CHAPTER 11: The Children's Crusade

My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. In my Ordensburgen a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth -- that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey.... In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.
-- Hitler

Nineteenth-century German youth was not yet hard. It was innocent. And it usually belonged to one or another youth group, whether religious, athletic, nature, cultural, or a combination of these. Some of them built medieval castles in the air. They were all an expression of restlessness and bewilderment, and well they might have been, for Germany, especially after World War I, was a place which was losing its hold on sense and purpose. Young people not only felt estranged from the government, but from adults in general. Though the same could be said of youth throughout Europe, particularly in the middle class, the difference in Germany was that it did not, for the most part, attach itself to the liberal cause, the way youth movements elsewhere did.

The German youth movement began at the end of the nineteenth century and was not at all political at first. It was a romantic protest against a society in which young people were superfluous. Middle-class youth had been educated and brought up to believe that they could claim their birthright on coming of age. Work and position would be theirs. In adolescence they experienced the culture shock of Kafkaesque alienation. Meaningful work and the status that went with it were claimed by the lucky few. To the rest, young manhood ushered in a period of drift.

The youth groups filled a vacuum. Everyone seemed to recognize that it was the end of an age, and that the futility and smallness which men now felt would not aid them in getting out of the snares of mechanized modern life. The youth groups, whatever their particular character, had certain things in common: They all promised liberation from artificiality, alienation, and sterility, and wholeheartedly opposed the bourgeoisie, which stood for everything that had failed them. They brought back the romanticism of the Middle Ages. Its simple faith, loyalty, and high-minded love contrasted with the impersonality and decadence around them. But it was not to be all feudal music and peasant crafts. The youth movement early on fell under the spell of third-rate philosophers with extremist notions, men like the occultist Theodor Fritsch; the Orientalist Paul de Lagarde; and Julius Langbehn, who believed he had sufficient magical powers to exorcise the demons from Friedrich Nietzsche, then languishing in an asylum.

Racism became violent and brutal and mixed with occultism through the influence of men like Lanz von Liebenfels and List. Lanz's comic-book heroes appealed to the young. They were larger-than-life and boosted the adolescent egos of their German readers, who could identify with their pure-blooded rage against the despoilers of civilization. List's fantasies were equally flattering. His glorification of Germanic history and deification of nature were bathed in the rosy glow of a sun which symbolized hidden psychic powers. As the historian George L. Mosse made clear in The Culture of Western Europe: "These men believed that their ideals possessed a tremendous magnetism for the hopeless, rationalistic world of the present.... Some took to the spiritualism of Madame Blavatsky or to the fad for Oriental sects which promised nirvana from the present."

The whole of Germany was swept up in this esoteric wave, and youth more than anyone. The peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon, spiritualism, and its more "scientific" variation, Theosophy, in Germany were welded together with a mystical concept of the Volk as a people whose collective "soul" was more than the sum of its parts. This Aryan "soul," Germans believed, united the individual German to his geographical place. Every tree and rock of German soil was holy, and spoke to the people, shaping them and causing their creativity. The intuitive wisdom of which the Aryans, rooted in their land, were capable was hidden from the Jews, those eternal wanderers, who had no organic place of their own and, therefore, tried to usurp the fatherland of others. On this account, the Jew was most comfortable in the city, alienated from nature and the Volk Spiritualism joined itself to the idea of the Volk, in that nature emitted a vital ether, a life force, with which only the Aryan was in touch. He alone could contact an extrasensory world which would yield up its secrets and give him special powers.

The new romanticism was, above all, irrational, and this seemed to guarantee its easy acceptance. It peddled itself as more substantial than the discoveries of science, because science itself did not claim to understand the dark mysteries of the force which drove nature, whereas Madame Blavatsky and others like her did. List, borrowing her Theosophy, also did. Her "ancient wisdom," transposed by him into Germanic wisdom which had been destroyed by Christianity, could be revived through intuition, and would explain the essence of things. German mystics developed an ideology, a hodgepodge of the occult, racism, and romanticism which, while ridiculous, went down surprisingly well with youth hunting for certainties. Many young people, Walter Z. Laqueur points out in Young Germany,

joined one of the many new religious and occult sects whose prophets grew like mushrooms in the volkisch camp between the First and Second World War. Of such were Mathilde Ludendorff's [the general's wife] Tannenberg Bund, Arthur Dinter's group, the Asgard Circle, or Gustav Muller's sect, which believed that the human soul was an amalgamation of three or four animal souls ("according to reliable reports from beyond"), and that the planet Mars was the place where man first appeared.

To children whose fathers had been killed in the war, the leaders of these groups became surrogates. To adolescents disturbed by a fragmented society, they offered solidity. To students who knew that nothing awaited them upon graduation from school, they offered immersion in the group. To alienated youth drifting into dreary, unfriendly cities, they offered companionship. To young people bewildered by the intricacies of sex, they offered the solution of rigorous puritanism. To children who could no longer believe in the God of their fathers, they offered a new, modern God. To those thirsting for absolute meanings, they provided absolute answers.

As one participant put it (in E. Y. Hartshorne's German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory):

Mysticism and everything mystical had dominion over us. It was in our ranks that the word Fuhrer originated, with its meaning of blind obedience and devotion. The word Bund arose with us, too, with its mysterious undertone of conspiracy. And I shall never forget how in those early days we pronounced the word Gemeinschaft ["community"] with a trembling throaty note of excitement, as though it hid a deep secret.

He goes on more objectively:

The tragedy of the appeal of this mysticism to the youth of the post-war period was that it offered them a dreamy haven of refuge from the pressing problems of the day.

A significant proportion of cultured idealistic youth was thus, for years on end, and at the most impressionable age, withdrawn from the tasks of their time, and estranged. Instead of learning to see things as they were, and freeing themselves from the dangerous tradition of German escape-idealism, they became victims of a deceptive mysticism which made them easy victims for the National Socialists. Furthermore, by yielding to the lure of this mysticism, toward which an attitude of rational criticism was sure to mean angry expulsion from the "group," these boys lost all capacity for criticism. At a time when the blind obedience of the soldier was regarded as unworthy of rational men, they adopted the habit of a far more sinister obedience: the servile subordination of the mind under the yoke of an ideology.

The divine essence, or elan vital, or life force, or vril, was believed to be electromagnetic -- "Theo-zoological," in Lanz's terminology. Since the sun was the repository of this energy, it became the fashion for German youth groups, as for occult groups generally, to adopt the emblem of the swastika, a symbol for the sun. The festival of the changing sun, an old pagan ritual, was given a new occult twist by the Sera Circle, in that the cosmic rays were thought to emit esoteric knowledge along with warmth. List's Armanen believed that the solar symbol held the key to an ancient "secret science" and that by communing with the ghostly spirits present in certain Germanic ruins, mysterious veils of the past would be lifted. The Cosmic Circle practiced pagan rituals intended to arouse the life force and awaken clairvoyant powers in people of Germanic blood. In their songs and dances, the groups tried to recreate that primordial kinship with nature which they supposed ancient man to have had. They abhorred science and reason as enemies of the life of the soul. Many of them became vegetarians and teetotalers, for they believed that the purification of the physical body would help the soul to see reality. They threw over orthodox medicine for spiritual and herbal healing, which were somehow felt to be closer to the primal source.

The youth movement in Germany was essentially conservative because it stressed the importance of the link with the past -- not with the traditions of one's parents and grandparents, but with the rites of one's remote ancestors. While Communist youth was being taught to believe in a classless society in which the individual was subordinated to the state, volkisch youth was being taught that the Aryan individual was bound to the state through his hereditary ties, that peasantry and rulers were one folk and each had his proper place in the hierarchy. The peasantry was rhapsodized over and imitated in dance, song, and dress as being "organic" folk. But like the Communists, volkisch youth held the bourgeoisie to be contemptible --  the source of all misery. After World War I, the German youth movements took on more and more the character of anti-Semitic societies, seeing the Jew as the exemplar of the bourgeoisie. Little by little, Jewish youth was excluded from membership in youth organizations.

At the same time that they were practicing spirituality through vegetarianism and abstinence from sex, boys and girls were being encouraged by leaders like de Lagarde, Langbehn, Chamberlain, and Fritsch to extol force, as the Crusaders had done, in a holy war against the enemies: Freemasons, liberals, and Jews.

The politicization of the youth movement came just after World War I, when the paramilitary Free Corps attracted many former members, to pass them on in turn to the Nazi party, and in some cases, the SS. Their education in obedience, discipline, selfless service to an ideal, romanticism, and the occult -- in a patriarchy where fathers had been taken away to the war -- helped to make the transition easy, and they were eager to follow the Fuhrer wherever he might lead. As one volkisch youth put it:

One often hears the question why it was that youth spontaneously rallied to Hitler. But the experiences of war, revolution, and inflation supply an explanation. We were not spared anything. We knew and felt the worries in the house. The shadow of necessity never left our table and made us silent. We were rudely pushed out of our childhood and not shown the right path. The struggle for life got to us early. Misery, shame, hatred, lies, and civil war imprinted themselves on our souls and made us mature early. So we searched, and found Adolf Hitler. What attracted us like a magnet was precisely the fact that he only made demands of us and promised us nothing. He demanded of every person a total commitment to his movement and therefore to Germany.

German youth had always been highly organized. In the Weimar Republic some 4.5 million boys and girls under twenty-one were members of organizations connected with the National Board of German Youth Associations. Under Hitler, the youth movement became a holy crusade. By the end of 1934, the Hitler Youth included 6 million members, ranging in age from ten to eighteen. Membership in other youth organizations was officially discouraged and disintegrated under pressure. Parents and church groups were in jeopardy if they failed actively to support the Hitler Youth, so that eventually all the young in Germany, according to the contemporary observer, Stephen H. Roberts, were "stamped into the same mould" and emerged "as unquestioning automata, physically fit and mentally sponges for the official Hitler hero-worship," with the slogan "Command and we follow ... the standard is more than death."

The brainwashing actually began in the cradle. Even the fairy tales read to babies instilled the propaganda that the Fuhrer had been sent from heaven to kill the wicked enemy who was eager to devour little children.

The "ideological training" Hitler decreed was "to bring up that unspoilt generation which will consciously find its way back to primitive instinct." Fairy tales were saturated with "struggle" and "race" as "a childhood means of education to a heroic view of the world and of life." One volume was titled People Fight. The Robinson Crusoe age groups were taught: "From an early age youth must be able to face a time when it may be ordered not merely to act, but also to die ... [it must] simply learn to think like our ancestors again. A man's greatest honor lies in death before the enemy of his country." Hitler Youth sang: "God is struggle and struggle is our blood, and that is why we were born." A book of tales published for them in 1935 gave them the battle cry: "No one shall live after the Leader's death."

The system of indoctrination was perfect. At ten, each boy joined the Young Folk; and each girl, the Union of German Maidens. They received uniforms and took a pledge to devote their lives to the Fuhrer. His will was to be their will. Hitler knew well how to accomplish this:

This youth learns nothing else than to think German, to act German, and if these boys enter our organization at the age of 10, ... then 4 years later they come from the Jungfolk into the Hitler Youth, and we keep them there for another 4 years, and then we certainly don't give them back into the hands of the originators of our old classes and estates, but take them straight into the party, into the Labour Front, the SA or the SS, the NSKK, and so on. And if they are there for another 2 years or a year and a half and still haven't become complete National Socialists, then they go into the Labour Service and are polished for another 6 or 7 months, all with a symbol, the German spade. And any class consciousness or pride of status that may be left here and there is taken over by the Wehrmacht for further treatment for 2 years, and when they come back after 2,3, or 4 years, we take them straight into the SA, SS, and so on again, so that they shall in no case suffer a relapse, and they don't feel free again as long as they live. And if anyone says to me, yes, but there will always be a few left over: National Socialism is not at the end of its days, but only at the beginning!

The child who was willing to assert himself as a leader in this system no longer had to worry about his future. He knew that he could rise to the top of an elitist cult. His family usually did not object, out of fear, ambition, or ignorance. Many did not realize until too late that a dreadful Pied Piper had taken their children away from them. Hitler himself remarked that it was a "quite special secret pleasure" to see "how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them."

Not every child throve under the training program. The more intelligent and individualistic must have found it unbearable to be watched like prisoners. Innocuous conversations were recorded by eavesdroppers. True friendship was impossible, because everyone was afraid to say what they really thought. One Labor Service inmate described what conversation inevitably was:

Camp conversations would begin somewhat in this fashion, when one was fairly sure of being able to trust the other person. "The camp's fine, isn't it?" "Yes, very"-- with emphasis on the word "very" -- "There's such a friendly spirit, don't you think, such spontaneous comradeship?" "Yes, and such excellent leadership, isn't there?" "Yes, I am thankful to be able to share such a valuable experience and to see eye to eye with my leaders."

But most young people succumbed to the brainwashing, even if their inclinations went counter to Nazi dogma. One young teacher, the daughter of a liberal professor, joined the Party under pressure:

At first I just made myself do it. The Nazi accounts were so fantastic -- plots of world-Jewry, etc. -- that I could hardly keep from laughing as I read them; but of course I had to be careful. It was somewhat of a shock to find how readily the children accepted these Nazi fabrications. But the most amazing thing of all was, that after a few years of going through the routine, I began to believe the stories myself and could no longer distinguish in my own mind between propaganda and truth.

Paragraph 2 of the Law Relating to the Hitler Youth read that "all young Germans in the Reich area are, except in the parental home and at school, to be physically, mentally and morally reared in the spirit of National Socialism for service to the nation and the national community in the Hitler Youth." For most young people, there was little resistance. The enthusiasm for the Fuhrer canceled out all other interests. Even when church groups or parents pleaded with children to keep away from the Hitler Youth, their hearts and souls had been captured by the uniforms, the fife and drums, and the example of their peers, so that not to be included in the Fuhrer's glorious movement became the worst kind of punishment.

The generation gap became a battle for the mind in some families, where parents who opposed the regime found it impossible to express their ideas to their idolatrous children. Parents rejecting Nazi dogma while their children shifted loyalty to the family to loyalty to the Party must have experienced great pain. In many households, one's offspring became one's worst enemy. It was not at all uncommon for children to denounce their parents as traitors to the state.

Children worshipped the Fuhrer as a god. To be singled out to see him and speak to him was to be elevated to demigod. The training fostered this kind of fanaticism while at the same time discarding intellectual inquiry. Philosophy was held to be morbid. Universal education was, according to Hitler, "the most corrosive and disintegrative poison ever devised by liberalism." Each stratum of society needed to learn what was necessary for its particular purposes, and nothing more. All education was to be under constant surveillance, with the "broad mass of the lowest class" receiving "the blessings of illiteracy."

Hitler was right. His pedagogy was hard, not only for German youth but for all mankind. He took the prevailing knowledge about mass propaganda techniques and applied them zealously. Almost every moment in the youth camps was regimented. The mind was led step by step through an intensive drill to accept Nazi principles. The days were long and active, and the political indoctrination was particularly effective when minds were tired. Without physical force, then, youth was brainwashed from the 5:45 A.M. reveille to the 9:30 P.M. lights-out, with lectures on the healthy family, the healthy nation, hereditarily diseased offspring, Germanic civilization, and Lebensraum theories instilled along with a love of heroism, toughness, silence, and loyalty, and above all, a contempt for weakness.

By these tactics, the Nazis created a generation of youth so brutalized that they were capable of roaring with hysterical laughter while watching civilians in occupied countries being executed and, when they ran out of civilians, hanging kittens from miniature gallows. A British soldier, writing home, remarked: "It is not even organized terrorism, but cruelty and bestiality practised for its own sake, the worst offenders being German boys between the ages of 16 and 18." Another observer, a Swiss who lived in Germany in 1943, noticed in these boys "an acquired military rigidity together with a quivering nervousness ... bright laughter side by side with a desperate seriousness, and a self-assured, grown-up manner alternating with childish and uncontrollable behavior." The boys he was describing were ten to eighteen years old.

The impact of the "hate" training is brought home dramatically when we realize that these young hoods, when captured in the war, refused blood transfusions if they could not be certain of the donor's racial purity, preferring to die instead.

When they were questioned by the Allies about the atrocities, they shrugged off their responsibility: "I saw women and children killed, but did not pay any attention to it; I have no opinion, I obey."

By Nazi standards, their education had been perfect. All morality and intelligence had been propagandized out of them. Before Hitler came, Germany had been one of the most respected countries in the world for its high standard of education. By February 11, 1941, the illiteracy that Hitler prized was an accomplished fact, according to an official press account, which reported: "Apprentices not only seem unable to spell properly, but also fall far below the old standards in arithmetic. At a recent examination for 179 apprentices, 94 spelled names without capital letters, and 81 misspelled Goethe's name [in 17 different ways]...."

After the war, the Allies were worried about how to rehabilitate these morally depraved youngsters. A German teacher provided a solution:

Why do we conquer such distant foreign lands if, in so doing, we must leave untilled the field of our own children's souls which is close at hand?

Never mind textbooks, the first job will be to teach these youngsters how to love!

Love was something Himmler actually tried to instill in youth, though not in the sense that the teacher meant it. Departing from the puritanism of the earlier youth movement, he urged that the mating of vigorous young males with healthy females was so important to the future of the Aryan race that procreation was no longer a private matter, but a duty to the state. Irresponsible youth was encouraged to produce children out of wedlock, and unwed mothers were elevated to hitherto undreamed-of heights. Although abortions for adult women almost disappeared (in 1940 there were less than a third of what there had been in 1931), abortions for fourteen- and fifteen- year-old girls rose, as did the incidence of pregnancies. Secret reports dealt with homosexuality among Hitler Youth, which officials blamed on the old youth-group past of many members and leaders, when a homoerotic ideal had been fostered.

One of Himmler's major preoccupations was the question of how to produce more male children to make up for those killed in the war. He had heard there was a custom in the Swabian Alps of a man abstaining from alcohol for a whole week, going for a twenty-kilometer walk in the early afternoon, and copulating with his wife on his return. She had done nothing but sleep and eat wholesome food for the week. This was believed to bring about the birth of a male child. Himmler asked an SS doctor to comment, but never got an answer.

Himmler dreamed up Lebensborn, a chain of maternity homes which looked after unwed mothers and provided foster homes for illegitimate babies. He believed the organization would result in several thousand more choice births annually. Every SS officer had to join it and support it with his dues, 5 to 8 percent of his salary. Other SS men were not forced to become members. Himmler believed that "Nietzsche's Superman could be attained by means of breeding" and warned his men that "without multiplying our blood we shall not be able to maintain the Great Germanic Empire that is in the process of coming into existence." He encouraged his "valuable and racially pure men" to become "conception assistants" and overcome their bourgeois qualms about fathering children out of wedlock. Lebensborn, he said, was "a unique phenomenon and can be the basis for a new advance of the Germanic race."

He tried to create the impression that he was learned in genetics. Citing "the marvelous authority of German folklore," he theorized that when conception took place in a Nordic cemetery, babies inherited the spirit of "all the dead heroes who lay therein." Lists of such cemeteries were published regularly in the SS periodical Das Schwarze Korps. One English wag, on learning of this, punned: "One might say that these lists give a new ring to the phrase 'poking about in graveyards.' "

Himmler must have been disappointed with the total output of "new beings" at Lebensborn. In 1938, two years after the program officially started, the seven Lebensborn homes accepted only 653 mothers, 40 percent of the applicants who had applied. Racial requirements were so exacting that the majority were turned away. In 1939, however, there were homes in Steinhoring, Polzin, Klosterheide (Mark), Hohehorst, and in the Vienna woods. Later, more hospitals, children's homes, and sanitoria were added from former Jewish properties. Directing offices were set up in Bromberg, as well as in Belgium and Holland. But, for all that, after nine operational years, the official figures for births at Lebensborn were recorded as 12,000, of which half were illegitimate.

Louis Hagen, in Follow My Leader, reports one Lebensborn mother as saying:

At the Tegernsee hostel, 1 waited until the tenth day after the beginning of my period and was medically examined; then I slept with an SS man who had also to perform his duty with another girl. When pregnancy was diagnosed, I had the choice of returning home or going straight into a maternity home.... The birth was not easy, but no good German woman would think of having artificial injections to deaden the pain.

Girls considered it an honor to be chosen. One maiden announced proudly to fellow passengers on a train: "I am going to the SS Ordensburg in Sonthofen to have myself impregnated." Naturally, young girls in the Hitler Youth were encouraged to try motherhood. Rewards were exemption from Labor Service and financial bonuses.

One Labor Service internee wrote to her fiance:

The first question they ask a Labor Service girl is, who's going to have a baby for the Fuhrer? Then the girls go into a camp and have to stay there for a year. First to be used by SS men, then stay for a year and have a child. If you do all right they slip you RM [reichsmarks] 1,000 and let you go....

The leaders of the camps gave their blessings to these liaisons. One wrote to the mother of a pregnant girl, to bring the glad tidings that she was soon to "present the Fuhrer with a child." If parents did not particularly care for this manner of bestowing gifts, there was nothing they could do. As one Labor Service inmate cautioned her family; "You better not beat me if I come home with a baby, or I'll denounce you!"

To get the right kind of offspring, Himmler even ordered the kidnapping of racially pure children from occupied countries.

Thus, the methodical indoctrination of a whole nation with a conglomeration of irrational ideas -- mystical, occult, racist, and anti-human -- led to the robotization of the German people, particularly the young, who were most susceptible. As J. G. Siebert, in The Remaking of German Youth, remarks;

The reason why German youth allowed itself to be tricked lies in the fact that it had itself submitted to self-escapement, irrationalism and mysticism, that it had willingly given away its rational powers and its will to independent action. It had given up mastery over itself, and when the Nazis fell upon it with their demagogery, it became an easy victim.

In a relatively short time, the good effects of civilization had been bred out of them, and they had shown themselves capable of performing the most atrocious deeds without any pangs of conscience.

Go to Next Page