Prof. Mahlendorf's memoir, Chapter 4 (14 pages)

Today Germany Belongs to Us,
Tomorrow the Whole World, 1940-42

When my age group of the years 1929/30 was inducted into the Hitler Youth in 1940 , it joined an well- established and tightly structured, national organization. During the Weimar Republic the youth division of Hitler’s SA (storm troopers) had been but one of the many youth organizations and clubs that originated in the late nineteenth century rebellion of middle and lower middle class youth against their bourgeois fathers and against their industrial, mechanized, highly structured and regimented society. Their different organizations, the best known of which called itself Wandervogel (migratory bird), glorified youth as a vital, idealistic force of social renewal, inspired by the ideals of German national Romanticism. Like their Romantic predecessors, Wandervogel groups wandered the open countryside and explored the common heritage of the simple folk, their tales, songs, fold dances, saying and customs. They strove for simplicity of life-style—shorts, open neck shirt, and solid hiking boots as dress--,for communal forms of living by camping and hiking, for individual self-realization and personal responsibility. They saw themselves as a-political, members of one community, namely German Youth. These organizations of young people, collectively called die Jugendbewegung , predominantly were male, of middle class origins and Protestant background. They as well youth organizations of different political convictions to the right and the left, of different religious affiliations and of different interests met in 1913 in a Festival of Youth, celebrating their communality as German Youth. Even before WWI, these different youth groups spread into all German-speaking countries (eg. Austria, Switzerland) and communities (Germans living in the border regions of Poland or Czechoslovakia). At the outbreak of the WWI, swept up in the up-surge of nationalism and patriotism, this youth volunteered in large numbers for the military and many fell in the first battles of WWI. The Wandervogel, for instance, lost half its membership. Much of the Wandervogel spirit, its Romanticism, its ethos of youth being led by youth, its Romantic communalism, its stress on simplicity and naturalness of lifestyle, its songs, campfires, hiking and camping practices survived into Hitler Youth as my generation came to know it. Even though none of us knew of the Wandervogel origins of this heritage, it was for many of us the most attractive feature of Hitler Youth.

The youth movements of pre- WWI changed profoundly after the war. Many became political and radicalized to the political left and right. The number of different youth organizations during the Weimar Republic increased as had the number of different political parties and interest groups. Ironically, young people experienced the Weimar Republic as they had the Empire—the rule of the old and outmoded. Few understood that they were free of the earlier authoritarian order and almost none rallied to the cause of the new democracy. The existing and new political parties, except for the Communists and the Nazis, were dominated by the older generation of men over fifty. Those youths whose families believed in the betrayal of the front soldiers by the home front, joined the youth groups on the right, with Hitler Youth as its most extreme group. Those young people whose fathers believed in the exploitation of working people by the industrial, military establishment, joined the left. Youth organizations of the left and the right as much as Catholic and Protestant youth organizations after WWI adopted soldierly values and attitudes—reverence for heroism, discipline, group spirit—and hierarchical leadership principles. Uniforms as well as military ranks and organizational structures from the smallest unit, the squad, all the way to the large national organization reflected this new post-WWI martial spirit. A change from the political left to the right often involved no more than a change in shirt color.

From his early political beginnings, Hitler formulated the structure and aims of a youth mass organization within his party. Subordinated to his Storm Troopers, the SA, it was to have its hierarchical, military structure and organization. Hence its shirts were brown and its insignia—swastika armband, leather belt—similar to those of the SA. Shorts rather than SA riding pants and boots, as well as a black kerchief held in place around the neck by a leather knot recalled the dress of the Wandervogel. Hitler conceptualized a German youth united against the injustices of the Versailles Peace Treaty that he like many conservative Germans deplored. Instead of being divided by class or religion, this youth was to be one community of race and blood. It was to fight against the international conspiracy of Jewry , Bolshevism and materialism and foster everything Germanic, of German blood and of the German Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the people. This German Youth was to cultivate these aims through weekly meetings, lectures, hiking, camping, singing, physical and military activities and competitions. At the 1926 Party Rally at Weimar, Thuringia, Hitler formally established the HY for the age group of 14-18 year olds as well as its administration with different departments and function like education, youth welfare, press, physical activities, even a department responsible for German youth abroad. With its own statutes and leadership, the newly created Hitler Youth paralleled SA paramilitary, pyramidal structure with its division into five geographic super territories. Each was again subdivided into Gaue (often corresponding to earlier provinces), into Oberbanne and Banne (regions and sub-regions), into counties, cities and towns. The hierarchy of leaders like in the military ranged from the lowest, squad leader responsible for 15 boys, over troupe leaders, who led three to four squads of up to fifty boys, over the xxx leader with responsibility for five hundred all the way to the highest, the party leader of Hitler Youth. By 1931, Hitler appointed Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the party’s student group, as leader of the entire Hitler Youth. A new organization of boys from 10-14, the Jungvolk (young people), was added to the male HY as well as one for girls from age 14- 18, the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, the BDM, the League of German Girls.

During the mid 1920s to 1933, a number of rival HY leaders had jostled for power; and a number of different sub-groups within the HY held slightly different orientations and aims—from working-class socialistic to middle class nationalistic. With Schirach’s appointment and subsequent rise in power, the nationalist middle class wing of the HY won out. But the idea clung on that the HY as well as the Party—its name was "National Social Workers’Party,"--had working class origins and a program for the disadvantaged and the common good. During my first year as a ten year old Jungmädel (Young Maiden) in late 1940, I collected money as part of the service I had to perform as a Young Maiden from passers-by on City Hall Square for the Winterhilfe, the assistance program for families in need.

The major difficulties for the entire Hitler Youth were lack of finances, scarcity of meeting places for group activities, sports, education and indoctrination as well as lack of a trained leadership cadre at all levels. Membership dues had to be kept small because of unemployment and the Depression. Basements, attics, and public spaces served as meeting places, the Heim, the home base each HY unit wanted to own. Except for a few leaders in the HY national administration, all leadership was unpaid and voluntary. Despite these handicaps in what the later HY glorified as the Days of Struggle, the HY grew rapidly after 1929 as did the Nazi party as a whole. Attracted by its spirit and success, youth organizations of the political right began to join the HY as groups. The enthusiasm and aggressiveness of the early Hitler Youth played an important role in the successes, elections, party rallies and street fighting of the party in the early 1930s.

A number of boys ranging in age from twelve to eighteen were killed in the fighting and joined the ranks of the martyrs of the party. Herbert Norkus, the fifteen year old boy who was celebrated as Hitlerjunge Quex in a sentimental novel and a movie for young people, was one. Both novel and movie bear all the hallmarks of Nazi martyr tales for the young: a generation conflict; a hero of impeccable character despite growing up in a bad environment; his attraction to the clean-cut and upright Hitler Youth; HY re-enactments of Germanic fire worship festivals (solstice); comradeship of the HY boys regardless of social class; badness and cowardice of Nazi enemies; service to and sacrifice of life for the Nazi cause. The plot was simple. Son of a working-class family, Quex under pressure from his father, joined a communist youth group. Disliking his fellows’ laziness and laxity of morals, Quex admires a group of Nazi boys for their disciplined and comradely demeanor. He becomes friendly with them and reveals to them that his communist fellows intend to attack them in their meeting place. As a revenge for his betrayal, his former friends drive his mother into death and finally stab him to death in a street fight as he is working for the party.

Shortly after Hitler’s 1933 assuming the chancellorship and the burning of the Reichstag, Hitler named Schirach the national leader of the HY directly responsible to him and no longer under SA tutelage. He placed the HY administration into the Ministry of the Interior (the police) and the Ministry of Justice, that is to say into the very heart of the police state. The youth organizations of the political left, both communist and socialist, were proscribed as were the parties of the left. By 1935, all other youth organizations were either dissolved, prohibited or integrated into the HY. Only Catholic and Protestant youth organizations resisted for a short period. As a result of Gleichschaltung, the termination of all other youth organization, and the growing domination and success of the party voluntary HY membership by 1935 had increased to about six million. The HY bureaucracy resolved some of its financial difficulties by confiscating or assuming the ownership of the funds and properties of all prohibited, disbanded and integrated youth organizations. For example, the independent German Youth Hostel Association that had served all youth organizations, came under the control and sole use of the HY. The inflow of other youth organizations with their leadership did not resolve the leadership shortage of the HY as Schirach did not trust their leaderships. Therefore in 1933 he established training centers all over the country to produce, in three week workshops, a leadership cadre for the lower ranks to accommodate the increase in membership—7000 in 1933 alone. Even so, lack of trained, disciplined, uncorrupted leaders of all ranks and therefore large differences between the discipline and practices of the local, regional and national HY units remained a problem of the Hitler Youth throughout the Nazi years. The problem became particularly grave when attendance increased again when membership became compulsory for boys and for girls age 10-18 in 1939. In some localities and regions, in particular groups and ancillary organizations, attendance and discipline were strictly enforced and negligence and absenteeism reported and punished. In others minimal standards were upheld and in a few, particularly in the countryside, it was possible to ignore the HY altogether.

From the beginnings of the HY, gender separation was strictly observed and HY remained a fundamentally a male organization. Until the late 1920s a HY for girls did not exist, and afterward it languished until 1933. Subsequently the BDM and its junior division the Young Maidens grew rapidly. Goals and programs for boys and girls were different, preparation for the military for boys and for motherhood and domesticity for girls. Boys had a vastly greater choice of ancillary HY groups to choose from provided their families had the means for equipment: the motorized HY; the navy HY with its own sail yachts; the HY air force with its own sail planes; the equestrian HY. For girls nothing comparable existed. I remember well my envy as I stood, ten years old, near the run-way of the sail plane port on Windmill Hill, observing a friend of Jochen’s in HY outfit and flying helmet climbing into a sail plane.

The ideology of the HY was a hodgepodge of old and new ideas. Foremost ranked the quasi-religious cult of the supreme leader, Hitler himself. The myth concerning him created by Nazi hagiography served as model to the young. Risen from obscure beginnings and near poverty, he had served his country as a common, simple soldier in WWI. Through a long and arduous struggle, he had attained national leadership and glory for his nation. The strength, courage, wisdom and love of youth that the myth attributed to him, made him a supreme, loving father. At age ten, when I heard him and my HY leaders call us "His Hitler Youth" I understood that literally. I was his as I was mother’s child. He and the Nazi party as a whole held youth to be the vital force of the German folk community; its enthusiasm was to serve the nation’s renewal. Never before or since has German youth enjoyed—by word if not by deed-- such attention and glorification. This vital force of youth, the ideology held, had to be trained, guided and strengthened through physical activity and education; through sports, military exercises and discipline in preparation for the military in the case of boys; sports, gymnastics, health education and domestic training for girls in preparation for childbearing and service to husband, family and nation. Struggle and exertion in physical activity were thought to bring about moral strengthening. As Hitler put it in it his speeches, "I want my Hitler Youth to be tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel, and fast as wind-hounds." Therefore the HY instituted competitions of all kinds between individuals, groups, and regions. In these competitions individuals and groups tested their capabilities and effort. The leadership rewarded achievement of excellence by public recognition and medals. Not rank or class, nor wealth or birth gave a person true superiority and leadership status but rather achievement of aims larger than the self—service performed for the HY, the Leader, the community of folk, the nation. Dedication to service, unquestioning subordination to a leader, loyalty to Hitler, the HY, the comrades of one’s group were the values the HY fostered. HY ideology preached venerating the German community of folk forged through a common history and the mystical union with that community through race and blood. It glorified the German landscape and German soil, forests and mountains, and German rural, regional styles of folk art and architecture. It rejected rationalism, intellectualism, and the European, Western Enlightenment.

At least in theory, private life and a personal, intimate sphere did not exist for a HY. Each HY member had the duty to serve a cause larger than himself or herself in ceaseless effort. Therefore activity triumphed over thought and reflection. From males the HY demanded total involvement and life-long service —from age ten to eighteen in HY; for the next six months in Labor Service; for the following two years military service; beyond that lifelong party membership and service in party causes and organizations until old age and death.

At the beginning of the regime, family and school still competed for the attention of youth. But in the course of Hitler’s ascendancy and later the war, the hours spent in HY activity increased from one afternoon or evening a week, to one and two additional weekend days, and finally to weeks and months. Once enemy bombings of the cities started, entire school classes of children and youth and their teachers were removed from their families and placed into HY-run camps in the country . As the war went on, through school vacations long and short, entire HY units and school classes and ever younger children were pressed into helping with the harvest, with alleviating labor shortages in families, industries and the military, including manning anti-aircraft guns and digging trenches. Schirach expressed this absolutism of HY claims on the lives of its members with the words, "You are either for us or against us." A neutral position once the HY got a hold of you did not exist.

On the whole early in the regime, the educational system and the teaching profession were not in conflict as German schools claimed the morning hours of instruction and the HY the afternoons. Moreover, teachers as a class like the middle class as a whole shared the nationalism of the Nazis. Once the HY became the State Youth, local HY units could freely use public school and sports’ facilities as meeting places and sports’ arenas. As time went on, the party’s influence over the schools as well as its instructional materials became dominant so that school and HY followed the same goals. By 1936 most textbooks followed Nazi ideology. Even in our arithmetic exercise book, problems had ideological content. "The inmate of a mental hospital costs the state 5.20 marks a day. How much does that come to in a month? A year?" The explanation my teacher offered, of course, was, "All hereditary illnesses are a heavy burden for the community." I never heard her justify euthanasia or sterilization as a solution to the problem, but the very explanation implied it. The result of interference with academics was that subjects became contaminated by ideology and diluted by indoctrination. Academic standards fell drastically, while HY activity and service replaced instruction.

As instructional material for the HY and entertainment for youth, Nazi publishers and soon most publishing houses favored fairy tales and sagas, Germanic myth and heroic epics, particularly popular adaptations of its national epic, the Nibelungenlied, glorifying Siegfried’s radiant strength and Hagen’s loyalty to his kings. Later, in graduate school, I came to understand how grossly these popular nationalist versions trivialized and distorted the medieval epic. Medieval heroes like the Hohenstauffen- and Saxon emperors populated the novels for young people as did the kings, nobles and officers of Prussian history. And of course, the heroic feats of bravery of "our soldiers" in the first world war and later in WWII and the treachery of "our" enemies formed the plots of the genre of juvenile war literature. Avid reader that I was, I consumed volume after volume of these materials whenever I could get a hold of them. Checking through a listing of HY recommended novels recently, I realized that by age fifteen I had read almost all of them. I recognized the names of authors, their titles, and could recall even plot fragments and characters. Like many intellectuals of my HY generation, after the defeat of Nazism I never again wanted to read a fairytale, Germanic saga, listen to a folk proverb or folksong except in the context of satire and parody. It took me years to recover for myself as a student and teacher of German literature the literary Romantic tradition of folk literature and decontaminate it from Nazi perversion and abuse. And I still am uneasy when I hear the melody of a German folksong.

As usual, Jochen joined the HY the year before me and as usual he did not like going as he did not like school or nursery school. I was still nursing my hurt of not being allowed to go to high school and of loosing my former friends and did not look forward to anything. As far as I was concerned, HY was another chore. When I try to recall my actual induction into Hitler Youth at age ten after Easter Recess in 1940, my mind resists remembering, refuses to focus on the everyday details which clamored for attention earlier in my writing this account. I cannot focus on the individual faces of the girls of my immediate squad as I could when remembering Hanne’s screwed-up nose when giggling or even Gisela’s arrogant, disgusted sneer when dropping the washcloth at my feet. I try to remember the names of the girls in my squad--nothing. Then suddenly I hear Marga, the squad leader, call out the list of names of the squad, a practice with which she started every Wednesday afternoon meeting. As my name in the middle of the list comes into focus, Mahlendorf, Ursula, the names before mine do, Kupka, Ursula; Lemke, Hannelore;, and after mine, Nitzsche, Helga. I cannot visualize their faces but other details emerge. I see myself standing in the schoolyard of Red School among a large group of girls my age, few of whom I know. It is Wednesday afternoon, 2pm, after school has let out. Fräulein Balzer told us in the morning to come here and start Junior Hitler Youth. I am alone in the crowd and miss Hanne who is late. My former friends, who left for middle and high school just a few months ago, stand together in a circle some distance away and I know they will snub me if I approach. I feel angry and isolated, turn my back on them and look up at the windows of our new fifth grade classroom on the second floor. Later, several older girls arrive with one of the middle school teachers, Lotte T., all in HY uniforms, navy blue skirt, white blouse, black kerchief held in place around the neck by a leather knot. Braided silk cords, defining their leadership status as I learned later, some red and white, some green and white, dangle on top of the kerchief down to the left blouse pocket. The older girls hold lists of names and begin calling out our names, asking us to form a circle around them. After a while, a pale, freckled girl in dark blond pigtails summons me to her group. By the time she has read aloud the last name, we are fifteen in her group.

"I am Marga M.," she introduced herself, "and I’ll be your Schaftführerin (squad leader). We are four squads to a troupe. Helga," she pointed to another girl who stood apart together with Lotte T., "will be our Scharführerin (troupe leader). Lotte leads the Junior Girls Hitler Youth in town. We’ll always meet right here in Red School play yard and begin our activities from here."

Her tone now changed to command mode: "Line up by size."

All fifteen of us were practiced in lining up by size as we had done since first grade. I was the third tallest.

"Count," was the next command.

The tallest girl started, "One." My heart began to pound. "Two," yelled the girl next to her. I hesitated, and then my mind went blank.

"Three," Marga said for me. "Pay attention!"

I froze while my mind raced, words, silent words, echoing within me. "Stupid, can’t you even count," I raged against myself. Since I had missed my turn, the entire squad had to repeat the practice.

"One, two, eh, eh, eh three" came my voice after a stammering I could not control. I never did get over freezing up for a heartbeat and stammering when it was my turn to count out my number, yelling "three" as I snapped my head to the right for the next girl to take up her "four."

Next we practiced marching in formation. We formed five rows of three girls each, again graduated by size. That put me in front row right.

"Forward march!" came Marga’s command. "Right, two, three, four; right, two three, four," she bellowed, and at each loud "right" our right foot, knee slightly bent, moved forward. We first practiced marching in formation straight ahead. One of us would fall out of step, and Marga yelled, "Formation, stop!" After a brief pause and an admonition to pay attention, we started again, "Formation, march; Right, two, three, four; one, two, three, four." Next came more complicated maneuvers. "Formation, right," meant that I had to perform my "one, two, three, four", lifting my feet in place while turning to the right. "Formation, left," meant that I had to take large steps to the left at the "one, two, three, four" while making a quarter turn without adding an extra step that might put me out of step with the formation. Marga’s command, "Formation right," made me start my turn to the left, and when I saw that my neighbor was turning toward me, I reversed. "Formation, stop!" Marga yelled. Turning to me, "Don’t you know right from left?" I felt humiliated, and for the first time in my life, I learned that I had difficulty distinguishing right from left when under any kind of pressure. Most of the time that afternoon, paying close attention, I managed the "formation, right" turn just fine. I failed to negotiate the wide turn at "formation left" every time.

Fortunately, after an hour and a half, Marga stopped the drill and led us into one of the larger classrooms in Middle School next door to Red School. We found the other squads waiting for us. I was so exhausted from trying to pay attention to the marching, from fearing the left turn, and from mortification at failing to negotiate it, that I slumped into one of the benches. Marga shot me a glance, and I knew that I should sit up straight. Lotte T. entered after a while and went up front to the teacher’s platform. She looked down at us, her face stern and serious.

"Welcome to HY, girls, "she addressed us. "You are beginning an important phase of your life today. From now on, you will serve our Führer and fatherland through the HY. For the next few months, you will be on probation and learn the first steps in becoming the kind of Young Maiden the Führer wants you to be. Once you have been tested, you will take your oath to the Führer after you return from your summer break."

Like all my future HY leaders, once they got started on a serious talk, she went on and on and I stopped listening. It strikes me as ironic, that with all the enthusiasm I soon developed for the HY, I never did take the oath because I always fell ill when I returned home from summer break. The initial "probation" by 1940 was a fiction. No one did or could fail, as we were required to attend. All through my HY career, however, we maintained the conviction that we served in the HY voluntarily.

I woke up from my daydream when she started to sing, "Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles," and joined in, raising my right arm. I felt guilty as I always did about not listening and then, as the song went on, proud that I was ten and a Young Maiden now.

Marga led our squad to another, smaller classroom. "Let’s learn a few songs for marching. It’s easier to keep step when you sing."

She began in a clear soprano voice, "O Beautiful, Wester Forrest."

We had all heard this song when HY troupes marched through town. We knew the melody and soon learned all the words. When we finished, she intoned another song, the theme song of the HY.

Vorwärts! Vorwärts!,schmettern die hellen Fanfaren,

Vorwärts! Vorwärts! Jugend kennt keine Gefahren,

Deutschland, du wirst leuchtend stehn

Mögen wir auch untergehn.

Vorwärts! Vorwärts!

Schmettern die hellen Fanfaren,

Vorwärts! Vorwärts! Jugend kennt keine Gefahren.

Ist das Ziel auch noch so hoch,

Jugend zwingt es doch.

Refrain:

Uns’re Fahne flatter uns voran.

In die Zukunft ziehen wir Mann für Mann.

Wir marschieren für Hitler

Durch Nacht und durch Not

Mit der Fahne der Jugend

Für Freiheit und Brot.

Uns’re Fahne flatter uns voran,

Uns’re Fahne ist die neue Zeit.

Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit!

Ja die Fahne ist mehr als der Tod!

("Forwards, forwards, let the fanfares ring,/ Forward! Forward!, youth knows no dangers./Germany, you will triumph/Even if we perish./Forward! Forward! Let the fanfares ring/ Forward! Forward!/ Youth knows no dangers./Let our goals be ever so high/ We will conquer them!/Our banner leads us ahead!/ We march into the future, man by man,/ We march for Hitler through night and distress/ With the banner of youth for freedom and bread./ Refrain Our banner leads us ahead./ Our banner is the New Age!/ And our banner leads us/ Into eternity!/ Our banner is greater than Death!")

After singing the entire song to us in her bright soprano, she taught us the words, line by line. When she dismissed us an hour or so later, most of us had memorized the melody and the words of the first stanza. None of us ten year olds understood that we had just absorbed the key concepts that were to guide our lives as HY members: We are a special, valuable class, Youth. We represent a new age for Germany. We serve Germany and Hitler, whatever the danger or hardship. We are ready to die and sacrifice our lives so that Germany can live free of her enemies. We will achieve this goal for all eternity. Our flag means more to us than death.

"You’ll need to know that song. It is our, the HY song and we’ll sing it at every rally," Marga concluded as she broke up the meeting.

`During the next four Wednesday afternoons, we practiced marching in formation and learning a repertoire of marching songs. The routine stayed the same: checking off our names, counting down our numbers, forming the marching formation, marching to "right, two, three, four." I never lost my nervousness in marching and, since I stayed front row right all year I was always highly visible. I tensed when the commands "right" or "left" came, for a moment unsure which side was which. On left turns, I got out of step most of the time. When the troupe leader came to observe our marching, I was sure to get out of step.

After marching, we always went to a classroom, always the same classroom, and learned more songs. At first, we only sang marching songs; later Marga added folk songs most of which I knew from singing them with my mother and brothers. Sometimes, as a reward, when we had completed our marching practice without too many of us falling out of step, we played a parlor game like post office or charades. Gradually, I came to enjoy the routine, particularly the singing. I never wondered until now as I am writing this: Why was I so awkward at marching? Why did I confuse right and left? Was I that stressed by the exercise? Why did I never lose my nervousness? It is all the more striking to me now as I was a whiz as a biker, an excellent swimmer, good at games of physical skill until I got embarrassed about my body at puberty. My best guess is that even that early I distrusted and resisted conforming to group activity and orders of even a minor authority.

Just before summer vacation, our HY troupe was allowed to accompany the older girls’ troupes to a rally held in Münsterberg, a town a few miles away from ours. Marga told us as I tensed up, "You have really made progress in keeping in formation. I hope you won’t embarrass us at the rally when we move into the stadium."

I worried about making mistakes even as I looked forward to the train ride—a rare event for me--to the neighboring town. We sang on the train, hundreds of boys and girls going to the rally. We marched into the Stadium, and it was easy to keep in formation because we followed the more experienced HY troupes, and we were followed by what seemed an endless stream of boys and girls marching to the tunes of the large band on the platform in front. Arrived at our designated spot on the stadium floor, we stood at attention and waited, first for the flags and standards to be carried in, next for all the leadership to march in. Finally, after a long pause, the province leader of Silesia, who was the speaker of the rally, paraded in with measured steps, all by himself, accompanied by our yelling, "Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil." I was impressed by his dignified procession, enthusiastic to be a part of HY. I understood only years later that with his late arrival and solemn procession to the speaker’s platform, he was imitating Hitler’s practice of mass manipulation.

Standing in the hot June sun became very uncomfortable. The province leader’s speech droned on.

"We are at war. Our brave soldiers have conquered France. England is next. We must all help the Führer in his difficult task to lead Germany, " I understood. " We must all do our part in helping win the victory. You, the future of Germany, can help, help with bringing in the harvest this summer, help with collecting herbs and recyclables, scrap iron, rags, bones, papers, to make guns, uniforms, medical supplies for our troops."

I was relieved when we finally could sing "Deutschland, Deutschland", our right arms raised in the Hitler salute. Since we stood right in the middle of the stadium, with rows of girls in front and rows behind us, I could rest my arm on the shoulder of the girl in front of me as the "Horst Wessel song" with its many verses dragged on and on. Early on in my HY career, I felt guilty for this undisciplined laxness in performing the salute. But during the many rallies that followed this first one the keenest enthusiasm aroused by the rally would dissipate by the time the final strophes of the double anthem sounded.

We sang again back on the train home, tired, sunburnt, but happy to be part of a great cause. I was aflame with enthusiasm to do my part in the war effort. This summer at Zülzendorf, I decided, I would work voluntarily in the fields with the other field hands, for the war effort, a full day, I swore to myself. I would not complain, ever. I would not protest staying the full six weeks of my vacation.

Working in the fields and not having access to radio news or a paper during my stay at the farm, I never knew what happened with our war against England except what I knew before I left for Zülzendorf, namely that our bombers were flying over London. Kept in isolation in our bedroom during my scarlet fever after I got home, I never did find out—was it because of my illness or because of a national news blackout?—that our side lost the Battle of Britain.

After I finally got back to school in the late fall of 1940, the war and Hitler Youth began taking over my life. Because it was difficult on account of war shortages to keep the tires on our bikes in repair (even I got good at fixing the inner tubes), we began to limit our riding around the countryside. Once my inner tubes consisted almost entirely of patches and the tires were almost shredded, I thought twice about going very far from home. Walking home with a flat was no fun. Friend Richard, who had entertained us with his fantastic stories, had been good at supplying us with patches and glue. But as materials got scarcer, he became cantankerous about helping us out; and once we found out about his stealing of our Saturday night Wiener sausages, we stopped seeing him. I might have found the Wieners-for-tires a fair exchange, but I was angry about his stealing and secrecy. And the daily news and ever-new special reports preceded by march music and trumpets and followed by, "Attention! Attention! Here is radio Germany, " kept us busy. Pictures from the papers of the Western Front and the beginning submarine war waited after the summer break to be cut out and labeled.

In addition, the party called on school classes and our Hitler Youth troupe to contribute to the war effort. The new national Youth Leader, Arthur Axmann—Hitler had replaced Baldur von Schirach, whom he no longer trusted—called on all Hitler Youth formations to serve the fatherland as replacements for the men called to the front and to collect recyclables. Older Hitler Youths began to serve as streetcar ticket collectors or as factory workers in munitions works. Toward the end of the war, the boys manned anti-aircraft guns, dug trenches and finally even fourteen year olds were called up and sent to the front. Girls participated as well. The League of Girls (BDM) aided the nurses as nurses aids, took over as street-car conductors when the men and boys were called up, worked in munitions factories, and finally helped dig trenches. It fell to the younger HY, the ten to fourteen year olds, to go from house to house to collect recyclables and to help during the harvests. I participated in the recycling efforts once a week for the next four years.

We started collecting papers, old scrap iron, rags, and bones from our families and neighbors. The barrels in the schoolyard, into which students dumped the bones left over from family dinners, crawled with maggots by the time a week had passed. As we lifted each barrel into our cart and then emptied it into a vat at the rag collectors, I gagged with disgust. The place reeked of dead meat, rats scampered among mountains of old papers, old clothes and rags, rusted bikes heaped atop of mountains of metal objects in all imaginable shapes and contortions. Our task was much easier on Saturday afternoons when we helped bring in the potato harvest at the close-by farms in Segen, Striege, or Lauden. Horse drawn wagons transported us back and forth from school to the farmers’ fields. Going out to the fields we sang; coming home at dusk tired out and silent, I watched the flickering fires all around as the farmhands burnt the dried potato stalks. Our wagons rumbled over Breslauer Street, turned into tree-lined Promenade Street under its canopy of yellow-brown linden leaves, and disgorged us in Red School yard. I dragged my feet across the street to our house past Werner and his friend. I fell asleep even as I had my supper at the kitchen table. No more play for me for tonight.

At my school, the girl’s school in Red School, all the teachers were women. But in Jochen’s, the boys’ school in Stone School, all younger teachers were called up for the army and some of our teachers taught in his school. The fathers of classmates and the fathers of families living in our house went to war. Herr Gurn’s truck driver who delivered the beer and lemonade bottled in the factory shed disappeared to the front. His drunkenness had tyrannized our apartment house every Saturday night for years and while Jochen regretted his loss of rides with him, I was happy to see him go. Most of the fathers of my classmates had been called up as had most of the neighbors. Gradually, the town emptied of younger men and older men and women took their jobs. Uncle Kurt, mother’s brother, indispensable as farm administrator, and Herr Gurn, as an invalid, remained the only male presence for the rest of my childhood.

At Wednesday afternoon Hitler Youth meetings all through 1940 and 1941, we practiced running races, broad jumping, and throwing baseballs as far as we could in the playground of Middle School. Since I had tossed pebbles with my brother Jochen and his friends for years, I had developed good wrist action and threw the ball proficiently. But I ranked as one of the poorest runners and broad jumpers of the entire troupe. The humiliation every Wednesday rankled, particularly when Marga teased me.

"Didn’t you say that you were good at sports?" My dyslexic friend Hanne in the same troupe but another squad, took turns with me in being the lowest scorer, repeating our disastrous spelling performance at school. I talked her into additional practice on our own on the athletic field on Adolf-Hitler Street that we occasionally used with our squads. We were frustrated because the older kids dominated the track and often chased us off.

Then I had an idea: in the back of the Gurn’s property there was a sandpit. If I lengthened the path to the sand pit by bringing up sand to the rim and leveled part of sand pit itself, then I had about ten meters of a race-track with a broad-jump pit at the end. I spent a week bringing sand from the pit up to the path, extended it almost level into the sand pit and dug down for a jump pit. Then I drew a start line into the path and placed a jump-off board at the beginning of the pit, and had my very own practice field. Hanne had long since lost interest in the project when carrying the sand up from the bottom had become too tiresome. I ran and jumped for hours on end all through the year stopping only when snow came in early December. I began again after snowmelt in March. Gradually my score for broad jump improved; in running, I now held a score close to the troupe average. I took pleasure in my athletic achievement. I began to enjoy Wednesday afternoons, and even the marching practice ceased being onerous.

During the winter months and the heavy snows of Silesian winters, practicing sports stopped almost altogether and we spent Wednesday afternoons with singing and political instruction. Marga, our squad leader, told us the story of the beginning of the National Social Party after WWI, of Hitler’s struggle against the Socialist government during the Weimar Republic. "The communists fought his movement in Munich; the Führer was betrayed by the Army. He was imprisoned in Landsberg Fortress after he tried to win power. He wrote Mein Kampf ( My Struggle) there and you’ll read that when you are older." She taught us that when he had tried to win power in Munich, many of his followers had fallen and had been wounded. One of his comrades threw himself in front of the Führer and received the bullet in his stead. The Munich November coup of 1923 and the Struggle for political ascendancy of the Nazi Party during the Weimar Republic played a large role in our early HY instruction. Her story told of martyrdom and sacrifice, of betrayal and heroism. I remember the mood Marga’s narration conveyed more clearly than the facts of the November Coup--we learned to call it The March on the Feldherrn Halle after the Munich war memorial where it occurred. I knew and therefore resonated to this tragic mood of glorification of comradeship, of sacrifice for the fatherland, of ideals of loyalty and heroism from the WWI novels Jochen and I were reading like Richard Euringer’s Flightschool: A Book about the Crew (1929) that the Nazis valued as an antithesis to Eric Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel Nothing New on the Western Front (1929), or Fritz Steuben’s Breakthrough 1918. A frontline Experience (1933).

Marga’s tales always ended on a positive note: "Despite the temporary setback in November 1923, our Führer did not resign himself. At Landsberg he took the time to formulate his political goals and to write them down in My Struggle." She followed up on her tales by teaching us new songs about the "movement," songs that raised our spirits and that made me wish I had lived through the struggle with Him. We learned the song of the "Good Comrade," of the man who, more loyal than anyone, dies for his comrades "als wär’s ein Stück von mir," ( "as if he was part of me.") My eyes filled with tears every time we sang it and I found it difficult to sing along. But we also learned the song that upset some of the adults like Manfred’s, my former sandbox playmate’s father, who a little later briefly went to the gestapo prison—as I heard Mother whispering to a customer--for defeatism.

Es zittern die morschen Knochen

Der Welt vor dem roten Krieg,

Wir haben die Knechtschaft gebrochen,

Für uns war’s ein grosser Sieg.

Refrain Wir warden weiter marschieren

Wenn alles in Scherben fällt,

Denn heute da hört uns Deutschland

Und morgen die ganze Welt.

("The ancient brittle bones of the world tremble/ Before the red War/ We have broken its slavery ,/ For us it was a mighty victory. Refrain: We will march on, even if everything sinks into dust / Because today Germany listens to us/ and tomorrow the whole world.")

I had forgotten a few words of the third line (what did we break?) and turned ‘red war’ into ‘great war’ because for me in 1940 a ‘red war,’ that is a struggle against communism, was meaningless while a ‘great war’ of course meant the war against the Allies. I do recall the refrain but also changed its meaning. The original refrain’s last two lines were, I found out a few years ago, "Today Germany listens to us/Tomorrow the whole world." Our version sang of conquest: "Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland." (Today Germany belongs to us/Tomorrow the rest of the world.")

Thinking about these examples of political indoctrination by song and narrative, I am amazed how skillfully they awakened the enthusiasm of ten to twelve year olds. Marga was an effective propaganda tool. Only two years older than us, she was the perfect realization of Hitler’s HY program that youth should lead youth. She made a seductive model and I followed her every word. That summer I even kept in touch with her from Zülzendorf by postcards. I don’t think she was especially schooled but she was a skillful leader. She appealed to our adolescent wish to follow a "great cause," to aggrandize ourselves by it, to be loyal to it, to sacrifice ourselves for it. For me as a young teen, her words played out in my actions.

She addressed us one Wednesday meeting, "This Sunday, let’s help the Führer’s war effort. Our soldiers at the front in Russia–it was the first disastrous winter of the Russian campaign in 1941/42—need warm clothes, particularly coats made of fur. Even small pieces can be sewn into coats. Get from your family whatever you can and bring it here to Middlle School. Let’s see that our squad collects more than the others."

I knew that Mother had an old coat in a trunk in the attic with a fur collar. And my coat also did. I cut the fur off both coats and on Sunday morning was about to run off to bring my contribution to our special meeting when Mother surprised me. "What did you do with your coat? And where is that fur from?" pointing to the fur from her coat.

" I got it from your old coat in the attic and I though I don’t need a fur collar on my coat. It’s for our soldiers, " I admitted.

"You did not ask if you could give them away, " she scolded. I ran off knowing that there would be hell to pay when I got back. But I felt heroic, I was willing to be cold. "She was not wearing her old coat anyway, " I rationalized away my guilt. Mother did not talk to me for a week. And though I was terrified of her silences, I felt I counted, I had done the right thing for the Führer.

Did Marga know that the propaganda stories of youth rebellion against the older generation, of working for the Cause, of comradeship and sacrifice gratified our omnipotence fantasies? That they provided roles young teens struggling to acquire a sense of personal power could emulate? She shared, this I know, our enthusiasm and was inspired as we were by the HY’s energizing, upbeat songs. I know that the leadership principles the Hitler Youth adopted from the turn of the century Youth Movement made for an excellent fit between leaders and the led: Twelve to fourteen year olds led ten year olds, so that there was always a two to four year age gap between the leaders and the led in the lower echelons. In our town, Lotte T. then a young teacher, served as county leader just as in other towns other young teachers served in the higher echelons. The slogan "Youth led by youth" proved a powerful tool of welding us into what we thought of as a comradeship, and which was, in fact, mass manipulation down to the smallest unit. Marga was the only HY leader aside from Lotte T. who impressed me enough that I still know her name and recall what she looked like and what I felt about her. I admired her because she was cheerful and forceful, and because she went to high school but was not arrogant. Not particularly good looking, energetic, freckled with dark blond hair, grey eyes, long-limbed, of slender built and athletic, she made a believable model to follow. I could imagine that I might be like her in another few years, and I wanted to be like her.

I do not remember details about all the indoctrination we received the first two years in HY aside from memorizing short biographies of the Nazi leadership, starting with Hitler and going all the way to such minor functionaries like Robert Ley, the leader of the Nazi Labor Front. In a sense, this hagiography was similar to the stories about the ever-so- pious and frightfully good children Aunt Magda told us about in kindergarten. Only these men as children were frightfully brave, loyal, and patriotic rather than pious and good. Later when I ran into their actual lives in WWII histories or the post Nazi press, I gagged with disgust at having been so gullible, at having been so easily manipulated.

Recently, Jochen and I talked about our Hitler Youth experience. We agreed that it would have been enormously helpful to us if even one of the adults around us had attempted to counteract this indoctrination, had told us that other values existed aside from bravery, toughness, obedience and loyalty unto death, that other nations, races, and peoples valued their way of life and were worthy of respect. I do not remember that I talked much to my mother, let alone to aunts, about what we learned in school and in Hitler Youth, or about what I thought and felt. Not that we were silent when we had our noon meal together, the only time we spent together as a family.

"Fräulein Balzer threw her key chain at Hanne today, and Hanne was almost knocked out, " exhausted my contribution to the conversation. We spoke of actions, of events; we complained, we bragged about what we did or of what happened to our friends or us. At best, we asked Mother to tell us about her childhood, about Oma, about the farm she grew up on, about the dances she went to and the trips she took as a teenager. For a young person like myself who burned to know about ideas, emotions, causes, and beliefs, home-life during my teens provided neither intellectual stimuli nor ethical values and moral guidance. Great thoughts, values and morals—or what went for such--and idealism existed only in the framework of Hitler Youth and its indoctrination.

I must have learned very early not to express feelings and to keep thoughts to myself. I remember one specific incident at age nine or ten in which I realized my family and community had no emotional or reflective life. Mother, both my brothers and I were on a day excursion with Mother’s dressmaker union. Aunt Lene, mother’s apprentices Lotte and Ida, were sitting close to me on the bus that was traveling at day’s end through the Silesian Mountains, the "Eulengebirge." I had a window seat, and all that day I had enjoyed looking at the passing landscape and daydreaming as the gentle swaying of the bus rocked me into a trance. I still enjoy the comfort of a vehicle in motion passing through the early dusk just as I did then. The road went along the crest of a hill, a meadow, slowly turning gray in the fading daylight, lay below us. Chains of hills in ever-paler shades of blue-grey bordered the meadow. Mists arose from the depth of the valley. I felt a sob rising in my chest. An ache engulfed me that ebbed through me in a gentle, euphoric swell. I quelled the sob but could not stop the tears. Ida who sat next to me noticed my tears.

"What is wrong, Ulla?" she trumpeted so that the entire bus heard her. I felt painfully embarrassed as my face flushed.

"I have a stomach ache," I finally muttered, aware for the first time that I could not speak of what I felt. Was I afraid of ridicule? Of being shamed? Of being chastised? I don’t know. What became clear to me with a pervasive sense of sadness was that I was alone with my emotion.

"Did you eat all the plums for desert? Maybe that’s why your stomach hurts." I felt embarrassed about Ida’s solicitous questions.

For the rest of the excursion, as we had supper at a restaurant and everyone danced to the music of a village brass band, I pretended that I had a stomachache and that therefore I was not participating. I felt slightly guilty for the lie but kept silent. The feeling of being different, of being moved to tears by a landscape, from then on kept me just a pace away from every one I knew.

By late spring 1941 I scored the highest of my troupe in broad jump and Marga stopped her teasing. At the next Wednesday HY meeting the troupe was called together. Our leader announced, "Some of you are going to the Middle Silesian athletic competitions at Breslau stadium before the summer break." She paused for effect. Then she called out three names. Mine was the last. I had not expected it, as my running score was still mediocre.

"Your parents will have to fund your rail ticket; the HY will house you with private families and provide meals at the stadium. "

I had long since run out of summer money and therefore had to ask Mother for the fare. She turned me down, saying that several customers had not paid her, she did not know when they would, and I would just have to tell the HY that I could not go. I cajoled her, begged, and promised that I would pay back a loan if she made me one, all to no avail. On her urging, I visited several customers and asked them for payment of what they owed Mother, but I had no success. They had the usual excuses: they would pay at the end of the month; they had had a shortfall because the children needed shoes; the grandmother had died and they had to come up with money for the funeral; their husbands had not paid this month’s child support. Uncle Kurt heard my griping for several weekends and finally gave in and handed me a twenty for the fare and for pocket money.

The Breslau meet took place at the end of June. We were to meet at the Strehlen station at seven in the morning. Eager to go, I left the house early and took the long way to the station, following Promenade Street through the town park and past the newly exposed parts of the old city wall, proceeding down Post Office Street and past the Tax Collector Offices, a huge light brown building that had been constructed after the Nazis took over the government. When I arrived at the station I found myself much too early and all alone. A few adults were waiting for the local train to Wansen. I felt shy and out of place in my uniform, in my blue skirt cleaned and brushed with cold chicory coffee the night before, in my whitish blouse and the obligatory black scarf tied together by a braided leather knot. I clutched my gym bag to my chest. Finally I saw several girls my age approaching, and they waved and called to me. I felt my shyness evaporate and greeted them enthusiastically even though I knew only a few of them from sight. We pushed each other around, joked and teased as the few adults looked at us disapprovingly. Their askance glances did not bother me. I felt as one of the group, and I was happy about it. This sense of instant comradeship within a group contrasted sharply with my usual melancholy isolation and distance from others. I lost myself in the group, and that is why, most likely, I remember none of my "comrades" during all four of the Hitler Youth years aside from Marga-- neither their first names, nor what they might have meant to me at the time, nor even individual interactions with them. No faces and no voices rose from my merger into the group.

I stayed overnight in a large apartment house with a family whose two daughters also participated in the sports meet. I had brought along a heavy blanket and two sheets mother had sewn together as a kind of sleeping bag. I slept in the living room, a stuffy large cavern with heavy old fashioned chairs around a large table and a heavy horsehair sofa covered with plush in a yellow, soft green and red pattern. Two large windows looked out into a narrow backyard bordered by the backs of adjoining houses. The family had gone to bed early, and a single lamp close to the sofa provided dim light. I had not thought of bringing along a book to read and I felt out of place. I tried to recite poetry to myself as I lay on the narrow surface of the sofa in my sleep sack. The plush of the flowery covering stuck right through the old sheeting and I could not think of any of the poems that came to me so easily and comforted me at home. I woke stiff and itching in the early morning, my back and legs covered with a rash from the plush. I thought of that night on the torturous couch years later when visiting Freud’s office in London and gazing at his plush couch.

I don’t know how I performed in either the hundred-meter race or the ball throwing. But I was disappointed with my broad jump scores. The graveled course slowed my run as I felt the stones prick through the thin soles of my gym shoes. The unfamiliarly shallow pit cut short my jump. Still, my comrades labored under the same handicap so that I did not do too badly in comparison. To my surprise, at the day’s award ceremony, I won a small bronze pin. The regional troupes whose members had won medals stood in the very front of the stadium, ours among them. We waited in the glaring afternoon sun for ages, it seemed to me. Finally my Bann, local Strehlen, was called.

"Four medals. One silver, three brass," a voice rang out from the podium. All four of us marched up. At the top of the stairs, a hand stretched out to meet us. We shook it, one after the other. Leaving the platform a sea of faces, of white and dark blue bodies looked up to me. I was relieved when I was back in my third row from the front. I had not missed a step. I did not stumble, as I had feared. Other boys and girls went up and then down the platform.

I was half asleep from the sun when Marga’s voice summoned me. Looking up, I saw that our flag bearer on the platform had fainted.

"Take her place, Ursel," she hissed.

As the Red Cross helpers carried the girl to the Red Cross tent, I remounted the steps, took the flag that the girl’s neighbor had picked up, and stepped into the line of the other flag bearers. I felt honored that Marga had called on me. I had wanted to be the troupe’s flag bearer but she had passed me over before. I looked into the sea of faces staring up at me and they began to sway and grew hazy. I suddenly was frightened as the mass of faces faded and grew sharp again. I don’t want to faint, I admonished myself. I cannot let her down too. As I struggled to stand upright, holding myself up by the flagpole, the ceremony seemed to stretch into an eternity. The last medal winners descended the stairs and then the boys’ trumpets blared out a signal. We sang, I don’t remember what. Finally a speaker in black uniform moved to the microphone. As he intoned his speech, I gripped the flag more firmly and held on.

"The Führer has ordered our troops to cross the border into Russia to revenge Stalin’s treachery. We will win the huge spaces of Russia and earn "Lebensraum" (space for settlements) for our people."

I stopped listening as my mind went blank and then started racing, "No, no, the grown-ups said Hitler would see to it that our soldiers did not have to fight on two fronts like in WWI. They said he made a pact with Stalin not to attack us."

Hitler, at the beginning of the Polish campaign had indeed concluded a non-aggression treaty with Stalin in exchange for the Polish Ukraine and other territorial concessions. The leader on the platform continued speaking of the glory our brave soldiers would win and of the sacrifices we would have to make to be worthy of them. But amidst the waves of "Sieg Heils" that interrupted every sentence he shouted at us, I saw our globe of the world on Father’s desk at home: the tiny pink spot that was Germany and the large pale green blob stretching almost over half the globe that was Russia. I froze up in fright and stared down at the mouths that opened rhythmically with "Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil." Their cries receded. I just stared into mouths that opened and closed, opened and closed. I don’t know how I managed to stay upright during the rest of the ceremony but I did. The spot that was Germany on the globe and the blob that was Russia hovered before my mind’s eye; spot and blob; blob and spot.

My fear dissipated during the next few days as our troops moved forward into Russia and as one special radio message followed the other. Smolensk, Kiev. At school, we moved the little flags from the Polish Ukraine into the Russian Ukraine in the South, toward Leningrad and Moscow further north. I started a new copybook for pictures of the Russian campaign and learned the spelling of Russian towns and cities. On return home after the meet, I heard mother and some customers repeat my worry—the huge expanse of Russia, the tremendous length of the Russian front, and tiny Germany. I felt reassured by the comments of another customer whose husband presided over the local Trade Association. "We don’t need to worry. After all, since last year we have allies, the Axis Powers. They are on our side. Japan has conquered most of China and Korea. And Italy has large colonies in North Africa. They are both very strong countries." Italy and Japan had indeed formed an alliance with Hitler after the fall of France.

As our troops moved forward through the Polish Ukraine into the Uraine and into Northern Russia , as we heard White Russians rejoice over being freed from Red domination (the radio re-echoed with jubilant shouts), we felt reassured and resumed our daily activities. Again, Special Report after Special Report announced the victories of our side.