Adolf Hitler's Impact On German Youth Essay

From 1920 onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful. Out of these messages, a youth movement led by Kurt Gruber, with the aim of attracting young men who could be trained to become members of the SA Stormtroopers was born. On 4th July 1926, the group was renamed the Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth and became attached to and run by the SA. Adolf Hitler believed that the support of the youth was vital to the future of the Third Reich and aimed, through the Hitler Youth programme, to produce a generation of loyal supporters of Nazi views.

Posters were used to attract more members and membership rose from 5,000 in 1925 to 25,000 in 1930. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 other youth groups, like the boy scouts were forcibly merged into the Hitler Youth and by the end of 1933 membership stood at just over 2 million.

It had a practical effect, too: Since other scouting organizations were banned, the only way for kids to get scouting experience was to join the Hitler Youth. As Germany hurtled toward war, children who refused to join were alienated, then punished. By 1939, over 90 percent of German children were part of the Hitler Youth organization. For the Nazis, this had other benefits too. Not only did it allow the Third Reich to indoctrinate children at their most impressionable, but it let the Nazis remove them from the influence of their parents, some of whom opposed the regime. The Nazi Party knew that families were an obstacle to their goals. The Hitler Youth was a way to get Hitler’s ideology into the family unit, and some members of the Hitler Youth even denounced their parents when they behaved in ways not approved of by the