Structure and Organization of the Hitler Youth

HITLER JUGEND or HITLER YOUTH (HJ)

"The National Socialist State will have to take care that it obtains. through an appropriate education of youth the generation which is ready for the final and greatest decisions on this globe. The people, moreover, that first start on this road will be victorious. "

- ADOLF HITLER

An outstanding characteristic of youth during the first half of the 20th century was its tendency towards organization. While Italian Fascism showed the way to monopolize the movement of youth for the purposes of party and state, the tendency of youth towards self-organization persisted in the liberal countries. It reached its greatest strength in England by the first years of the Second World War. In that country forty percent of boys and girls between fourteen and twenty belonged to some youth organization at the outbreak of the war, as against seventy-five percent at the end of 1942.

By the time the Nazis came into power a vast variety of youth organizations were active in the Reich, some nonpolitical in character, others being mere subdivisions and appendages of political parties on the right or the left. The Arbeiter Jugend. the youth group of the Social Democratic Party. was the strongest single organization of this kind.

The founding date of the Hitler Youth is usually given as 1925, though there was a Youth League of the NSDAP from 1922 which at one time called itself a League of German Labor Youth (Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend). A slightly more aristocratic NS youth organization was the NS League of Pupils (NS SchtJlerbund). founded in 1926 and put under the authority of the SA.

In October. 1931, the Reich Fuhrer of the NS League of Students, Baldur von Schirach, was appointed Reich Youth Leader of the Nazi party by Hitler. At that time, sixty-nine percent of the members of Nazi youth organizations were juvenile laborers and apprentices, ten percent were in commerce and trade. twelve percent were high school students and a large number of the members came from the unemployed. Membership, which included only those who paid their initiation and membership fees. was 20,000 though there were more who belonged but could not pay, for 100,000 marched by the Fuhrer at a Reich Youth Congress for the Nazi party in Potsdam in October 1932.

Most of the German youth groups before 1933 were associates of one over-all group. the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations. It was the existence of this that enabled the Nazis to take over youth, which was done by a coup on the part of Hitler Youth Leader Schirach in April, 1933 with the help of groups of the SA. After that, the usualprocess of Gleichschaltung brought the few remaining associations under Schirach's direction and on the road to uniformity of organization. Schirach emerged as Reich Youth Leader of the Nazi party and Youth Leader of the German Empire.

This unification process, which the religious youth organizations resisted longest, was not fully carried out until the year 1936. when a Reich Youth Law of December 1 recognized the "claim of the Hitler Youth to totality." This law also brought to an end an earlier tendency, lasting approximately from May, 1934 to the end of 1936, to make out of the HJ a "State youth", placed under the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and Popular Enlightenment, under civil servants and professional educators, rather than as a "party youth", placed under a party bureaucracy. The party directorate thought it advisable to have the party guide and possess youth. Control seemed more safely arranged and deserving party members were provided with jobs when the party ran the youth organization. It gathered the fees which, with a membership fee for the youngest group (Pimpfe) of 35 pfennige a month. brought an annual income from this source alone of at least 35 million RM.

This basic law of 1936, considering that "on youth depends the future of German folkdom (Volkstum)" and that "consequently the totality of German youth must be prepared for its future duties", provided that (1) all German youth within the territory of the Reich be united (zusammengefasst) within the HJ; (2) All German youth be educated physically, mentally, morally in the spirit of National Socialism and for the service to the people and for folk community (Volksgemeinschaft); and that (3) The task of leading the whole German HJ be conferred upon the Reich Youth Leader of the Nazi party, this act making him Youth Leader of the German Empire. His office had the rank and position of a supreme Reich office with the seat in Berlin and was placed directly under the Fuhrer himself. It was independent as any ministry, if not more so.

A youth Service Decree (Jugenddienstverordnung) of April, 1939 made membership in the HJ obligatory for all German youth from ten to eighteen. In keeping, however, with its tendency of preserving a party elite within such all-inclusive institutions in the Third Reich, the party provided for a special nucleus within the HJ, the Stamm-HJ.Membership in it was voluntary like party membership and highly selective. and thus a new party organ to ensure continued control was introduced. The General HJ (Allgemeine HJ) was the "omnium gatherum" which took in even those with a non-Aryan grandmother, whereas the Stamm-HJ fulfilled "the same racial conditions which the Nazi party insists upon for its members" and had to show that parents of members were politically reliable.

On the strength of this law, agreements with the Reich Ministry of Education set aside one whole day, Saturday. (which had always been a school day in Germany) to be given to the HJ for purposes of "education through the Reich Youth Leadership." Sunday was to be reserved for the family and the home (agreement of June 7, 1934). Schools were set up in order to produce a uniform-mined leader personnel, a higher professional group of the (JugendftJhrer) and a lower nonprofessional one of the Unterfuhrer. The latter were prepared in three week courses of the numerous Leader Schools (Fuhrerschulen), of the HJ. of which there were sixty-five in 1937. The professionals were educated in the Academy for Youth Leadership (Akademie fur Jugendfuhrung), located at Braunschweig, to which every Hitler youth could be called, provided he proved his German blood, good health and eugenic promise, a fully completed apprenticeship in some handicraft or other profession or graduation from a nine-class highschool. After a preliminary selective course, the authorities of the HJ decided whether or not the candidate was to be admitted to this new profession. In the first case, he had to serve his regular time on the Labor Service and in the armed forces after which time the following services were expected of the Fuhrer aspirant (Fuhreranwarter): four months activity in the office of a HJ Gebietsfuhrung, an eight weeks course in the Reich Leader School (Fuhrerschule) at Potsdam, and one year's course in the Academy, three weeks of service with the industries of the homeland and a five to six months educational stay in foreign countries. If that was passed, the Youth Leader began his service which as a minimum would last twelve years, the usual term of the professional noncoms of the armed forces.

The number of professional paid HJ leaders was given as high as 30,000 to whom should be added hundreds of thousands of minor Fuhrers. In fact, in April, 1938 the HJ was led by a total of 562,000 male and female leaders: of these 59 were Gebiets and Obergebietsfuhrer, 1,365 Hauptbann-, Oberbann- and Bannfuhrer, 9,000 Stammfuhrer or Ringfuhrerinnen, with 550,571 leaders of the still lower units, All leaders from Bannand Jungbannfuhrer upward had by the end of 1938 met their military duties or had served for at least eight weeks with the armed forces.

"Youth must be led by youth" was the declared principle of HJ leadership. Here are the age averages for 1938: Obergebietsfuhrer, thirty years and six months; Gebietsfuhrer, thirty-one years and four months; Abteilungsleiter of the Gebiete, twenty-five years and four months; Bannfuhrer, twenty-five years and one month and Jungbannfuhrer, twenty-five years and eight months. It was planned to retire the professional youth leader after twelve years of his service, which would mean at an age of about thirty-six, and then take him over with a corresponding rank and poSition into the SS. Of the total HJ membership (at the end of 1937),16.4 percent were pupils of grade and high schools, 25.5 percent were working in commerce and trade, 8.7 percent in the technical professions, 3.4 percent were agricultural workers, 20,9 percent were called youthful laborers, 5.9 percent were university and college students (with theology students excluded as HJ leaders), and 5.4 percent were school teachers, while 11.3 percent belonged to various other trades and professions and 21.5 percent had no profession.

The HJ comprised German youth in the following groups: German Youth Folk (Deutsches Jungvolk DJ) for the male youth from eight or later ten, to fourteen years, the Pimpfe; the HitlerYouth, HJ, in the narrower sense of the term, for the male youth from fourteen to eighteen; the corresponding groups for girls were the Young Girls (Jungmadel, JM) and the Association of German Girls (Bund deutscher Madel, BOM) which was also the term for all girl's organizations within the HJ.

Ray Cowdery: "Nazi Para-military Organizations", Northstar Commemoratives, 1985

Note: Look closely at the poster shown above. Does the HJ kid in the background look like someone familiar? Bob