Life in Nazi Germany

This IA will address how the Hitler Youth program effected the Nazification of Germany leading up to World War II. Hitler started the Nazi movement in 1919 and led the Nazis for some time before the whole party took control of Germany (Featherman, 1932). The Nazis officially came to power in 1933, and The Hitler Youth was made official that same year (Baldur von Schirach, 67, Dies; Head of Hitler Youth 1933–40, 1974). Hitler chose Baldur von Schirach as the head of the youth program (“The New York Times Archives”, 1974, p. 36). Schirach’s job as the head of the Hitler Youth was to lead an organization that specializes in training the aryan German youth to embody the perfect Nazi. Once the Nazi’s were in control of Germany the Hitler Youth continued to and grow and grow, and eventually became mandatory for all the adolescent aryan youth in Germany (Central Intelligence Agency, p. 14). The Hitler Youth was the main reason that race in Germany became the society and the state (Waite, p. 340), and the German military was so abundant because of the Hitler Youths ability to train kids and put them into war quickly (Central Intelligence Agency, p. 14).

Naziism had a huge impact on German youth during Hitler’s reign of power over the state. The life of a German child changed dramatically during the 1920’s and 30’s, especially for

The Nazi Party considered the youth of Germany as an important component for the future. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazi Party) wrote in his autobiography Mein Kamp (My Struggle), “whoever has the youth has the future” . Hitler considered the Germany’s youth and the treatment of the youth to be an imperative aspect to guarantee a secure future for Germany and Nazi party and he aimed to create a nation dedicated to the Nationalist Socialist view. In order to achieve this, Hitler exploited the education system and took control of the Youth movement. The Reich Ministry of Education took power of the schooling system permeated it with propaganda to indoctrinate the youth. The majority of the young people in Germany participated in youth groups such as the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls which trained them for military service and motherhood.

Children tried their best to continue schooling, by attending secret classes organized by adults. Children learned how to hide books from the Nazis, to avoid being caught. Jania David, a young Polish Jewish child, remembers: “Schools were forbidden, but parents organized small groups of children, four or five at a time, and of course there was no lack of teachers. We met once or twice a week in somebody’s room, usually in a different room every week because there was a death penalty for the children, the teachers, the parents and in fact everybody in the house, if we were discovered” (Remembering: Voices of the

This proved to be relatively easy, because often the leaders of the other youth groups sympathized with Hitler and were easily lured into Hitler youth. By the end of 1933 membership had increased to two million and by 1936 it had risen to five million.

Hitler isolated the youth from the rest of Germany to be able to easily manipulate their beliefs. In 1926 the Hitler Youth was founded and was made for the purpose to train boys to enter the SA (Storm Troopers), a Nazi Party paramilitary

Children were not only drawn into Nazi ideology through education reforms, but the creation of Nazi Youth Organizations also attracted a majority of German youth to the Nazi belief system. The single greatest tool used by Hitler to convince the youth to work towards the Volksgemeinschaft was the Hitler Youth. The goal of this party-run youth organization was to brainwash children to think and act German, and to wipe out class distinction and individualism. Like the education system, the Hitler Youth also emphasized physical fitness, as a key part of Aryan superiority. It also provided a plethora of group activities, the goal of these activities was to build trust for your

Hitler used many tactics to control German society during the Nazi era; his outlook on how women should act is embodied in the Speech to the National Socialist Women’s Association. The speech was given by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the organization’s leader, with the intent to convince women to take their place in Hitler’s Nazi movement. The emphasis on women’s natural roles in the home, as mothers and wives, and the discouragement of women’s right are manifested in the persuasive language of national identity and involvement. Hitler uses Scholtz-Klink to fight for the minds of German women in a speech that asks for feminist ideals to be cast aside all for the good of the country.

Hitler isolated the youth from the rest of Germany to be able to easily manipulate their beliefs. In 1926 the Hitler Youth was founded to train boys to enter the SA (Storm Troopers), a Nazi Party paramilitary formation. After 1933, however, youth leaders sought to integrate boys, while isolating them from the German girls and from their parents, into the Nazi national community to prepare them for service in the armed forces as soldiers. The Nazi army was such a dominant

The first way Adolf Hitler used education to make students into good Nazis, was to change their textbooks and their school curriculum to further Nazi ideals. Doing this would make every student learn the Nazi ideas, whether they wanted to or not. For example, paragraph 10 states, “For Hitler, education had one purpose: to mold children into good Nazis. As soon as the Nazis came to power, they took control of the public schools, called National Schools. They threw out old textbooks and implemented new ones. They rewrote the curriculum from top to bottom, so it only taught Nazi-approved ideas.” This means Hitler wanted the children to

“Young boys were organized into the Deutches Jungvolk (German Young People, informally called Pimpfe), older boys into the Hitlerjugend (HJ). The Deutches Jungvolk could have boys from the ages of 10-14 and the Hitlerjugend could have boys from the ages of 14-18. When World War II started, more than ninety percent of German youth were members of these organizations. Ninety percent is a huge percentage. That means that almost every teenage German, Gentile was a member of some kind of Nazi Youth Organization. Many of these youth organization actually over rid the parental control on the children. Many were told that the individual or the family was less important than the state. If children had disloyal parents, they were encouraged to report them. When the boys weren’t in school or at home with their parents, they were with their youth organization learning military maneuvers and different chants. An example of the one the chants that the Hitler Youth used to march around chanting are: “Comrades, we march to the field, red today, tomorrow dead, Comrades it must be that way.” If the boys made any achievement in the Hitler Youth, credit in school would be given to the student. The teacher must respect the authority of the youth leaders, regardless of their age or attitude towards them. Blind obedience seems to be a common theme. Children are taught these ideologies without knowing the true real reason. Teachers are forced to believe and follow these ideologies if they wish to

“the Hitler Youth was such a group, with its own departments of culture, school, press, propaganda and so on. All this early organization was done because Hitler realized that, if and when he finally managed to over throw the Weimar government, we would need to have something ready to take its place immediately.”

In this essay I will discuss the methods that Hitler used to influence the young Germans until the end of the World War II. To analyze this topic will be considerable to show several points. I will discuss the people who supported Hitler in his rise to the power as background, how the Nazis used Nazi Propaganda to influence to youngsters, clarify why the young people

This intellectual resistance group was created by Hans Scholl, Sophie's older brother, and his friend Alexander Schmorell. They had felt compelled to take actions, especially after hearing about mass murder by the Nazis in Russia and Poland. Later on, they were joined by Willi Graf and Christoph Probst, two other students in their mid twenties, and by their philosophy teacher, Kurt Huber. The group was also secretly supported by many other

Within the barracks they immediately joined an agelai, or herd of boys. Here they learnt military and basic reading and writing skills. They were taught obedience and how to fend for themselves,