27. The Nazis’ Tragic Indoctrination of German Children in the Ways of Hate and Horridness
Nazi Germany committed many atrocities, and one of the most tragic is how it went about the mass indoctrination of innocent children, to turn them into obedient and hate-filled cogs in their monstrous machine. However, not all German kids were eager to accept the fare fed them by the Nazis, and some of them adamantly refused to go along. In a mixture of youthful courage and the instinctive teenage desire to express their individuality, some German youngsters, who came to be known as the “Edelweiss Pirates”, bucked the system and defined themselves in opposition to the Nazis.
The Nazis’ perversion of the young began before they assumed power. In 1922, they established a youth arm to recruit, indoctrinate, and train members for their paramilitary arm, the Storm Troopers, or Brown Shirts. As the party became more numerous and powerful, so did the size of its youth arm, which was renamed the Hitlerjugend (“Hitler Youth”) in 1926. When the Nazis gained power in 1933, they made their youth arm Germany’s sole official youth organization, and took over and folded preexisting youth organizations into their own. Hitler appointed a Reich Youth Leader to oversee the takeover.