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UBC: Hitler Youth
Jan. 9th, 2011 02:16 pmKater, Michael H. Hitler Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
This was a very disappointing book. My early disquiet and dissatisfaction were not assuaged by more nuanced and careful argument later in the book. Particularly on issues of sexuality, Kater's discussion ranged from the vague to the infuriating. He never reliably distinguished between "sexual promiscuity" and sexual assault,* nor did he ever explain whether he was measuring "sexual promiscuity" by the Nazis' yardstick or some other measure, or indeed trying to analyze it at all. Although he did at least discuss the experience of German girls, he did so with a semi-covert chauvinism.
He also had a bizarre double standard. When talking about German boys, he expanded the category of "boy" to include "young soldiers" and then, less explicitly, "all soldiers," and thus spent a great deal of time talking about things, such as the siege of Stalingrad, that had no direct relevance to his ostensible topic. (Also, although he mentioned the atrocities committed by them and the effect on his "young soldiers," the Einsatzgruppen appear in his text like inclusions of alien material. There cannot possibly be any Hitler Youth or former Hitler Youth in them.) He remembers to put in the verses about German war crimes and the brutality of German soldiers, but over all, he presents the "young soldiers" as victims. And then, in the section on German girls in war-time, comes this sentence: "However, insofar as many young and older women had assisted their male superiors in creating a system that facilitated ever-greater human abuses, including their own continuous exploitation, German women were by no means without blame" (Kater 232). Here, he's using the opposite rhetorical strategy. Where, with the male Germans, he expanded the category of "boy" to include men, here he's expanding the category of "woman" to include girls, and saying that, where the men are tragic victims just like the boys, the girls are complicit criminals just like the women.
To be clear: I think the question of guilt and complicity in Nazi Germany is an incredibly complicated and difficult one. It's not that I think that women should be exonerated, or that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were not cruelly exploited by their officers and government. But I object to the shoddy way Kater has constructed his argument.
I also object, while I'm at it, to Kater's tendency toward moral judgments, especially his unexamined belief that democracy must be morally good. While I agree that Nazi totalitarianism was certainly morally bad, I'm too aware of the corruption endemic in, say, the entire history of the American government to think that democracy is automatically going to be better or that it's somehow a sign of the stunted growth of German youth that they did not immediately embrace democracy with great glad cries at the end of World War II.
So. Poor prose style, poor organization (by which I mean his paragraphs were a mess, not the overall structure of the book, which was fine), fallacious rhetoric, and flatly unnuanced argument full of unexamined assumptions about morality, politics, warfare and violence, sexuality, and gender roles. This book did provide an English-language synthesis/summary of material on the HJ and the BDM that hasn't been translated, and for that I found it useful, even if still frustrating.
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*It's bad enough when he's talking about the youth groups of Nazi Germany, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, but his discussion of German girls and Allied soldiers is really not any better: "Rapes by French occupation soldiers, in addition to the Russians, were notorious, whereas in American and British zones of influence, the borderline between rape and consensual sex became blurred, since the use of chocolate, lingerie, and cigarettes as barter encouraged covert prostitution" (Kater 241). The line being blurred here is not between rape and consensual sex, but between consensual sex and prostitution--or possibly between rape and prostitution. It's hard to say, since this sentence is all the details we get. All other considerations aside, this is sloppy writing and sloppy historiography, and I'm disappointed in Harvard University Press for letting it slide.
This was a very disappointing book. My early disquiet and dissatisfaction were not assuaged by more nuanced and careful argument later in the book. Particularly on issues of sexuality, Kater's discussion ranged from the vague to the infuriating. He never reliably distinguished between "sexual promiscuity" and sexual assault,* nor did he ever explain whether he was measuring "sexual promiscuity" by the Nazis' yardstick or some other measure, or indeed trying to analyze it at all. Although he did at least discuss the experience of German girls, he did so with a semi-covert chauvinism.
He also had a bizarre double standard. When talking about German boys, he expanded the category of "boy" to include "young soldiers" and then, less explicitly, "all soldiers," and thus spent a great deal of time talking about things, such as the siege of Stalingrad, that had no direct relevance to his ostensible topic. (Also, although he mentioned the atrocities committed by them and the effect on his "young soldiers," the Einsatzgruppen appear in his text like inclusions of alien material. There cannot possibly be any Hitler Youth or former Hitler Youth in them.) He remembers to put in the verses about German war crimes and the brutality of German soldiers, but over all, he presents the "young soldiers" as victims. And then, in the section on German girls in war-time, comes this sentence: "However, insofar as many young and older women had assisted their male superiors in creating a system that facilitated ever-greater human abuses, including their own continuous exploitation, German women were by no means without blame" (Kater 232). Here, he's using the opposite rhetorical strategy. Where, with the male Germans, he expanded the category of "boy" to include men, here he's expanding the category of "woman" to include girls, and saying that, where the men are tragic victims just like the boys, the girls are complicit criminals just like the women.
To be clear: I think the question of guilt and complicity in Nazi Germany is an incredibly complicated and difficult one. It's not that I think that women should be exonerated, or that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were not cruelly exploited by their officers and government. But I object to the shoddy way Kater has constructed his argument.
I also object, while I'm at it, to Kater's tendency toward moral judgments, especially his unexamined belief that democracy must be morally good. While I agree that Nazi totalitarianism was certainly morally bad, I'm too aware of the corruption endemic in, say, the entire history of the American government to think that democracy is automatically going to be better or that it's somehow a sign of the stunted growth of German youth that they did not immediately embrace democracy with great glad cries at the end of World War II.
So. Poor prose style, poor organization (by which I mean his paragraphs were a mess, not the overall structure of the book, which was fine), fallacious rhetoric, and flatly unnuanced argument full of unexamined assumptions about morality, politics, warfare and violence, sexuality, and gender roles. This book did provide an English-language synthesis/summary of material on the HJ and the BDM that hasn't been translated, and for that I found it useful, even if still frustrating.
---
*It's bad enough when he's talking about the youth groups of Nazi Germany, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, but his discussion of German girls and Allied soldiers is really not any better: "Rapes by French occupation soldiers, in addition to the Russians, were notorious, whereas in American and British zones of influence, the borderline between rape and consensual sex became blurred, since the use of chocolate, lingerie, and cigarettes as barter encouraged covert prostitution" (Kater 241). The line being blurred here is not between rape and consensual sex, but between consensual sex and prostitution--or possibly between rape and prostitution. It's hard to say, since this sentence is all the details we get. All other considerations aside, this is sloppy writing and sloppy historiography, and I'm disappointed in Harvard University Press for letting it slide.
