Time Trip - Hitler youth groups

0 Comments | Current Events, Sept 28, 2001

* Children played a major role in the rise of the Nazi party. Adolf Hitler believed trained young Nazis would ensure the future of his empire, which he thought would rule the world for 1,000 years.

* In 1926, Hitler established the Hitler Youth, an organization designed to indoctrinate Nazi principles in German youths aged 10 to 18. Children aged 10 to 14 joined the German Young People. At age 14, boys joined Hitler Youth proper and girls entered the League of German Maidens. In 1936, Hitler banned all other youth groups in Germany and made membership in Hitler Youth compulsory for all non-Jewish German children. Parents who prevented their children from joining were sent to prison.

* Girls in the League of German Maidens learned housekeeping, cooking, and child care. Their primary role in German society, they were told, was to be fit and strong so they would grow up to have healthy babies and therefore preserve the future health of the nation. As a future German mother, a young girl also learned traditional German songs, tales, and dances to one day teach her children.

* Hitler said the young German boy of the future must be "slim and slender, as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as steel." To that end, boys in Hitler Youth constantly played sports and practiced military maneuvers.

* Boys in Hitler Youth studied German history and Nazi theory. After passing tests in athletics and Nazi ideology, boys earned the coveted Hitler Youth dagger, bearing the inscription Blut und Ehre ("Blood and Honor").

* All members of Hitler Youth were taught to worship Hitler and to hate Jews. A portrait of Hitler hung in every classroom, and students studied from Nazi primers. A Hitler Youth song contained the lyrics "Yes, when the Jewish blood splashes from the knives, things will go twice as well."