17. The Hitler Youth Started Off as the Underage Wing of the Brown Shirts
Scouting and other youth organizations and movements became popular in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time Hitler came to power, Germany had plenty of social, religious, and political youth groups. The Nazis had their own organization: in 1922, they had established the Jugendbund der NSDAP, a youth arm to recruit, indoctrinate, and train members for its paramilitary, the Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers, better known as the Brown Shirts. Indeed, after the Brown Shirts, the Hitler Youth was the second oldest Nazi Party paramilitary organization. When the Nazi Party was temporarily banned in 1923 after a failed coup, the Beer Hall Putsch, the Brown Shirts, along with their youth arm, were banned. The Nazi youth organization secretly continued however, renamed in 1924 The Greater German Youth Movement.
