UBC: The Hitler Youth

[truepenny]

Koch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945. New York: Dorset Press, 1975.

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In a nutshell, this book is about the way in which Hitler and the NSDAP exploited--and betrayed--the energy and idealism of German youth for their own benefit. Koch was himself a Hitler Youth--and a survivor of the Volkssturm--and his occasional, bitterly sarcastic, personal comments are some of the book's most enlightening moments on the thoughts and experience of the boys themselves. (I wish he had brought himself to talk a little more about his own experience, but that wasn't the book he was writing, and I respect that.) He shows very clearly how National Socialism, both vehemently anti-intellectual and lacking an ideology that was even coherent, much less capable of standing up to debate, substituted physical activity for thought. Although Koch never says so explicitly, it's clear that Führer-worship (which Kershaw showed to be endemic and pervasive in German culture under the Third Reich) made up the deficit. And although Koch argues that the Nazis' ideological programming of the Hitler Youth was less than successful, he does not omit the evidence that children absorbed the "correct" attitudes towards, for instance, Jews and Poles. And toward the necessity of fighting to the last "man."

I also wish that the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen) and the experience of girls were not as clearly an afterthought to Koch's book as he admits they were to the Nazi regime. More reasons to try to find the (very few) books written about women in the Third Reich.

And I shall end with a Nazi word problem, as cited by Koch:

"A mentally-handicapped person costs the public 4 Reichsmark per day, a cripple 5.50 Reichsmark and a convicted criminal 3 Reichsmark. Cautious estimates state that within the boundaries of the German Reich 300,000 persons are being cared for in public mental institutions. How many marriage loans at 1,000 Reichsmark per couple could annually be financed from the funds allocated to institutions?" (A. Dorner, ed., Mathematik im Dienst der nationalpolitischen Erziehung, Frankfurt 1936)
(Koch 174)

The Third Reich, in all its creepy anti-glory.

Comments

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

Okay, definitely finding this book. *makes grabby hands* I still wonder what it says about me that I find Nazi history/worldview so creepily fascinating? But still, yeah. Gonna read.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, you and me both.

[almightychrissy.livejournal.com]

It says something utterly terrible about me and how long I've been teaching test prep that my first though after reading that problem was "Oh, so the criminal and the cripple are just distractor information!"

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I've never taken a test prep course (they were unusual, and mostly remedial, when I was of testing age), but so far I've known all the tricks I've heard reported from them. But yeah, I was stacking up facts in my head, and then dumped those two when they were shown to be irrelevant. I thought "propaganda" of course, though.

[almightychrissy.livejournal.com]

Take it from me-- the courses are not worth it.

I thought propaganda too, but I spent a disturbingly long amount of time analyzing it as a math problem before finally thinking about it in terms of worldview.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

Have you read A Child of Hitler by Alfons Heck? It's a more memoirish sort of book written by a guy who was in Hitler Youth, I had to read it for a politics course a long time ago & found it very readable. It's got personal details. The one I remember most is the HY boys being shown films of the concentration camp & not believing it, because they were so used to propaganda films.