How Teenage Sexuality Among the Hitler Youth Spiraled Out of Control
To increase the German population, the Nazis encouraged their teenagers to have lots of sex
The Nazis established two organizations to control and manipulate German teenagers. For boys, they had the Hitler Youth and for girls, they created the League of German Girls. They established both organizations in 1936.
The League of German Girls was the girl’s wing of the Hitler Youth. Because of sexual promiscuity, the organization got the nickname “The League of German Mattresses.”
All German teenagers aged between ten and eighteen years had to join the Hitler Youth. At its peak, the Nazi youth movement had 8.7 million members.
By 1945, a staggering nine out of ten German teenagers joined the Hitler Youth.
The teenagers were perfect targets for the Nazi skillful manipulation
The teenagers were fascinated by camping, movies, excursion trips, and singing. In the dull life of the German youth in the 1930s, the Nazi youth movement came as a breath of fresh air.
A lot of parents disapproved of their children being members of the Hitler Youth. Yet, this even spurred the rebellious teenagers to join the movement.
The teenagers loved to work at workshops organized by the Nazis. It allowed them to be away from school and strict parents. Besides, they could meet with members of the opposite sex.
Little did they know all fun activities were a part of a huge manipulation scheme. The Nazis indoctrinated innocent teenagers into ardent worshippers of Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler had a status of a rock star among the teenagers.
In the late 1930s, the Nazis put a lot of pressure on teenagers to join the Hitler Youth. If a teenager didn’t want to join, he or she was ostracized or even imprisoned.
A lot of boys from the Hitler Youth would later serve in the German army. They were fanatic soldiers, completely brainwashed by the Nazi ideology, and fearless. One such example was Alfred Sech.
The teenage orgies of the Hitler Youth
Nazi Germany was obsessed with the growth of the “pure” German population. They encouraged German women to have as many children as possible. According to the Nazis, the highest service to the German nation was to have babies. If they were illegitimate, it didn’t matter.
The girls from the League of German Girls were taught to take care of their bodies to prepare for motherhood.
Nothing was holy to the despicable Nazis! In the teenagers, they found susceptible victims for their plans to increase the population. Teenagers are full of hormones and sex is high on their agenda. The Nazis mercilessly exploited that!
The leaders of the League of German Girls and the Hitler Youth encouraged teenagers to have children.
The preparation camps for girls and boys laid next to each other. The Nazis intentionally mixed boys and girls during rallies and workshops. Consequently, there was a lot of teenage sex!
During Nürnberg Rally in 1936, over 900 teenage girls got pregnant.
Teenage sex is nothing bad if it involves protection. However, the Nazis placed restrictions on contraception and abortion to trigger population growth. In their view, contraception meant violation of nature and degradation of motherhood. In 1943, they made abortion punishable by imprisonment or even death.
As a consequence, German hospitals became overcrowded with teenagers who were pregnant or had venereal diseases.
There were a lot of unwed mothers and illegitimate children. The Nazis tried hard to end the social stigma associated with single mothers.
The Nazis told the girls their sole purpose was being a mother
Young girls were brainwashed into believing motherhood was their sole purpose. The girls seemed oblivious to being pregnant at such an early age. They actually felt they did their duty for Adolf Hitler.
“We were told from a very early age to prepare for motherhood, as the mother in the eyes of our beloved leader and the National Socialist Government was the most important person in the nation.”
— Ilse Mckee, a member of League of German Girls
Some girls from the League of German Girls were selected to take part in Lebensborn (in German Wellspring of life). The Lebensborn was the SS breeding program.
The selected girls with a proven Aryan lineage were sent to a secret location. There they were introduced to a group of SS men. All the men were tall, strong, blonde, and with blue eyes. Each girl had to pick the one she liked.
Once the girls made their choices, they had to wait for ten days after the beginning of their periods. They had sex a few times with their chosen SS boy to get pregnant. The whole procedure was mechanical and industrialized. The “couples” didn’t even know their names.
After a baby was born, a teenage mother handed it over to SS. She returned after one year to provide another child for Nazi Germany.
Teenage sexuality became perverted and twisted
Encouraging teenagers to have sex without consequences, drafting their fathers into the army, and making their mothers work long shifts in armament factories, created a fertile environment for sexual promiscuity and violence.
The Nazis inadvertently triggered the dark side of human sexuality. The results were sexual violence and debauchery.
Young boys were sexually attacking children, committing incest, bestiality, and sodomy. The Nazi regime prosecuted less than fifteen percent of the teenage sexual offenders. Who knows how many assaults were not even reported!
In one case in 1934, police in Darmstadt, Germany, arrested a seventeen-year-old teenager who had sex with girls of only seven, eight, and nine years. He received a sentence of four months in prison.
In another case, a youth from the village of Dürnbach was arrested for sexually assaulting several cows.
In Nüremberg, police had a case of twin sisters getting pregnant with the same fifteen-year-old. In another infamous case from Nüremberg, a sixteen-year-old girl had group sex with four boys in front of the altar in the church.
In Schweinfurt, an eleven-year-old girl had sex with seven of her classmates, one after another.
The Nazis were shocked by the sexual promiscuity of the teenage girls
The teenage girls allowed themselves to be more sexually active. The Nazi propaganda praised motherhood above all. The girls understood that as the encouragement for illegitimate pregnancies and polygamy.
When confronted by the grown-ups, they would defend their behavior by saying: “The Führer wants more children” or “What do you want, I’m a German mother.” Some of these girls were twelve or thirteen years old.
The Nazi propaganda tried to bring people and the soldiers closer together. The teenage girls took the message literally. The girls, often younger than sixteen, ventured near military bases. They searched for the opportunity to have sex with the soldiers. Officials reported parks near military bases to be littered with used condoms.
Much to the chagrin of the Nazis, the young German girls engaged in sex with French prisoners of war (POWs). After being arrested, the girls usually said that the French “do it better!”
Conclusion
Because of the Nazi abuse of hormone-charged teenagers, teenage sexuality spiraled out of control. Orgies, rapes, sexual harassment, and teenage pregnancies were rampant.
On the outside, the Nazi regime advocated the ideal of chastity. In reality, they did little to stop sexual violence and debauchery among the teenagers.
What could be the best time in the lives of these teenagers was transformed by the Nazis into perversion and destructiveness.
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References
- David, P.H., Fleischhacker J., Hohn C. 1988, ‘Abortion and Eugenics in Nazi Germany’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 81–112
- Zastre S., 2020, ‘Get yourselves under control! Youth sexuality in the Third Reich’, Central Europe Yearbook, Vol.2
- https://spartacus-educational.com/2WWgirls.htm
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4742560/The-girls-young-10-fought-Hitler.html
- https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/bund-deutscher-m-auml-del-the-league-of-german-girls
- https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704872
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls