Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

“I am beginning with the young,” Adolf Hitler exclaimed soon after coming to power in 1933. “We older ones are used up…. We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past…. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them I can make a new world.” Nor was this mere hyperbole. Hitler intended, with a desperate seriousness, to create a new man and a new society. “We must educate a new type of man,” he proclaimed at the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1935, and in a speech in Reichenberg in December 1938 the Führer outlined what he meant: “These young people learn nothing else but to think as Germans and to act as Germans; these young boys join our organization at the age of ten, …then four years later they move… to the Hitler Youth…. Then we are even less prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create our class and status barriers…. If they… have still not become real National Socialists, then they go into the Labor Service and are polished there…. And if… there are still remnants of class consciousness or pride in status, then the Wehrmacht will take over for a further treatment…. They will not be free again for the rest of their lives.” 8Hitler intended early on, then, to create a new Nazi society through intense efforts at socializing the young and eliminating what he regarded as ruinous vestiges of the class conflict that he believed had brought Germany to a state of weakness and degradation.

Much of the passionate energy and idealism associated with Nazism stemmed from these young people, exposed as they were to relentless National Socialist ideological indoctrination and training. Many of them were attracted by the rebellion against seemingly failed old norms and traditions, as well as by the promise of building a new classless, harmonious society in which internal divisions would be eliminated and a spirit of community would prevail. The Nazi stress on comradeship, achievement, and constant action produced a restless dynamic that drew many fervent followers into the circle of belief. “What I liked about the HJ was the comradeship,” remembered one Hitler Youth leader after the war:

I was full of enthusiasm when I joined the Jungvolk at the age of ten. What boy isn’t fired by being presented with high ideals such as comradeship, loyalty, and honor. I can still remember how deeply moved I was when we learned the club mottoes: “Jungvolk boys are hard, …they are loyal; Jungvolk boys are comrades; the highest value for a Jungvolk boy is honor.” They seemed to me to be holy. And then the trips! Is there anything nicer than enjoying the splendors of the homeland in the company of one’s comrades…. And it always made a deep impression to sit of an evening round a fire outside in a circle and to have a sing song and tell stories…. Here sat apprentices and school boys, the sons of workers and civil servants side by side and got to know and appreciate one another.

Indeed, remembered Gustav Köppke, a worker from a Communist family in the Ruhr and himself a communist after the war, “Our workers’ suburb and the HJ were absolutely not contradictory…. The HJ uniform was something positive in our childhood.” 9

This attempt to bring together Germans from differing social, educational, and occupational backgrounds made a deep impression on many young Germans. “The creation of that Volksgemeinschaft in which the workers would be fully integrated,” Friedrich Grupe remembered thinking, “the end of the destructive class struggle, the realization of the principle ‘common good before individual good,’ was that all not really revolutionary in comparison to that which had been before?” To serve a Volksgemeinschaft, to live a life of camaraderie, to believe in the German people and Hitler as the German Führer—these were ideals pressed into the minds and souls of German youth. “Our freedom was service”: this line from a Hitler Youth song reflected the ideal of devotion to the community—even to the point of death; as Grupe acknowledged, hardly any song sung by the youth of the HJ did not celebrate death in the service of the community. “Laugh, comrades,” one such song proclaimed, “our death will be a celebration.” And why? “Germany must live, even if we must die,” went the refrain. “We dedicate our death to you as the smallest deed.” Nor did such songs denote empty ceremony. “We believed in a new community, free from class conflict, united in brotherhood under the self-chosen Führer…, national and socialist,” Grupe claimed. Further, like many of his generation, he believed that “this new society should grow out of the youth movement. Our struggle above all aimed at the profiteering ‘plutocrats’ and the vain, egoistic bourgeois materialists.” The group’s motto, Grupe recalled, was, “Down with these external signs of class snobbery. We are all comrades!” 10

As Hitler had foreseen, the Labor Service ( Reichsarbeitsdienst ) appeared to many young men, as Grupe put it, “the embodiment, the realization of the Volksgemeinschaft …. Everyone had to perform work with the spade in the German earth, everyone became a worker belonging to the great national community over and above rank, status, and class…. That was living comradeship.” This enthusiasm was no mere romanticized sentiment, for Grupe wrote in 1937 during his own stint in the Labor Service:

This community of working men is something unique. From all sections of society we come here together…. Often we sing the song that characterizes this new compulsory labor service in the Third Reich:

Because of our burdens borne in common the feeling of comradely identity grows rapidly…. We’re experiencing here what we understand to be Volksgemeinschaft . And we’re putting our conception of National Socialism into action: We are all the same in our service for our people, no one is asked his origins or class, whether he is rich or poor…. Snobbery, class consciousness, envy, and idleness are left out on the street. This is the way from “I” to “We.”

An obvious Nazi enthusiast as a young man, Grupe provided a hint of the seductive force of the notion of national community, relating in his diary a contemporary episode redolent of the enthusiasm generated by this idea:

This excitement has also infected those men who obviously did not believe in National Socialism. Just a short time ago one of my roommates, who openly admitted to still being a communist, confided to me that he would never, absolutely never, belong to our Volksgemeinschaft . Afterward as before there would be no doubt as to the reality of the class struggle…. But now, situated in our special train on the return trip, which is filled with a happy din, he has also put a flower in his buttonhole and appears to be visibly moved. And I ask him: “Have you now felt it, the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft ?” 11

To Grupe, as to many young Germans, the Labor Service represented true socialism in that everyone wore the same uniforms and performed similar tasks in service to the nation. But just how representative Grupe’s emotional attachment to the concept of a national community was remains a matter of conjecture. The Hitler Youth’s success in indoctrinating young people in Nazi ideology probably proved less than its founders had hoped. The quality of leadership in the HJ was generally poor, and the war served further to remove talented section leaders from the organization. Nonetheless, the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service almost certainly reinforced specific values important to the Nazis: camaraderie, sacrifice, loyalty, duty, honor, endurance, courage, obedience; and perhaps as well a certain contempt for those outside the bonds of community.