Cruel World (21 page)

Less prosperous farmers treated both boys and girls like the forced labor that would soon replace them. During her Land Service stint, Maschmann was required to wash a sick man’s filthy underwear, do heavy fieldwork, and deal with an alcoholic widow and her feebleminded son, both of whom tended to pass out by afternoon. But in the end she was inspired: “The physical exhaustion … changed suddenly into an unquenchable joy in creation.” She endured because she believed she was needed, and she loved life in the camp where the workers were lodged, as its homogeneous makeup seemed to her to exemplify the “National Community.”
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Maschmann, who would rise relatively high in the BDM hierarchy, did not stay “on the land,” but it is estimated that more than 20 percent of participants, mostly drawn from poorer families, would have done so had the war not prevented them from doing so.

Not everyone did farmwork. Girls could do a Home Economics Year as nannies and housekeepers. Both boys and girls could also be called into the Reich Labor Service (RAD). This organization, originally created by
the Weimar government to combat unemployment and used for big government projects such as canal building, was soon taken over by the Nazis. Its brown-uniformed members marched at the Nuremberg rallies, carrying gleaming shovels on their shoulders. Its ideological aim was to acquaint young men with manual labor and, as was true in all Nazi formations, eliminate class differences: Hitler in 1934 referred to the RAD and other such formations as “social smelting-furnaces in which gradually a new German man will be formed.”
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The Nazi addition of military drills and indoctrination on top of the physically demanding work indeed had a “smelting” effect, as a 1938 report from exiled German Social Democrats shows:

That, of course, was the whole idea.

Needless to say, many young people tried to escape these activities altogether. The Hitler Youth police force, known as the Streifendienst, or SRD, was, therefore, constantly expanded.
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The SRD had been set up in 1935, before Hitler Youth membership became compulsory. In an attempt to improve the organization’s reputation, SRD patrols were sent out to control members indulging in “wild wandering and idle tramping.” This they achieved by secret surveillance of HJ and BDM groups in youth hostels and camping areas or on the streets. In addition, they enforced curfews, pursued expelled HJ members who still wore the uniform, and tried to identify and infiltrate youth groups carrying on anti-Nazi activity. Reports on the latter were sent back to headquarters and on to the grownup police, who then took action.

In 1936 the Law Concerning German Youth was expanded to make Hitler Youth membership obligatory, and was bolstered by a stricter Disciplinary Code. Enforcement of its measures now also became the duty of the SRD. Working along with the Gestapo and the Kripo, the SRD spied
on their own leaders, opened mail, and patrolled movies and bars (much to the irritation of the proprietors) for underage colleagues. By 1938, they could also detain fellow juveniles for anything that violated the race and sex laws. The SRD was especially zealous in spying on the churches and could denounce pastors who made inflammatory sermons. Outdoors, they tracked down groups meeting in the country and watched highways and forest trails for suspicious activity.

Violators of the Disciplinary Code could, on SRD authority, be brought before special Hitler Youth courts completely independent of the mainstream legal system. These trials were hardly objective. All court officials were in the HJ leadership corps. There were no defense representatives and the accused were not allowed to see evidence relating to their political evaluation. The Hitler Youth generally avoided total expulsion, which would lower its available manpower pool, and, at this stage, tended to use public humiliation and fines instead.

All this police action was needed, for despite vicious suppression and exile of their leaders, the old youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts had not disappeared entirely. A number simply continued their activities and sang their old songs under the guise of Hitler Youth meetings held in secret forest hideouts or mountain retreats, and even, in one ingenious case, in boats floating down a stream.
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Catholic groups were particularly defiant, and for a time maintained dual membership. Attempts to stop this practice were, for a time, successfully challenged in the courts, enabling 2,000 Catholic boys to go on a pilgrimage to Rome and be received by the Pope in 1935, and several thousand others to attend Catholic summer camps abroad as late as 1937.
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More difficult to control were the “wild” gangs whose main objective was rebellion against any kind of compulsory service. These increased when the war began and led the authorities to impose curfews for the young “due to the changed conditions of life wrought by the war.” Teenagers under eighteen were not allowed to “loiter” after dark and could not be in a café without an adult after 9:00 p.m. They could not drink spirits, smoke cigarettes, or chew tobacco in public. Dancing without an older “guardian” present was forbidden, and no dancing at all was allowed after 11:00 p.m.
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This was waving the red flag. The defiant “wild” groups then, as now, dressed in far-out clothes, drank a lot, and indulged in jam sessions where they listened to forbidden American songs and “Negro Jazz.” The famous “swingboys” of Hamburg, who numbered into the thousands, had wild parties, many of which were held in middle-class houses when parents were out of town. For this crowd, appearance as far
removed from the Hitler Youth uniform as possible was the thing. Hitler Youth reject Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi, who had gravitated to this milieu, sported long hair and sideburns, which were worn along with “knee length double-breasted jackets, wide-bottom pants that nearly covered our shoes, starched shirt collars, waist fitting navy blue overcoats, matching homburg hats and—as a touch of elegance—white silk scarves.”
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Provoking the SRD was half the fun:

In Duisburg, the less elegant Kittelsbach Pirates, made up of boys of many persuasions, specialized in ambushes of HJ boys in the streets and anti-Nazi graffiti. The SRD did not always prevail in such confrontations. In Kiel, a patrol trying to break up a secret jazz session was routed when the musicians beat them with their drumsticks and wooden flutes.
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There were many other such groups all over Germany, most with colorful names such as Bush Wolves, Dreadful Stones, Navajos, and Municipal Bath Broth, few of which ever had any real political effect, but which, all through the war, remained objects of strange fascination and doubt to their more dutiful peers who glimpsed them only infrequently. Jürgen Herbst, now seventeen and proudly on his way to join the famous Grossdeutschland Regiment of the Wehrmacht, was caught in a bomb shelter with a group of Edelweiss Pirates:

The rules for teenagers were made even stricter in 1939 and 1940 by two Youth Service laws, which equated duty in youth programs with military service and made public service compulsory for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds.
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This was beefed up by an SS Police Order for the Protection of Youth, which implemented short-term “youth service arrests” for evaders. Under this measure offenders aged fourteen to eighteen, after a quick hearing, could be given weekend detentions on bread and water or be incarcerated in a variety of punishment camps.
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Such was the fate of Karma Rauhut, who, with the help of sympathetic teachers, had been able to evade BDM membership for years, first by going to a private school outside her home district and later through family influence. One classmate who had wanted to denounce Karma early on had hesitated to do so because of these possibly powerful connections. Rauhut later noted that “if one had no connections one was done for.… One could create a certain free space for oneself … if one had enough connections and maybe also a little bit of money.… You did not want to stand out. You only wanted to carry on with your style of life without selling yourself.” Despite her efforts, Karma, in the end, could not avoid her Duty Year. Disqualified by her record of evasion from the nicer jobs, she was sent to a windswept, barbed-wire-enclosed “work duty” camp peopled mostly by reform school girls and prostitutes, who cheered her up no end. She needed support, for, in this place,

When Karma became too ill to write home, her parents asked a young Luftwaffe doctor to check on her. With his aid she escaped, married her rescuer, and, with the help of his commanding officer, spent the rest of the war in hiding in Austria.
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For the truly incorrigible, Himmler set up a special “youth protective custody camp” for boys at Moringen in 1940, and another for girls at Uckermarck in 1942. Eventually, juveniles could be sent to these camps without
reference to parents, legal guardians, or the courts. The inmates were given the now standard physical, racial, and psychological examinations, and the “unfit” were often sterilized before being sent on to other institutions. Those who remained were treated as concentration camp inmates and used as forced labor. The camps were not large, but knowledge of their existence had great deterrent effect.
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As time went on, the SRD came more and more under SS control and eventually would be the main feeder organization for its racial and police agencies. From its ranks also came those destined for concentration and death camp administration. For these special forces the SS height limitation was generously lowered from five foot ten to five foot six. After 1939, it was not unusual for SRD boys to be taken out of school for special operations and “auxiliary police work.” Training camps proliferated, and a fulltime school for teenaged spies was set up at Pretzsch-on-the-Elbe. Boys destined for the spy school were extracted from their local schools or apprenticeships, often over the protests of parents and teachers. The SRD boys were zealous as only fanatic teenagers can be, especially when it came to sex crimes, and sometimes had to be restrained by their elders, many of them sinners themselves, who suggested that they “not take their jobs too seriously where girls of 17 and 18 were concerned” and that they not treat “sober tasks” as “romantic adventures.”
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In the end the SRD and its adult allies prevailed. The majority of HJ and BDM members conformed, as there was very little way to resist. Even the swingboys would eventually be swept up in the draft. The safe thing to do was not to rock the boat. Fear of punishment and humiliation were very strong, but often not clearly recognized, as Jürgen Herbst relates:

The smallest slip or unconsidered remark could cause agonies of fear of denunciation. Sitting around one night during a bombing raid with schoolmates who were repeating German victory propaganda such as “Göring said no British bomber will ever fly over our country,” Herbst inadvertently exclaimed, “This is how they lie!”: