The War Years (back to top) When the World War II began, there were over seven million Hitler-Jugend in the ranks, not to mention over another million serving as aides to SS officials on the battlefields and at command posts.[reference?] In August of 1940, Artur Axmann succeeded Baldur Schirach as Hitler-Jugend leader. He implemented much stricter guidelines and activities. The young Hitler-Jugend were ordered to act more like adult Nazis than before. For example, they were required to have target practice and practice terrain maneuvers. It is sad to see such a violent and cruel regime training boys to become killer soldiers without the boys' knowledge of Axmann's and Hitler's plans for them in years to come. These young children were born into a time in a country where they had no freedom to choose their future. As Heck put it: I was born into a regime which had succeeded in turning me into a fanatic, willing to die for causes I believed not merely achievable but just—the creation of a new world order under the Nazi ideology. The tenets of this faith had never been opposed by those who influenced me as a child—my elders and educators including my priests. Since membership in the Hitler Youth was compulsory, we had no choice but to follow orders.[4] (Heck 1988, 9) As Germany invaded Poland, Denmark, and Norway, the Hitler-Jugend also began to be trained to be the elites of their generation. The training of the future elite was carried out by a three tier system: first, the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt (national-political educational institution, or Napola) and the Adolf Hitler Schools, second the Ordensburgen (brotherhood castles), and finally the Hohe Schulen (advanced schools). This was the ultimate form of brainwashing because a young boy was removed from the influence of the parental home at an early age, and if the father or mother refused, the SS would take that as a sign of disloyalty toward the Reich and punish the family, or possibly say, as Koch put it: Your son is not your personal property, solely at your disposal. He is on loan to you but he is the property of the German Volk. To object to his name being put forward for an elite school is tantamount to insulting the Reich and the Fuhrer.[5] (Koch 1975, 179-185) World War II also brought new functions for the Hitler-Jugend, namely action on the battlefields in war. Hitler and other Nazi officials decided to put older members of the youth group onto battlefields, especially after the United States entered the war against Germany in December 1941. Anti-aircraft batteries were officially manned solely by Hitler-Jugend boys, and when the Allies landed in northern France on June 6, 1944, the Hitler-Jugend tank division was sent to the Normandy front. I feel this is a point in history when Hitler and other Nazi Germany officials felt they were losing the stronghold of the war. If their trained military could not stop the advancement of Allied forces, why could young men and boys who were not trained as much as they were be able to stop them? This was the Nazi ideology: to fight till the end and die rather than lose to an army not of the Aryan race. It was this Nazi ideology that forced Hitler to create the Volkssturm (People's Storm), and the Werewolf project. The Volkssturm was the military strategy to defend the German homeland until the bitter end, including old men and underage boys, women and girls. The Werewolf project began training children in sabotage, guerilla warfare, and other sneak attacks on Allied forces. These had only limited success, but they resulted in American troops having to kill innocent children who had been brainwashed by a ruthless leader. In 1942 Hitler decided to hold a conference to decide what to do with the captured Jews of the war. The decision to exterminate had been made at a small top-secret conference in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. The year was 1942, and the SS had captured millions of Polish, Russian, and Eastern Jews. With the exception of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, none of the men present at Wannsee were well known. Most were mere bureaucrats, among them an obscure SS lieutenant colonel by the name of Adolf Eichmann who recorded the agenda of the meeting. Not one written order exists which decreed death to all captured Jews, but there is no doubt after Goring's testimony at the Nuremberg tribunal that the verbal order came directly from Adolf Hitler and was transmitted to Heydrich.[6] (Heck 1988, 78) Since World War II, historians and the general public alike have asked the question of how most of Germany, along with members of the Nazi party including the Hitler Youth, did not know of the atrocities being inflicted amongst the Jews. To answer this, I do agree that most knew of Kristallnacht, and the persecutory laws against Jews, but many did not know of the actual murdering of six million Jewish people. The Holocaust as it is known today, was more secret to the youth of Nazi Germany than most people now think that it was. As Heck put it: Jews in particular, see World War II in the flaming letters of the word Holocaust. They find it both offensive and incredible that I lived through the rise and fall of Nazism without any awareness of the fate of the Jews.[7] (Heck 1988, 238) It was at this late stage in the war that the fate of the Nazis was determined, and Hitler was well aware of it. On his birthday in 1945, and also his last public appearance, Hitler pinned medals on Hitler-Jugend boys outside of his bunker in Berlin. Ten days later he committed suicide. By early April 1945 the Germanarmy basically gave up, but some SS and Nazi officials encouraged the remaining Hitler-Jugend to continue defending Germany. The boys kept fighting as their leaders retreated and evacuated as fast as possible. Many Hitler Jugend perished, while others such as the Hitler-Jugend tank division surrendered to the U.S. 7th Army. [reference?] The aftermath of the war left Germany's young generation, a youth surrounded by broken symbols and discredited ideals whose perversion made the largest part of this generation at least immune in the future to ideologies and apathetic to political radicalism (Koch 1975, 253).[8] German soldiers, including members of the Hitler-Jugend, were captured and questioned by Allied forces. Captured Hitler-Jugend were commonly forced by Allied forces to view the carnage inside liberated concentration camps up close. They were also forced to bury piles of decomposing corpses. Propaganda films created by the United States from documentary footage taken by soldiers as they liberated these camps was also shown to Hitler-Jugend members in order to show the atrocities the Nazi party had committed. The young men and women of Germany realized for the first time that they had been victims of the Nazi regime, the regime they had been willing to die for. They had given their all to Hitler, dreaming of a bright future and exulting in their role in making the dream real. Now the dream was dead. They had helped to make the massacre of six million Jewish lives possible. Alfons Heck describes his feelings of wanting to commit suicide after finding out the truth about the Holocaust: It crossed my mind that I should have pulled the trigger the day the Americans arrived at Wittlich; at least I would have died with my innocence intact. To lose a war after the most unimaginable sacrifices was one thing, but to be shouldered with the irrefutable genocide of millions was an intolerable burden. Like most of my countrymen, I wasn't ready for that; I myself had not laid a hand on any civilian, Jew or Christian.[9] (Heck 1988, 173)