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Hitler Youth
In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the Hitler Youth, founded in 1933 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. The result was a potent tool for bending young minds and hearts to the will of Adolf Hitler. Baldur von Schirach headed a strict chain of command whose goal was to shift the adolescents' sense of obedience from home and school to the racially defined Volk and the Third Reich. Luring boys and girls into Hitler Youth ranks by offering them status, uniforms, and weekend hikes, the Nazis turned campgrounds into premilitary training sites, air guns into machine guns, sing-alongs into marching drills, instruction into indoctrination, and children into Nazis. A few resisted for personal or political reasons, but the overwhelming majority enlisted. 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.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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January 2, 2016
There's a curious phenomenon in historiography of the Nazis: the insidious way in which, if you aren't very careful, you will find yourself reinscribing the terms of the very discourse you're supposed to be studying. Hitler's ignorance and therefore innocence of the genocide of the Jews is probably the creepiest of these memes. It was a popular defense of the Führer during his reign, and then got picked up by Hitler apologist David Irving on his long descent from fire-eating muckraker to Holocaust denier. Another example is the idea of the "ethnic German" which historiographers have a distressing tendency to treat as unproblematic despite its clear ideological freight. And a third, brought again and forcibly to my attention by this book, is "homosexuality."
In discussing the endemic problem of discipline in the Hitler-Jugend, Kater says:
As early as 1933, Hitler told Schirach that Reich President Paul von Hindenburg was cross with him because "the young people did not show the necessary respect to old officers, teachers, and ministers of the church." Later in the Third Reich, HJ miscreants in their early teens were known for committing petty theft, obstructing railroad tracks, and accosting civilians in the streets. As for the older ones, traffic violations such as racing with staff cars became a serious problem, sometimes resulting in the injury of innocent bystanders. HJ leaders were habitually driving their cars with such speed that often "they cannot be brought to a necessary stop," according to an official complaint. Homosexuality and sadism became rampant among HJ members. In one notorious case in the summer of 1938, a mid-level teenage leader inflicted long-lasting torture on his charges by tying their wrists and ankles during an outing and then beating them with his steel-studded belt. (52-53)
And again, just down the page:
During the war years boys and girls continued to engage in crimes like theft, impersonation, or gross acts of vandalism. [...] Nazi character training notwithstanding, homosexuality could not be curbed, and more women were being sexually molested than had been the case in peace time. (53)
In both cases "homosexuality" is being vaguely lumped together with vandalism, rape, insubordination, theft, and joy-riding (the longer I look at these passages, the longer my list of problems gets), and Kater doesn't define either the Nazi use of the term or his own. He seems perfectly willing to accept homosexuality, like sadism, as nothing more nor less than a problem that crops up when discipline among teenagers is lax.
I know basically nothing at all about LGBTQ issues in Germany between the beginning of the twentieth century and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but I do know, from reading about the Nazis, that there seems to have been a general association between thuggishness, love of (para)military social groups and structures, and what is referred to as homosexuality (also "perversion"), typified by Ernst Röhm, the SA leader murdered in the so-called "Röhm Putsch" of 1934. Röhm is invariably tagged as a "notorious homosexual" by historiographers of the Nazis; it's an epithet like rosy-fingered Dawn or ox-eyed Hera, and like those epithets, its meaning is actually kind of slippery. Certainly it is used, by both Röhm's contemporaries and historiographers of the Nazis, as code for "pervert" and "degenerate," a way to emphasize Röhm's bad character and general undesirability. I have no idea how Röhm understood his sexual identity, if he ever thought about it at all, but using the word "homosexual," as it was applied to Röhm by his contemporaries--or to these Hitler Youths--without stopping to interrogate it, unpack it, or even signal that it is a loaded term and neither transparent nor value-neutral, is sloppy scholarship, if nothing worse.
And then there's this extraordinary proposition:
Girls did not possess the same degree of herd instinct that characterized the males, which motivated them to join groups, gang up on others, and eventually made them complicit in crimes such as assault and murder. Girls had constituted only one-third of the total membership in the Weimar youth movement, which suggests a greater tendency to maintain their individuality rather than submerging it in a mass group. (72)
While I certainly would like to believe that, by virtue of having two X chromosomes, I can count on my inherent rugged individualism to protect me against being enthralled by fascist demagoguery and mob rule, I can think of several other things that that information about female involvement in the Weimar youth movement might plausibly suggest, none of them a grossly overgeneralizing piece of sexual essentialism.
Hitler Youth was a very disappointing book. My early disquiet and dissatisfaction were not assuaged by more nuanced and careful argument later in the book. Particularly on issues of sexuality, Kater's discussion ranged from the vague to the infuriating. He never reliably distinguished between "sexual promiscuity" and sexual assault,* nor did he ever explain whether he was measuring "sexual promiscuity" by the Nazis' yardstick or some other measure, or indeed trying to analyze it at all. Although he did at least discuss the experience of German girls, he did so with a semi-covert chauvinism.
He also had a bizarre double standard. When talking about German boys, he expanded the category of "boy" to include "young soldiers" and then, less explicitly, "all soldiers," and thus spent a great deal of time talking about things, such as the siege of Stalingrad, that had no direct relevance to his ostensible topic. (Also, although he mentioned the atrocities committed by them and the effect on his "young soldiers," the Einsatzgruppen appear in his text like inclusions of alien material. There cannot possibly be any Hitler Youth or former Hitler Youth in them.) He remembers to put in the verses about German war crimes and the brutality of German soldiers, but over all, he presents the "young soldiers" as victims. And then, in the section on German girls in war-time, comes this sentence: "However, insofar as many young and older women had assisted their male superiors in creating a system that facilitated ever-greater human abuses, including their own continuous exploitation, German women were by no means without blame" (Kater 232). Here, he's using the opposite rhetorical strategy. Where, with the male Germans, he expanded the category of "boy" to include men, here he's expanding the category of "woman" to include girls, and saying that, where the men are tragic victims just like the boys, the girls are complicit criminals just like the women.
To be clear: I think the question of guilt and complicity in Nazi Germany is an incredibly complicated and difficult one. It's not that I think that women should be exonerated, or that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were not cruelly exploited by their officers and government. But I object to the shoddy way Kater has constructed his argument.
I also object, while I'm at it, to Kater's tendency toward moral judgments, especially his unexamined belief that democracy must be morally good. While I agree that Nazi totalitarianism was certainly morally bad, I'm too aware of the corruption endemic in, say, the entire history of the American government to think that democracy is automatically going to be better or that it's somehow a sign of the stunted growth of German youth that they did not immediately embrace democracy with great glad cries at the end of World War II.
So. Poor prose style, poor organization (by which I mean his paragraphs were a mess, not the overall structure of the book, which was fine), fallacious rhetoric, and flatly unnuanced argument full of unexamined assumptions about morality, politics, warfare and violence, sexuality, and gender roles. This book did provide an English-language synthesis/summary of material on the HJ and the BDM that hasn't been translated, and for that, at least, I found it useful
---
*It's bad enough when he's talking about the youth groups of Nazi Germany, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, but his discussion of German girls and Allied soldiers is really not any better: "Rapes by French occupation soldiers, in addition to the Russians, were notorious, whereas in American and British zones of influence, the borderline between rape and consensual sex became blurred, since the use of chocolate, lingerie, and cigarettes as barter encouraged covert prostitution" (Kater 241). The line being blurred here is not between rape and consensual sex, but between consensual sex and prostitution--or possibly between rape and prostitution. It's hard to say, since this sentence is all the details we get. All other considerations aside, this is sloppy writing and sloppy historiography, and I'm disappointed in Harvard University Press for letting it slide.
In discussing the endemic problem of discipline in the Hitler-Jugend, Kater says:
As early as 1933, Hitler told Schirach that Reich President Paul von Hindenburg was cross with him because "the young people did not show the necessary respect to old officers, teachers, and ministers of the church." Later in the Third Reich, HJ miscreants in their early teens were known for committing petty theft, obstructing railroad tracks, and accosting civilians in the streets. As for the older ones, traffic violations such as racing with staff cars became a serious problem, sometimes resulting in the injury of innocent bystanders. HJ leaders were habitually driving their cars with such speed that often "they cannot be brought to a necessary stop," according to an official complaint. Homosexuality and sadism became rampant among HJ members. In one notorious case in the summer of 1938, a mid-level teenage leader inflicted long-lasting torture on his charges by tying their wrists and ankles during an outing and then beating them with his steel-studded belt. (52-53)
And again, just down the page:
During the war years boys and girls continued to engage in crimes like theft, impersonation, or gross acts of vandalism. [...] Nazi character training notwithstanding, homosexuality could not be curbed, and more women were being sexually molested than had been the case in peace time. (53)
In both cases "homosexuality" is being vaguely lumped together with vandalism, rape, insubordination, theft, and joy-riding (the longer I look at these passages, the longer my list of problems gets), and Kater doesn't define either the Nazi use of the term or his own. He seems perfectly willing to accept homosexuality, like sadism, as nothing more nor less than a problem that crops up when discipline among teenagers is lax.
I know basically nothing at all about LGBTQ issues in Germany between the beginning of the twentieth century and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but I do know, from reading about the Nazis, that there seems to have been a general association between thuggishness, love of (para)military social groups and structures, and what is referred to as homosexuality (also "perversion"), typified by Ernst Röhm, the SA leader murdered in the so-called "Röhm Putsch" of 1934. Röhm is invariably tagged as a "notorious homosexual" by historiographers of the Nazis; it's an epithet like rosy-fingered Dawn or ox-eyed Hera, and like those epithets, its meaning is actually kind of slippery. Certainly it is used, by both Röhm's contemporaries and historiographers of the Nazis, as code for "pervert" and "degenerate," a way to emphasize Röhm's bad character and general undesirability. I have no idea how Röhm understood his sexual identity, if he ever thought about it at all, but using the word "homosexual," as it was applied to Röhm by his contemporaries--or to these Hitler Youths--without stopping to interrogate it, unpack it, or even signal that it is a loaded term and neither transparent nor value-neutral, is sloppy scholarship, if nothing worse.
And then there's this extraordinary proposition:
Girls did not possess the same degree of herd instinct that characterized the males, which motivated them to join groups, gang up on others, and eventually made them complicit in crimes such as assault and murder. Girls had constituted only one-third of the total membership in the Weimar youth movement, which suggests a greater tendency to maintain their individuality rather than submerging it in a mass group. (72)
While I certainly would like to believe that, by virtue of having two X chromosomes, I can count on my inherent rugged individualism to protect me against being enthralled by fascist demagoguery and mob rule, I can think of several other things that that information about female involvement in the Weimar youth movement might plausibly suggest, none of them a grossly overgeneralizing piece of sexual essentialism.
Hitler Youth was a very disappointing book. My early disquiet and dissatisfaction were not assuaged by more nuanced and careful argument later in the book. Particularly on issues of sexuality, Kater's discussion ranged from the vague to the infuriating. He never reliably distinguished between "sexual promiscuity" and sexual assault,* nor did he ever explain whether he was measuring "sexual promiscuity" by the Nazis' yardstick or some other measure, or indeed trying to analyze it at all. Although he did at least discuss the experience of German girls, he did so with a semi-covert chauvinism.
He also had a bizarre double standard. When talking about German boys, he expanded the category of "boy" to include "young soldiers" and then, less explicitly, "all soldiers," and thus spent a great deal of time talking about things, such as the siege of Stalingrad, that had no direct relevance to his ostensible topic. (Also, although he mentioned the atrocities committed by them and the effect on his "young soldiers," the Einsatzgruppen appear in his text like inclusions of alien material. There cannot possibly be any Hitler Youth or former Hitler Youth in them.) He remembers to put in the verses about German war crimes and the brutality of German soldiers, but over all, he presents the "young soldiers" as victims. And then, in the section on German girls in war-time, comes this sentence: "However, insofar as many young and older women had assisted their male superiors in creating a system that facilitated ever-greater human abuses, including their own continuous exploitation, German women were by no means without blame" (Kater 232). Here, he's using the opposite rhetorical strategy. Where, with the male Germans, he expanded the category of "boy" to include men, here he's expanding the category of "woman" to include girls, and saying that, where the men are tragic victims just like the boys, the girls are complicit criminals just like the women.
To be clear: I think the question of guilt and complicity in Nazi Germany is an incredibly complicated and difficult one. It's not that I think that women should be exonerated, or that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were not cruelly exploited by their officers and government. But I object to the shoddy way Kater has constructed his argument.
I also object, while I'm at it, to Kater's tendency toward moral judgments, especially his unexamined belief that democracy must be morally good. While I agree that Nazi totalitarianism was certainly morally bad, I'm too aware of the corruption endemic in, say, the entire history of the American government to think that democracy is automatically going to be better or that it's somehow a sign of the stunted growth of German youth that they did not immediately embrace democracy with great glad cries at the end of World War II.
So. Poor prose style, poor organization (by which I mean his paragraphs were a mess, not the overall structure of the book, which was fine), fallacious rhetoric, and flatly unnuanced argument full of unexamined assumptions about morality, politics, warfare and violence, sexuality, and gender roles. This book did provide an English-language synthesis/summary of material on the HJ and the BDM that hasn't been translated, and for that, at least, I found it useful
---
*It's bad enough when he's talking about the youth groups of Nazi Germany, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, but his discussion of German girls and Allied soldiers is really not any better: "Rapes by French occupation soldiers, in addition to the Russians, were notorious, whereas in American and British zones of influence, the borderline between rape and consensual sex became blurred, since the use of chocolate, lingerie, and cigarettes as barter encouraged covert prostitution" (Kater 241). The line being blurred here is not between rape and consensual sex, but between consensual sex and prostitution--or possibly between rape and prostitution. It's hard to say, since this sentence is all the details we get. All other considerations aside, this is sloppy writing and sloppy historiography, and I'm disappointed in Harvard University Press for letting it slide.
August 2, 2007
I haven't looked at the other reviews yet, but this one seemed to be rated pretty low. I'm not sure why. Kater is a very good historian and I like his writing style quite a bit. He examines the origin of the youth organizations in Germany and in surrounding parts of Europe and makes connections between an earlier rebellion against modernity to the volkish, heavily charged nationalism that would result in a framework for the Hitler Youth for the NSDAP. I found particularly interesting his examination of youth culture during the Third Reich and how the politics, nationalism, and cause of dissident groups varied depending upon geography, economics, and level of education. There was no such connection that said variable a and b will give you c. But you could make connections between these variables to a degree. I suppose it is interpretive. The most interesting of the dissident groups were the White Rose. University students and former members of the Hitler Youth, these young people possessed a degree of knowledge of the war in the East and an idealism linked to some political and philosophical understanding. The choice of the Nazis to behead members of the White Rose sent a strong message to all who might choose to resist. Kater emphasizes the NSDAP's neglect of higher education as well. All in all, the book examines youth groups and youth culture, the indoctrination that separated children from the family structure (running contradictory to Nazi ideology), examines reasons for youth dissent, and ends in showing how the Hitler Youth was a vehicle to train boys for war and girls for the prolifiration of the master race GO master race! Nah...bad joke. But this book is an interesting look at the Hitler Youth and as in Kater's other writings, he helps the reader understand a progression from pre-NSDAP history to the history of the Third Reich - very important.
January 12, 2008
This is a typical European history writing in that it is short of addressing the "so what?" question. I do not find the question he poses, "Were those who joined the HJ legally responsible for what they did?" particularly interesting. (The answer is pretty obvious from the beginning.) It is rich in details based on memoirs recently written by survivors, however. If you are interested in this particular German historical issue and the experiences of German youth during the war, it is an interesting book to read. But if you want to know more systematically about the political machine of the HJ, Gerhard Rempel's "Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS" (1989) is a better option. If you are studying the history of youth in Germany, start with Peter Stachura’s "The German Youth Movement 1900-1945" (1981). For those who do comparative history like me, this book is not very useful since it lacks any effort to generalize implications, compare with other cases, or situate it within the broader historical context.
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July 30, 2011Very comprehensive and enlightening.
September 21, 2019
The subject is more "Youth Under Hitler" than a specific history of the titular organization. Very often the progression of topics seems to proceed by chance association than obvious design, and the author is prone to occasional tangents that have only marginal; relation to his subject, as when he gets on the topic of the backgrounds and careers of various "race hygienists" who were involved in setting up camps for wayward but not necessarily criminal youth.
Still, there are many sections of interest, especially the chapter about the types of rebellious youth gangs and cliques that rose within Nazi Germany in reaction to the Hitler Youth role model.
Still, there are many sections of interest, especially the chapter about the types of rebellious youth gangs and cliques that rose within Nazi Germany in reaction to the Hitler Youth role model.
February 27, 2020
Este escrito del profesor Michael Kater, es un libro antropológico y psicológico de una generación que vivió contrastes en una época de apogeo, guerra y caos. El autor realiza una exhaustiva investigación de los niños y jóvenes alemanes que vivieron y nacieron en régimen del Tercer Reich, muchos datos y anécdotas descritos abren el mundo secreto de esta juventud, y logran que al final del libro el lector entienda el por qué de los comportamientos y acciones de posguerra de esta generación que construyó una Alemania democrática. Lo mejor, saber que el profesor Kater vivió esa época en carne y hueso cuando era un niño.
April 18, 2011
I actually really liked this book in some ways, but was confused by some of the conclusions Kater seems to want to come to. The thesis is allegedly wrapped up the dicey questions of complicity among the "average" Germans under the Third Reich. This sort of discussion is wrought with problems at the outset, and Kater avoids a real examination for the most part. It is, though, a highly readable and thorough history of one of the weirdest, most disturbing aspects of Hitler's regime.
September 3, 2014
Many interesting historical facts, but lacked some of the depth in the story-telling which would have helped the reader be able to perhaps draw some conclusion about a reasons why so many young people readily signed up in service to Hitler.
December 31, 2010
Very good book on the Hitler Youth and the socialization of the young people in Germany. Really enjoyed..
November 29, 2017
Hitler Youth is a story about the children who followed Hitler, and the National Socialists (Nazi) in 1933 to 1945. The book has twelve different kids that and they talk about throughout the story about how some were German and some of them were Jews. They made joining Hitler’s youth like it was a good time and to them it was a good time. They went camping and did activities to prepare them. The girls would join Bund Deutscher Madel. They would advance as they got older. This story tells the life of the boy and girls that were alive during Hitler’s ruling and you get to see what it was like for them and then you get to find out what happened to them and the end of the book. I never thought of what it was like for the kids that followed Hitler it just never crossed my mind that there would be such young kids following him. The Accuracy in this book is amazing you can tell that the author really did her research on it. She had different views from the German youth and some from Jewish view. The organization of this book was very well done it goes in order by dates and as time goes on you can see how much of an influence that the youth really had big impact on Hitler’s and his power.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews