Swing Heil

In the memorandum, Himmler also warned the police about young people who ignored German culture and preferred jazz music and swing dance.  These resisters were called the Swing Youth, due to their taste in music.  According to Himmler, the teenagers said, "Swing Heil," instead of "Heil Hitler."  He noted that the boys wore their hair long and the girls wore makeup and painted their fingernails.

Today I read Susan Campbell Bartoletti's Hitler Youth: Growing Up In Hitler's Shadow.  It was a fascinating read.  I hesitate to try and write a post about it because I don't think I could do justice to the topic without much more time and research, but at the same time I felt an overwhelming wish to voice some of my small thoughts.  Frankly, most of my mind is focused on the war more than the actual book.  That being said, I must briefly mention that, as a person generally uninterested in non-fiction, I was very impressed.  Ms Bartoletti created an incredibly well-crafted book that presented difficult information in a very engaging manner.

Hitler's plan for training the youth of Germany is a fascinating and terrifying thing.  As I read this story of indoctrination and peer pressure I just kept looking at the world in which I live.  The climate of fear and reactionism that allowed Hitler to successively strip Germans of their freedoms with no opposition (indeed, each new breach of their freedom was often celebrated as a victory) seems so like the one in which we live today.  SOPA created an international outcry that roused people from their somnolent apathy and their outrage has, at least for now, been acknowledged.  But where was that same outrage when Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act which, among I don't even know what else, allows the government to detain Americans "suspected of terrorist activity"?  This law was signed off by the president this month and is now in effect (insofar as I am aware...).  Setting aside the issue of detaining anyone without basic rights because I can only address so much here, the fact is that under a new and frighteningly broad definition of "terrorist activity" our government can now detain us, it's own citizens, indefinitely and without trial.  It may seem reactionary and extreme to imply this comparison, but I can't help but worry...is "The War on Terror" a good enough reason for us to sit quietly while our civil liberties, such an enduring hallmark of this nation (even as its reputation has suffered ever more tarnishing from the hands of outsiders and insiders alike), are chipped away one by one?

Ironically, I found a bitter sort of comfort even as I mused on these frightening ideas.  Bartoletti begins her book with a quote from Hitler himself

I begin with the young.  We older ones are used up...But my magnificent youngsters!  Are there finer ones anywhere in the world?  Look at all these men and boys!  What material!  With them I can make a new world.

Hitler understood the importance of the rising generation in the success of his war machine.  Bartoletti's book describes the activities the Hitler Jungen (HJ) orchestrated to get all the children involved.  She describes hiking and camping and summer camps.  She talks about the patriotic propaganda that played to the fervor of young minds.  Hitler had an immense gift for speaking, and with his nation's youth he used it to terrible effect.  Bartoletti includes several first-hand accounts of boys and girls in their teens who heard him speak.  They talk about how inspiring he was and how his words went right to their souls and captured their hearts and minds.  My bitter comfort as I read these accounts was a knowledge that the youth of my generation are immune to such insidious tactics.  The fact is, mine is a generation defined by apathy.

I cannot be proud of this safeguard. After all, apathy is just as dangerous as misguided fanaticism.  It was the apathy of others that allowed families to be dragged from their homes and put into concentration camps.  With enough apathy, fear, and carefully placed manipulation bad men can create a world all of their own making.  The fact is everyone wants their world to be ok.  They don't want there to be problems and trouble and issues.  It is frightening to think that something is wrong because that means that it must somehow be fixed.  Bartoletti interviewed actual members of the HJ and they talked to her about their inability to face what they had done.  So many of them simply could not accept that the man they had believed in with religious fervor was a madman and a murderer--not even when they saw the evidence with their own eyes.  People don't want to believe that the world is gone awry and that they have been a part of it, no matter how inadvertently.

But most of all this book overwhelmed me with the horror of violence and war.  Hitler took an entire generation and raised them up to be perfect soldiers.  Boys and men capable of the most horrifying atrocities towards their fellow men with little or no immediate remorse.  As I read Bartoletti's accounts of "mercy killings" and then the Holocaust I kept trying to understand how such programs could exist...and keep existing.  It wasn't just the insanity of Hitler; somehow hundreds of other people were pulled into complicity with it.  He was just one man.  Somehow he took living, feeling human beings and turned them into something less, something that was capable of looking others in the eye and inflicting every imaginable kind of torture on them.  How did he do that?

And yet this is not an isolated example.  To our shame, the history of human cruelty is as long as the history of human existence.  The worst part of this is the fact that it continues to exist today.  The fact that after witnessing something so appalling as World War II there still exists places like Guantanamo Bay.  That there are still terrorists and extremists and people filled with hate (or even more terrifying--people filled with militant zeal).  That people are still capable of taking another human being's life in his or her hands and snuffing it out because someone told them to...or because they told themselves to.  How?  How are we still doing this to one another?

I wish I had answers to any of these questions or solutions to even just one of these problems.  How does one abolish apathy while staving off misguided zealotry?  How does one subdue the demon within Man that strips from him his Humanity?  How do people conquer their wills and learn to interact with each other civilly and reasonably?  I don't know.  All I know is that even without solutions we have to keep trying.  Bartoletti told the story of various young men and women who rose up in rebellion under Hitler's regime.  In every instance they were quickly found and executed, their voices silenced, leaving what appeared to be little or no change in their wake.  It was difficult to hear their stories without bitterness as I wondered what it was for.  But I had to remind myself that the simple fact that I could read their stories all these years later means that they had some effect.  I cannot find the words to explain what their sacrifice means to me, a privileged and ignorant girl some 70 years later.  All I can say is that I am so grateful that they made it.  And perhaps, with that example to inspire me, if one day I find myself called on to sacrifice something of my own to protest against injustice, hatred, violence, or cruelty I will be able to make the right decision.  Even if I don't think it will make a difference.