The Hitler Youth And Child Indoctrination: An Analysis Of Guilt And Responsibility

Megan Gould
Mentor: Brian Van Wyck, History

The Hitler Youth was an organization for boys aged 14-18 sponsored by the National Socialist Party in Germany. Eventually coming to replace standard education as the sole legal organization for boys under the Nazi dictatorship, the Hitler Youth indoctrinated a generation of German boys in Nazi ideology. Because ideological indoctrination was a central component of the program for its more than eight million participants, postwar observers and contemporary scholars have debated the question of the responsibility of individual Hitler Youth members for participating in the regime and its crimes as children and young adults. This paper analyzes responses to the Hitler Youth and the question of the individual culpability of participants found in the arguments offered by prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials, in American newspaper coverage of postwar Germany, and in memoirs written by former Hitler Youth members. The paper argues that these different sources advanced distinctive, often incompatible interpretations of the Hitler Youth that reflected their different purposes, assumptions, and intended audiences. This paper thus demonstrates that the types of sources consulted by scholars structure the conclusions that can be drawn about the individual culpability of Hitler Youth members, challenging the idea of a single response to this question.