How did the Nazis deal with young

people?

How did the Nazis deal with young

people?By Gonzalo Frias & Elena Piñon.

IntroductionIntroductionHitler focused specifically on young people because he realized that they were the next

generation of Germans. He censored schools, trying to get every Aryan boy to enter the

Nazis. He even created an organization called the Hitler Youth. This program consisted on taking young children away from their homes and placing them under the control of the Nazi

government.

The Hitler Youth was seen as being as important to a child as school was, because Hitler believed that the future of Nazi Germany was in its children. In it, boys were prepared for military service while girls were trained for motherhood.

The Nazis used posters like this to attract young people to join them. The Nazis wanted all young people to become loyal followers of Hitler. So in the 1920s he created the Hitler Youth. The Hitler Youth was intended to bring up "Aryan" German young people as true Nazis.

Boys at 10, joined the Deutsches Jungvolk (German Young People) until the age of 13 when they were transferred to the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) until the age of 18. There was even a special Hitler Youth division made up of 20,000 boy soldiers.

Boys also had to try to shoot down Allied aircraft.

The Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM (The League of German Girls), was the only female youth organization in Nazi Germany.It was the female branch of the overall Nazi Party youth movement, the Hitler Youth.

Both of these are some of the many posters they used to attract young women.

The following photo is part of a collection from The Hitler No One Knows: 100 Pictures of the Life of the Führer by Heinrich Hoffmann .In 1940, 420,000 copies had been printed.

You can realise in this source how young the children when they started being part of Hitler Youth were.

Why did Hitler do this? He figured that if they were taught the Nazi way from a young age, they would stick to it, in other words, he brainwashed young people.

Hitler used posters like

these ones so to give a lot

of propaganda

to Hitler Youth. At first, boys could join the Hitler

Youth at the young age of

14 but in 1936,

membership became

unavoidable.

Young children: what do you know about your leader? This poster was a way of showing the “kind” side of Hitler, a man who cares about the future of yong children in Germany.

Hitler liked to portray himself as greatly caring for children.

Young children who serve the leader.

The oppositionThe opposition

Despite the fact that many young people were in favor or

the Nazis, there were some opposite movements. The

most famous ones were The Swing Youth and The

Edelweiss Pirates

These were members of The Edelweiss Pirates. The Edelweiss Pirates used direct and aggressive methods of resistance. They were determined to defeat Nazism not only through small-scale aggression, but also with direct and organized violence.

The Swing Youth, on the

other hand, used cultural

transformations.