collected and destroyed by the Nazis in order to ensure the complete obliteration of the organization. The Nazi uniforms were on constant display as the Jungvolk, led by their own fabulously accoutred drum and bugle corps, marched through town and country and participated in every traditional holiday parade and in the innumerable new ceremonies invented by the Party to honor often bogus youthful martyrs and heroes.

All this was much more fun than school and going to church. Neither parental disapproval nor the most dreadful racial discrimination could quench the desire of most small children to belong to the glorious scene. The pressure became especially strong in 1936, dubbed the Year of the Jungvolk, when the Hitler Youth went all out on recruiting. Elementary school teachers were ordered to encourage their pupils to join. The aim was universal membership of ten- to fourteen-year-olds in time for Hitler’s forty-seventh birthday. The schools were bombarded with emotional movies and other visual aids. Each Nazi Party district was divided into small units in which strenuous recruiting activities took place. One Hamburg school offered a prize to the first homeroom to achieve 100 percent Jungvolk membership. The teacher put a large chart on the blackboard with a space for each child, which was filled in if he joined. Those who said they did not have parental permission were asked to bring their parents to see the teacher. Day by day, by twos and threes, the empty squares were filled. Nobody wanted to be the cause of the class losing the prize. But this
class happened to include Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi, son of a German mother and an African father. He too wanted to fill in his square, and was stunned to hear that he was ineligible for the Jungvolk. Unable to believe this, he forced his mother to take him to the local Jungvolk meeting place. Looking in the door he could see the lucky members:

But mother and son were unceremoniously thrown out of the building, and at school the teacher simply erased Massaquoi’s empty space from the chart—and class membership was complete. The prize, a Monday off from school, was won; but not for Massaquoi, who was required to come to school anyway and sit in another classroom.
¹⁴

Even small Aryans with high qualifications could be denied membership if their parents were not politically correct. So great was the shame of this that suicide attempts by ten-year-olds were not unheard of, and hatred or rejection of the “guilty” parents was common. Such rejection of family was exactly what the Nazis had in mind. For children and teenagers, one of the biggest attractions of the Hitler Youth was independence of parental control. Responsibility and pride came early. Jungvolk leaders could be in command of a troop of thirty or more by the time they were fourteen, and the majority of all leaders were in their twenties. Hitler Youth “duties” were perfect for adolescents, who could use them as an excuse for not doing homework or chores. Grades often plummeted as HJ “officials” on duty skipped classes without consequences from teachers who feared Party retribution. Parents who complained could be intimidated by the authorities. The pressure to conform was tremendous, and often led to more serious choices than whether or not to do the dishes.

Sixteen-year-old Jürgen Herbst was scheduled to participate in a longplanned Jungvolk night exercise, reminiscent of present-day paint-ball competitions, which consisted of an ambush and mock battle in which the “object of each group was to tear off the colored strings we and the boys of the opposing group had tied around their wrists.” This important event coincided with his father’s last night on leave from the Eastern Front. Herbst “felt torn as I never had experienced before.… I did not want to
disappoint my father and tell him, through my actions, that I valued him less than the excitement that awaited me in the woods.” But “duty” proved stronger, and the boy, “feeling terrible,” went to the exercise. His father, who was not a Nazi and who disapproved of the influence of the Hitler Youth, was killed one month later. Years later, still full of anguish, Herbst wrote:

Choosing between parents and Nazi laws was no easier for girls. One
Mädel
who had just enlisted and was fearful that the authorities would see her going into a Jewish-owned store with her mother, said:

Another boy, eleven years old, having been told by his “big and strong” Jungvolk teacher to discourage his parents from doing business with Jews, was appalled when, the day after Kristallnacht, he discovered a Jewish business acquaintance of his father’s sitting in the kitchen. That night his father helped the man escape into France. “When he came back, my mother asked him, ‘Are you sure no one saw you?’ ‘You can rest assured,’ my father told her, and at that moment I saw a smile light up my mother’s face. And for the first time in my life I wished I wasn’t my parents’ son.”
¹⁷

Above all, it was exciting to be working for a cause. Melita Maschmann, then seventeen, noted that it was not important that she be happy, but that it was important that she “should work for Germany.” Life in the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM, the girls’ version of the Hitler Youth, now had “a meaning independent of self,” and she “discovered the ability to look away from myself, to cease contemplating my own happiness and to serve the people of my nation” and “took refuge in a fanaticism for work which kept its hold on me … until the end of the Third Reich.” In this case, as the Communist youths had done in the Ukraine, the fanaticism not only led her to “look away,” but also to be persuaded to try to infiltrate an allegedly Communist youth group run by the brothers of a Jewish schoolmate. In this she failed dismally, as the Jewish family had not been convinced of her sudden political transformation and had canceled the meeting that Gestapo agents, hiding outside as Maschmann went to the designated house, had intended to raid.

Bund Deutscher Mädel girls at a Nazi Party ceremony
.
(photo credit 5.2)

Action was indeed the thing, but it is clear that the slogans and ceremony also had their effect. Maschmann later wrote that in low moments she would be invigorated by a “glance at the … flag” or by calling to mind “one of the texts which expressed what we considered the purpose of our lives.”
¹⁸
Above all it was music that inspired sacrifice. These emotional responses are true in most societies; it was the Nazi objectives that were so chilling. The American journalist Dorothy Thompson, driving through southern Germany in 1934, stumbled upon a Hitler Youth summer camp near Murnau and was shaken by what she saw: