Hitler Youth

With youth I can create a new world

"I begin with the young. We older ones are used up. But my magnificent youngsters! Look at these men and boys! What material! With them, I can create a new world" (Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg 1933). By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth.

Largest youth group in history

It would become the largest youth group in history. Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the loyalty, trust, and passion of so many of Germany's young people. Her research includes telling interviews with surviving Hitler Youth members.

Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow by Susan Bartoletti
ISBN: 0439353793

Jungsturm Adolf Hitler

The first Hitler Youth was founded in 1922 as the Jungsturm Adolf Hitler. The group was based in Munich, Bavaria, and served as a recruiting ground for new Stormtroopers of the SA. The group was disbanded in 1923 following the abortive Beer Hall Putsch but was re-established in 1926, a year after the Nazi Party had been reorganized.

Hitler Youth

In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the second Hitler Youth, founded in the late twenties soon after the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany. Determining that by age ten children's minds could be turned from play to politics, the regime inducted nearly all German juveniles between the ages of ten and eighteen into its state-run organization.
By 1930, the group had over 25,000 members with the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German girls). The Deutsches Jungvolk was another Hitler Youth group, intended for still younger children, both boys and girls. In 1933, Baldur von Schirach served as the first Reichsjugendführer (Reich Youth Leader) and devoted a great deal of time and manpower into the expansion of the Hitler Youth.

Bending young minds

The result was a potent tool for bending young minds and hearts to the will of Adolf Hitler." Drawing on original reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Kater traces the history of the Hitler Youth, examining the means, degree, and impact of conversion, and the subsequent fate of young recruits. Millions of Hitler Youth joined the armed forces; thousands gleefully participated in the subjugation of foreign peoples and the obliteration of "racial aliens.
Although young, they committed crimes against humanity for which they cannot escape judgment. Their story stands as a harsh reminder of the moral bankruptcy of regimes that make children complicit in crimes of the state.

Hitler Youth by Michael H. Kater
ISBN: 0674014960

More information

Witnesses in the Holocaust
Adolf Hitler Biography