Hitler Youth by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

From The Week of October 31, 2010

Ms. Bartoletti has assembled here a wonderful and frightening primer on that most powerful of forces, the will and the vigor of young people. In the 1920s, before he had become one of the most destructive forces in human history, Hitler was a mostly powerless thug with a hateful ideology and no way to implement it. But then a program was born, thought up and made reality by Hitler and his cadre, a plan to harness the frustrations of the jobless youth and grant them not just a purpose but an outlet for their anger. In a frighteningly short period of time, Hitler had an army at his fingertips, an army loyal only to his ideals, an army willing to smash and intimidate any opposition. But while the Brownshirts helped sweep Hitler into power, he needed a system capable of extending National Socialism to the next generation of Germans, the youth of the new, Third Reich.

Enter the Hitler Youth, a paramilitary organization modelled on the Brownshirts which inculcated children, some as young as 10, in Hitlerian doctrine. Though the children were given a basic, academic education,the main focus of their training was the transformation of their bodies into machines of war. They needed the skills and the knowledge to fight for Hitler, to fight for Hitler's Germany, not the knowledge of the book, of the weak way. The Hitler Youth were loyal footsoldiers, invaluable to the leadership both as exemplars of Aryan supremacy and as a feeder system of Nazis into the military, baptizing the armed forces in National Socialism. Ms. Bartoletti discusses here the methods used to indoctrinate these young men and women, the highs they experienced, and the betrayals they suffered. For when the army was exhausted and shattered, it was the Hitler Youth left to defend Berlin, at the end, beardless boys against grizzled Soviet troops.. And their leader, their father, having taken the easy way out, putting a bullet in his own brain...

This is a quick, edifying read. There is no power in this world like youth power. But it can be deployed for ill as effectively as for good. That's as true today as it was in the darkness of the Third Reich. This is not the first book to make this argument, or to expose the betrayal of youth in this way, but it is a welcome entry in a lesson that cannot be learned enough. (3/5 Stars)