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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
But by the late 1920s, Germany's economic instability and sense of stagnation made such groups seem irrelevant. By contrast, the Nazi Party looked young and efficient, and attracted recruits accordingly: The HJ boasted 100,000 members by early 1933, when Hitler assumed power, 2 million by the end of that year and 5.4 million by the end of 1936. The inevitable "draft" into the Hitler Youth began in March 1939: Everyone age 10 through 18 was forced to join. By then, Hitler understood that the HJ could train young people for immediate entry into the armed forces.
To that end, it was crucial to curb formal education and abstract thinking. By the end of the '30s, teachers were encouraged to wear HJ uniforms to school, and a new category of "liaison teachers" was formed, answering directly to the HJ. The length of formal education was shortened by one year, and a set of Adolf-Hitler-Schulen ("Hitler Schools") was established. Today it's almost comical to think about how these schools divided the academic day: Ninety minutes for book learnin', five hours for sports. But it's less amusing to read that boys were chosen for these special schools based on their "character," a quality deemed superior to intellect and based on Nazi notions of honor, bravery and devotion to the Führer."
Gee, where else have we heard lately about "character" and blind devotion being valued above intellect? It's a historically insensitive analogy, to say the least, yet something about it sticks. Maybe it's just that anytime religious certainty infects politics the result bears a fascist echo.
Speaking of faith-based programs, the Nazis promoted certain young women in the League of German Girls (or BDM, the female branch of the HJ) into something dubbed "Faith and Beauty." This elite group was made up of gorgeous Aryan types, age 17 to about 28, who were supposed to meet weekly, wear glamorous outfits and look forward to bearing gorgeous Aryan children to S.S. leaders. Since many of those leaders were already married, bigamy was seen as, alas, a eugenic necessity. Throughout, Kater traces the misogyny of Nazi policies: The BDM itself was seen as an apolitical organization, preparing 10-to-18-year-old girls to be good mothers (their main role in Nazi society). Yet it didn't neglect to teach the girls fierce racist propaganda about perverse Jewish gynecologists and a girl's duty to remain racially pure (which translated, of course, into an implicit sanction on the "right" kind of sexual activity).
It seems that during the second half of the '30s, teenagers in the HJ and the BDM were making a lot of whoopee. Kater draws a vivid picture of that generation's sexual license, brought on, paradoxically, by Nazi racial doctrines. It makes sense that the Third Reich was oversexed; its entire raison d'être was tied to the reproductive rights of various races. Still, some of Kater's examples will knock you over: Following the now-infamous 1936 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, for instance, 900 BDM girls came home pregnant.
