Back to the front page
People

Tragic Discoveries from the Canadian Indigenous Schools and other Events

Painting by Kent Monkman of the tragic seizure of Indigenous children by the RCMP to place in mandatory boarding schools
Painting by Kent Monkman of the tragic seizure of Indigenous children by the RCMP to place in mandatory boarding schools. Pintrest

One of Nazi Germany's more tragic aspects was the indoctrination of children to become cogs in a monstrous machine
One of Nazi Germany’s more tragic aspects was the indoctrination of children to become cogs in a monstrous machine. The Holocaust Explained

27. The Nazis’ Tragic Indoctrination of German Children in the Ways of Hate and Horridness

Nazi Germany committed many atrocities, and one of the most tragic is how it went about the mass indoctrination of innocent children, to turn them into obedient and hate-filled cogs in their monstrous machine. However, not all German kids were eager to accept the fare fed them by the Nazis, and some of them adamantly refused to go along. In a mixture of youthful courage and the instinctive teenage desire to express their individuality, some German youngsters, who came to be known as the “Edelweiss Pirates”, bucked the system and defined themselves in opposition to the Nazis.

The Nazis’ perversion of the young began before they assumed power. In 1922, they established a youth arm to recruit, indoctrinate, and train members for their paramilitary arm, the Storm Troopers, or Brown Shirts. As the party became more numerous and powerful, so did the size of its youth arm, which was renamed the Hitlerjugend (“Hitler Youth”) in 1926. When the Nazis gained power in 1933, they made their youth arm Germany’s sole official youth organization, and took over and folded preexisting youth organizations into their own. Hitler appointed a Reich Youth Leader to oversee the takeover.

Written by

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.

Keep reading

Advertisement