THE AMERICAN VICTIMS OF NAZISM
Clair, Louis
The American Victims Of Nazism By LOUIS CLAIB A FEW months ago, the Swiss press reported the following incident: "Among the many refugees recently arriving here, there was a 12-year old boy from...
...The German" could be pictured as a subhuman being, and especially each and every boy and girl was considered beyond hope of redemption...
...All schools and universities are closed, normal social life is nearly at a standstill...
...The Hitler Youth to which most of them belonged had not succeeded in giving them any great love of war...
...They wore a gaudy 5-and-10-cent-store flower pin underneath their left lapel as their only identification...
...But we hardly had anything to point to...
...T must confess that, when I first came across these and similar reports, I was tremendously excited...
...They are now hounded by military police, since, as political organizations, they are strictly forbidden in Western Germany...
...That's no life...
...They very soon become opposed to the Hitler Youth, in certain instances even to National Socialist philosophy, and finally aim at committing punishable acts...
...They don't know a thing about democracy, cannot define it, don't know what it is but they will all tell you that they want some kind of liberty...
...The Nazis fondly believed that it was possible to remake completely the human mind through indoctrination...
...Said one of them: "Who the hell wants to spend all his time marching, drilling, doing service and the rest of the damn foolishness...
...One of them said to a startled interviewer, pointing to a friend of his, that "he was a dependable reactionary...
...But a new society needs positive aims, and ideals that go beyond mere rejection...
...It makes me shudder to think that they will some day hold responsible positions in German society...
...These youngsters revolted against indoctrination and drilling...
...The Nazi regime has collapsed, but the spirit of Hitler blossoms among Americans, columnists, educators, publicists...
...The United Press reported from Kassel (May 81 : "Two 17-year old German boys who flirted with death by aiding the Allies, proudly told today of the 'Edelweiss pirates.' The Edelweiss gang, a loosely knit network of teen-age lads, banded together to sabotage the Nazis in every way possible—destroying material and beating up party members...
...theirs was just revolt, just striving for something else, something freer, something where young people could freely associate and thrash out their ideas...
...SHORTLY before the final downfall of his bloody reign, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, ook time out to draw up personally a circular letter to 11 Gestapo units on anti-Nazi activities by youth groups: "In all parts of the Reich, particularly in big cities, the formation of youth groups is on the increase...
...And then reports began to come in from various sides: The leaders of the Hitler Youth were seriously concerned about the weakening of their hold on young people...
...No amount of indoctrination could reconcile these youngsters with the huge bureaucratic machinery that the Hitler Youth had become...
...Members are usually children of working-class parents...
...Their opposition is shown by indifference to war events, evasion of service, assaults on members of the Hitler Youth, listening to foreign broadcasts, spreading of rumors and carrying on the tradition of illegal groups...
...They, just as Nazi educators, cannot understand that the human mind is not simply a machine to absorb and reproduce stereotyped thinking, and thus they advocate that swarms of American educators descend on German schools and universities to re-educate (read reendoctrinate) German youth...
...I HOPE these lengthy quotations didn't bore you...
...We hated the Hitler Youths...
...The groups consist of young men and sometimes girls...
...In the middle of 1944, the Deutsche Polizei, organ of the German police, explained why it had been found necessary to institute special "police camps for the protection of juveniles": "There is an inclination among juveniles to form cliques whose members soon indulge in an accentuated indifference and indolent attitude to contemporary events...
...WHAT does it all add up to...
...THE Nazis have caused tremendous ravages among the younger generation of Germany, no doubt...
...They didn't share the idolatry of Adolf Hitler common among men 10 or 12 years older...
...The bodies of 13 of these youngsters, who were murdered by the Gestapo for helping American parachutists, were found recently in Benzheim...
...That's no life...
...He made a sketch from a European map in his camp and then ran away without telling anybody of his plan...
...On the other hand, you can let them do exactly the same kind of work, but declare it a punitive measure by which the German youth—the pariahs of Europe—are being punished for the sins of their fathers and older brothers, and you will repel and disillusion them a second time...
...Some of these youth did revolt, but their revolt had little concrete content...
...They still proclaim that the Nazis have completely poisoned German youth, that all youngsters born and reared under the Nazis are a lost generation...
...These ideals, however, cannot be imposed from the outside, though outside help is essential to develop the tender seeds that for years have been slowly growing under the snow...
...they only, and not the products of Military Government's accelerated teaching courses...
...The theoreticians, who concluded from their desks here that Nazi indoctrination has completely got hold of the German youth, have shown that, more than the Nazi youth, they themselves have fallen victim to Nazi propaganda...
...In Krefeld at least 30 per tent of the Hitler Youth were secret Edelweiss members...
...He declared that he had been a member of the Hitler Youth against his will and that he never liked the service...
...The Nazis made us work from 10 to 12 hours daily and after that we were sup-losed to w^irk for the party...
...In February he planned to escape...
...Their chief aim was to destroy the Hitler Youth which they found dull and corrupt...
...Thus the field was open for Rex Stout and all the other professional hate mongers...
...What the Winter will bring is hard to imagine...
...Parents often encourage their children to join such groups...
...The American Victims Of Nazism By LOUIS CLAIB A FEW months ago, the Swiss press reported the following incident: "Among the many refugees recently arriving here, there was a 12-year old boy from near Bayreuth (North-East Bavaria...
...When they started parading around, giving orders and beating-up people, we wanted to show them we weren't taking their orders.' said Heinz Johannes...
...An excellent report on German opposition youth movements, issued by the American Association for a Democratic Germany (New York City) states: "The best elements of the young generation will have kept youthful enthusiasm and longing for positive goals that can be transformed into positive action and a positive ideology...
...TWO years ago, a Nazi professor wrote an alarmed article on German university students : "They are tired of the political conception of life and are seeking private intellectual satisfaction...
...These youngsters had been reared under Nazism, they were supposed to be completely poisoned, without hope of salvation...
...They vaguely sensed the emptiness of Nazi life and craved for different values, for a release of energies which could find no outlet within the garrison state...
...And the Rex Stouts, the Emil Ludwigs, el al, believed them...
...These youth groups were hounded by the Gestapo...
...they believed that there is nothing inherently spontaneous in the make-up of human psychology, nothing that cannot be remodeled by modern soul doctoring, just as modern surgery remodels parts of the human body...
...compulsory re-education breeds resistance and not understanding of democratic ideas...
...They are romantic and confused, idealistic, and militant . . . they want to destroy the Nazi state and they dream of some kind of new world which they cannot describe more concretely than by saying it should be free...
...Nazi censorship was airtight and in wartime Allied censor-shin has also been very strict...
...it rather represented the society of the grownups...
...German youth, just as German adults, now live on a starvation diet of around 1.000 calories...
...Well, this contradicted all we had heard so far...
...It is the second method that is now being followed...
...And then there came this curious report from a prisoners' camp in North Africa (New York Times, June 7, 194?,) : "Thousands of the prisoners are youth of 16, 17, 18...
...No doubt, Edelweiss and the various other opposition youth movements with the romantic names didn't have a concrete political program...
...Re-education...
...One of their practices was to waylay young Nazis and beat them up...
...Only after a while did the interviewer realize that because the Nazis in their propaganda speeches often attacked 'reactionaries.' the boy simply had adopted this terminology, giving it a positive instead of a negative content...
...But for the younger generation, the Hitler Youth no longer was the romantic movement it had been for their elders...
...Maybe we felt that something was wrong about these statements, that even the most total control of all phases of human life, even indoctrination and propaganda from cradle to grave, could not completely extinguish spontaneous human reactions...
...Nevertheless, what a defeat for the Nazi education program...
...For years we had heard about the depravation of everything German, but especially about the total Nazification of the entire German youth...
...it was an official institution just like school...
...These groups have oppositional political as well as liberal individualistic tendencies...
...A number of their leaders come from former opposition groups or student organizations...
...They lead a life incompatible with National Socialist ideas...
...But these new re-educators would meet with as little success as the Nazis did...
...if at the same time you can fill them with the vision of a new Europe in whose rebuilding they participate and of which they will be a part...
...Free man can be born only in a free society...
...But present policies breed Werewolves, not democrats...
...They completely overlooked the fact that Nazi propaganda had been successful at a time when insecure and revolted youth craved for some sort of leadership in the midst of insecurity, frustration, and unemployment...
...we didn't even have time o sleep,' said baby-faced Hermann Bannenberg...
...As a recent manifesto of German Socialists from Buchenwald concentration camp (which had been completely suppressed in the American press and has only been published now) says: "No one can re-educate us but ourselves, who must assume this task in freedom...
...Margaret Higgins cables from near Frankfort to the New York Herald Tribune (April 27) : "There has been confirmed here the existence of an anti-Nazi group of youngsters banded together in several cities...
...These kids had the vaguest notions of what "life" could be, they didn't know a thing about pre-Nazi or foreign political conditions...
...You can put these young- people to hard work...
...These students are the men who can assume the burden of education in a new Germany...
...The trip took him 6 weeks, staying in villages, helping farmers in the fields, until he finally reached the Swiss frontier...
...their opposition was almost entirely negative...
...They made life miserable for leaders and members of the Hitler Youth...
...and here just they, contrary to the generation immediately preceding them, were said to be sharply critical of Hitler and the war...
...The Edelweiss organization apparently is an almost leaderless nationwide gang that took its name from the Alpine flower...
...Hitler Youth patrols kept a special eye on unorganized tramping and hiking and the formation of youth gangs...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 33
