HJ and Volkssturm: Tomorrow’s Soldiers

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Tomorrow’s Soldiers

Hitler Youth protect their ears during the firing of a belt-fed, water-cooled machine gun. Familiarity with different types of weapons prepared young German boys for national service in the Wehrmacht.

On the basis that the children of today are the soldiers of tomorrow, Hitler viewed Germany's youth with the needs of future war in mind. It was his intention that Germany's younger generation, without even knowing it, should be physically and mentally prepared for conflict. He was speaking quite literally when he told the 1935 Nuremberg party rally that "what we look for from our German youth is different from what people wanted in the past. In our eyes the German youth of the future must be slim and slender, swift as the greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel." In short, they were expected to develop all the characteristics of storm troopers.

If the goal of Hitler and the Nazis was to turn Germany's youth into life-long National Socialist supporters and then into soldiers, it was inevitable that the twin planks of youth policy would be the systematic indoctrination and regimentation of German children and adolescents. Accordingly, the Nazis set about changing the nature of everyday life for young Germans.

By focusing on stories about fighting and conflict, German language instruction became a vehicle for promoting militarism and a love of war. As one pupil of the time recalled:

A large part of our compulsory, reading in German lessons was world war literature. .. As a rule these were books like "Seven at Verdun" or' "Bosemüller Group", in which, amidst all the horrors of modern warfare, the comradeship of the front was still triumphant and if you died you were at least awarded the Iron Cross.

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Deutscher Volkssturm

Of all the measures taken to mobilize speed the last manpower resources of the German nation, the most extreme was the creation of the Volkssturm designed to supplement the defense of the homeland. The Deutscher Volkssturm was constituted in September 1944. The organization may be considered a territorial militia which was formed and called to arms only for training purposes or for employment whenever a local area was threatened by the enemy. It was used to reinforce the Wehrmacht by "total commitment of all German people," as the constitution decree dictated. Although formation and training to the Volkssturm was not under the responsibility of the Wehrmacht, but rather under the auspices of the NAZI Party (NSDAP), for employment in combat all Volkssturm units came under the full operational command and control of the army. Under the status of forces as determined by the Geneva Convention, the Volkssturm was a legal irregular defense force that was neither part of the Wehrmacht nor the army, but rather an independent fighting force controlled by the Party.

Hitler Jugend

Few historical subjects are so emotional as the Nazi Third Reich, few have stimulated so much general interest, and few have been subjected to such close scrutiny. Adolf Hitler continues to fascinate and to horrify, and his barbaric regime still defies imagination. The Nazi regime is fortunately dead and buried, but the questions raised by its terrible history continue to demand explanations. Countless books have been written on the Nazi period, including many about the Hitler Youth, some of which have now become classics of their kind. In 1979, the historian James P. O’Donnell remarked that the British Library and the Library of Congress listed over 55,000 items on Hitler and World War II. Even the superficial student of that period of history is aware of why Hitler attached so much importance to the German youth, and the process of indoctrination leading to full-scale militarization is now well known