Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
The use of these children was promoted enthusiastically by the Reich Youth Directorate. Some officials envisioned groups of young boys who would carry on a sort of guerrilla warfare against the invading troops, much like the groups set up by the Soviets in Leningrad. Others went further. Thirty-two-year-old Artur Axmann, head of the Youth Directorate, was eager to get the boys into full-fledged combat, and even set up a special youth sniper training course. Elaborate mobilization plans, never initiated, were drawn up for the Bavarian HJ/BDM. But in March 1945, the HJ was instructed to begin training 4,200 boys for antitank units, many of which, after extremely minimal instruction, were attached to combat units on the Eastern Front, by now within the borders of Germany.
It was in Berlin that the German youths would see the most action. An estimated 5,000 boys and girls under sixteen would take part in the final battles in the ruins of Berlin, despite strong protests by regular Wehrmacht commanders who repeatedly ordered the HJ to be withdrawn. Only 500 are thought to have survived. During the battle they fought, helped wounded civilians and soldiers, and worked until they literally dropped. Fear and “defeatism” among this group was often punished just as brutally by the SS as it was among older soldiers, whose bodies hung all over Berlin labeled “traitor” or “coward.” One thirteen-year-old Jungvolk member, whose formation was converted wholesale into a combat unit, later reported that “when we wanted to … go home we were stopped and had to join the escape across the canal.… My
Jungzugführer
, who
refused, was strung up on the nearest tree by a few SS men.… But then he was already fifteen years old.”
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Although the rate of desertion was high, it was fear of such a fate and of capture by the “subhuman” Bolsheviks that kept most of the young defenders fighting. Some loved the glory of blowing up a tank and, dressed in motley uniforms and helmets that were far too big, fought with valor. But the total inadequacy of their training led to high casualties and made clear the hopelessness of their situation. Many officers, appalled at the slaughter, dismissed the boys and sent them home. Oblivious to it all, Hitler, in his last appearance outside his bunker, awarded medals to a pathetic troop of these children, patting them on the cheek in a grandfatherly way as he did so, certainly not a normal gesture when the medals were for adults.
Near the end, a unit of Hitler Youth boys was given a final duty: after the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic on April 12, 1945, an all-German program that ended with the music from the final scene of
Götterdämmerung
, in which “Valhalla is seen in the distance in flames—final illumination of that twilight of the Gods which is now to darken into eternal night,”
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the uniformed children are said to have stood at the exits holding baskets of cyanide capsules for those of the Party faithful who now contemplated suicide.
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If the change in Germany’s fortunes had led to unprecedented combat experiences for many of its young people, in the occupied lands the turn of the tide had encouraged ever greater involvement in Resistance activities. This had occurred both because the hope of liberation now seemed more real and because Nazi reprisals had become progressively more brutal, pushing many who had previously been passive to action fueled by hatred, revenge, and despair.
Resistance is made to order for teenagers, secrecy and defiance of authority being so natural to them and the excitement of clandestine activity so appealing. In every occupied area the young itched to be part of the action and free of parental restraint. The eleven-year-old son of Dr. Klukowski, our observer of Polish occupation life, had run away to join the partisans twice by May 1942. He was sent home on both occasions. By October of the following year attitudes had changed so much that his father allowed the boy to be sworn in as a member of the Home Army. It was an emotional moment:
Today my twelve-year-old son Tadeuz was sworn in as a member of the Home Army.… This was my attempt to start him in conspiracy work, in the type of work permitted at his young age. During the entire ceremony, which took place in my private office, I was present. But at one moment when I looked into the face of my boy, I felt so moved that to avoid crying I left the room.
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Not everyone felt this way. One mother went right into a partisan camp to retrieve her two teenaged daughters; another, who had pursued her sixteen-year-old son and taken away his shoes to keep him from joining up, was forced at rifle point by the boy’s platoon commander to return the shoes and let her son be a partisan.
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Before 1942, there had been even greater adult objection to active resistance within the ghettos, where the Judenrats and conservative elements were convinced that cooperation with the Nazis and the sacrifice of a few would save the majority, and where activities for the young were channeled into clandestine education and preparation for new lives in Palestine and other future destinations of refuge.
In the early days of the war few young people were accepted by the underground organizations, who feared teenaged carelessness would lead to exposure. But by 1943, a growing number of organizations all over Europe, deeply involved in publishing illegal newspapers, rescuing downed pilots, sheltering the hunted, and fomenting unrest with minor sabotage and nuisance activities had found that young people were extremely useful. Small newsboys in Warsaw tucked illegal pages into the authorized Nazi newspapers sold on the streets. These were usually boycotted by the Poles unless the vendors shouted, “Today you have extraordinary news,” which indicated that there was a “special” supplement.
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Children, already adept at stealing food, acted as couriers and copyboys for the clandestine press, feeding information received on hidden radios to underground writers. One group of boys pulled down the swastika flying over the Parthenon in Athens; another, in Warsaw, known as the “Little Wolves,” specialized in anti-Nazi graffiti, puncturing tires, and putting up satirical posters referring to Nazi decrees. After an order in late 1942 requisitioning furs from the Polish population for German forces on the Eastern Front, the city was covered with images showing “a gaunt, glaring German soldier … swathed in a very feminine mink coat with a silver fox muff protecting his hands,” captioned, “Now that I am so warm, dying for our Führer will be a pleasure.”
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Girls were especially useful as messengers and for making deliveries of
small arms and components of such items as illicit radios.
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The work, often involving long treks by foot or bicycle in all kinds of weather, during which constant vigilance was essential, was, after a time, exhausting. One young Polish girl, for whom the adventure had worn off after three years on the job, admitted that she kept “dreaming of just one thing. I wish the war were over and that I might have a job where I could stay just where I am, in one spot all the time and have people come to me. I would like to be the matron in a ladies rest room, I really mean it.”
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Punishment for those who were caught was brutal and age was no mitigating factor. Girls and boys alike were subjected to unspeakable tortures in the cellars and attics of Gestapo buildings in order to extract the names of their colleagues. If they survived, the young resisters were sent to concentration camps. In the West, for girls, this usually meant Ravensbrück, where they were fed into the slave labor force or used for medical experiments, including injections of gangrene-producing matter and sterilization by X-ray.
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The sterilization program at Ravensbrück was a major operation by 1943. Established in 1941 with Himmler’s blessing, it had been accorded ever-increasing amounts of equipment and numbers of subjects by the Reichsführer SS, who in July 1942 had ordered the researchers to find out “how long it would take to sterilize one thousand Jewesses.” By June 1943, the methods were so developed that the chief researcher, a Professor Clauberg, could report to Himmler that with the proper equipment and the right number of trained assistants he could sterilize “several hundred or even a thousand a day.” The new X-ray methodology, he was pleased to note, would also be very practical for “our normal eugenic sterilizations,” as it could replace surgery. The “training” would continue into 1945 on whoever came to hand, including non-Jewish teenage “terrorist” Resistance workers and little Gypsy girls as young as eight, at least one of whom died after four days of agony during which an incision in her abdomen was kept open so that the experimenters could view the effects of the radiation on her uterus.
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By 1943 not everyone still had relatives to try to stop them from dangerous resistance work. Thousands of teenagers, left alone when whole villages were destroyed and their families were murdered, no longer had anyone to restrain them or give them refuge. Nowhere was this truer than in the Eastern ghettos after the initial massive deportations, which had targeted the very young and the old, eliminating both parents and small siblings of those young people reprieved by their ability to work. It was among this group that active Jewish resistance would be born. Organizing had begun in Vilna in January 1942, in the face of violent protest from
many conservative ghetto residents. As the deportations and executions grew, some spontaneous responses occurred. In September, in the Ukrainian town of Tuczyn, young residents openly urged their elders not to go to the assigned assembly area and persuaded them to start fires and destroy their houses and possessions. In the resulting massive conflagration and chaos 2,000 Jews were able to escape into the forests. Taking to the woods was no guarantee of escape: most of the young people from the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania who tried to join the partisans perished of wounds, exposure, or after being betrayed.
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More serious organization took place in October in the Warsaw Ghetto, from which tens of thousands had already been deported. With much negotiation Jewish Zionists, Communists, and other factions united to form the Jewish Combat Organization, which soon became the dominant power in the ghetto, where somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people still remained.
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By January 1943, some twenty-two small combat units, whose members were aged eighteen to twenty-five, had been formed and hundreds of secret tunnels and bunkers had been built. An attempt by the Germans to organize further deportations in late January was met with gunfire. Surprised, the Nazis, who had suffered a few casualties, withdrew. On April 19 they returned in strength. The Combat Organization’s heroic but hopeless defense is now legend.
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The Nazis, even during this battle, which lasted until May 16, still managed to load and dispatch their death trains. But things had changed: in the summer and fall of 1943 more revolts, equally doomed, would take place right in the extermination camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, and in other ghettos.
There was nothing altruistic about the leaders and supporters of the Resistance movements. Alliances between underground groups were temporary and aimed at getting rid of the Germans. But for all of them the question of postwar control was paramount. While young people sought out the partisans to get revenge on the Germans, find romantic adventure, or obtain security and food, most of those controlling the groups had more specific agendas, which were supported by domestic factions or governments in exile. Added to these were gangs of bandits seeking booty and tribal hegemonies of various kinds. Nowhere would the cynical manipulation of partisans be more manifest than in a second uprising in Warsaw, this time of the Polish population. The underground Home Army, supported by the Polish government in exile in London, had been waiting for years for the perfect moment to rise up against the Nazis. In late July 1944, with the Red Army nearing Warsaw, and encouraged by Radio
Moscow, they felt the time had come, and set 5:00 p.m. on August 1 as their D-Day.
Full of excitement, the younger members of the Resistance comported themselves with dangerous defiance during the hours leading up to the rebellion, which, when it came, surprised the Germans despite much leaked information. Their response was brutal. Two of the Nazis’ most experienced antipartisan operatives, Oskar Dirlewanger and Mieczyslaw Kaminski, whose units, consisting largely of convicts and mercenaries, we have already seen in action in the USSR, were sent to Warsaw. Within days, using the techniques that had been perfected in destroying the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nazis shot thousands of Poles in mass executions, without mercy for children, pregnant women, or the elderly. Whole blocks were looted and burned, and the streets and courtyards piled with bodies. The uprising was large, involving at least 25,000 armed Poles, who fought with desperation, but it could not succeed without help from outside. The hope of help from the Red Army and Polish units fighting with it was not fulfilled. Nor would Stalin permit British and American bombers to use his air bases so that they could attack German units moving toward Warsaw, which limited the help the Western Allies could provide to a few airdrops of supplies. By allowing the non-Communist Home Army to fight things out with the Nazis, Stalin knew he could kill two birds with one stone, and he did. Against all odds the Poles continued to fight until October 5. By then much of Warsaw had been destroyed and a reported 200,000 fighters and civilians had been killed. Most of the remaining population was then deported to concentration camps, and the city remained a virtual ghost town.
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Out in the countryside, the problems presented by partisan activity were even more difficult, because of their sheer unpredictability. In many a village, be it in Poland, the Ukraine, or the Balkans, there was little choice between the violence and atrocities of the Germans and those of the partisans, both of whom demanded compliance at the point of a gun. More often than not, villages were subjected to reprisals from both sides. This was particularly true in Greece. Like Spain before it, Greece would be consumed by a multifaceted civil war within the world war in which “rightists” and various adventurers would join the Germans to suppress the “Andartes,” a miscellaneous amalgamation of groups, aided at times by the British, that eventually evolved into the Communist-dominated ELAS
(Greek People’s Liberation Army). The Greek “right” and “left,” supported in quite a different order by the Cold War powers, would continue their vicious conflict for four long years after the end of World War II.
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