The Hitler Youth Conspiracy
The Hitler Youth Conspiracy was the conspiracy that wasn’t, created by Soviet Secret Police to justify the arrest, incarceration, and in at least 40 cases execution of young Germans living in Moscow and other areas of the Soviet Union during the Great Purge. In the early 1930s German teens were arrested under suspicion of being members of the Hitler Youth, but after “re-education” most were released unharmed after just a few months. By the end of the 1930s those suspected of being Hitler Youth members or of being involved in other anti-communist activities were not so lucky.
In January 1938 the NKVD – Stalin’s secret police – announced the secret formation of a Hitler Youth group in Moscow by German students at the Karl Leibknecht School, a German language school which had been established for the benefit of German refugees. By the late 1930s many Germans, especially those with communist leanings, had fled Germany and the Nazis. Many went to Moscow. Another institution targeted was Children’s Home 6, an orphanage for German speaking children. The NKVD alleged that the Hitler Youth was conspiring to perform espionage and sabotage in Moscow and its environs.
About 70 teenagers and young adults were arrested, along with some older adults including actors from a touring German theater troupe and some factory and clerical workers. They were taken individually to Soviet cells and tortured until they agreed to sign a confession indicating that the suspicions of Hitler Youth activity held by the NKVD were correct. NKVD officers were assigned quotas and target ratios of arrests to confessions. The arrests and confessions took place between January and March 1938. Of the more than 70 arrested, only six were released after the beatings to which they were subjected failed to elicit confessions. At least one died in custody.
Two of the suspected Hitler Youth conspirators were deported to Germany and the hands of the Gestapo, likely a worse fate than that faced by those remaining in Soviet custody. Those two were specifically requested to be returned by the Germans during the negotiations which led to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939. Twenty of the “conspirators” were sentenced to serve prison terms of five to ten years. At least 40 were executed by firing squad by the NKVD. The majority of those executed were children, some as young as fourteen, and several were the sons of prominent German communists.
As the Great Purge wound down Stalin had many of the officers responsible for carrying it out, under his orders, arrested and tried for committing the crimes which he had directed. Among these were the NKVD officers responsible for the Hitler Youth Conspiracy, who were tried and convicted for a variety of crimes, including the maltreatment of prisoners. By executing the executioners Stalin managed to keep some of his crimes hidden for a time. Most of the prisoners who had been released from Soviet custody were arrested again following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.