LITMIR.BIZ

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has his favourite Jew.’

      Once the Nazis were in power, it was a matter of days before freedoms began to disappear from every sector of life. The Enabling Act allowed Hitler to make laws without recourse to the Reichstag, freedom of speech was abolished, concentration camps were introduced, political parties were banned, trade unions were destroyed, beatings were administered, and books reflecting an ‘un-German spirit’ were burned. In a speech to Berlin students at a book-burning, Joseph Goebbels said:

      The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death – this is the task of the young generation.

      Here is the key to Nazi intentions. Young people faced a future of action, sacrifice, certainty and obedience – with no room for individuality. As head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, declared, ‘such a thing as a private individual does not exist.’ Hitler went further, privately describing how, from the age of ten until adulthood, a German youth would be sent from one militaristic organisation to another, until he or she was a ‘complete National Socialist’. Once this had been achieved, he said, ‘they will never be free again as long as they live.’

      Hitler’s ambition could be seen taking shape. Christabel Bielenberg, a British woman living in Hamburg, was a committed anti-Nazi. After two years of National Socialist rule, she observed how the youngsters she saw hiking the country roads were now dressed in dreary Hitler Youth uniforms, with identical haircuts: short hair for the boys and plaits for the girls. Individualism, she noted, seemed to have evaporated. But she was also forced to admit that people seemed more cheerful, and were behaving more politely. Fear of a financial crisis seemed to have passed, and a sense of national self-respect was returning.

      Optimism was not visible everywhere, of course. In April 1936, Bernt Engelmann was sitting in a train carriage as it passed through Duisberg. At the time, the long-distance ‘Adolf Hitler roads’ were being built, and two construction workers were sitting opposite him, moaning to each other about the project. Into this mix came a young female member of the National Socialist Women’s League. ‘Heil Hitler!’ she said cheerfully to everybody, and sat down. For a while, she read her newspaper while the men continued moaning. ‘Is this whining really necessary?’ the woman said suddenly. ‘You should be grateful that you have work and thank the Führer for getting rid of unemployment!’

      The men stared at her, before one of them spoke. He explained that they were on compulsory service with just ten days’ holiday a year, their accommodation was a straw mattress in a wooden barracks, their food was abysmal and their pay was low and regularly falling lower. In fact, the man said, he was earning less than he had before the Nazis came to power, and was no longer even allowed to carry out his own trade.

      The young woman was silent for a while. Finally she spoke, protesting that Germany had regained its strength, that Hitler had achieved miracles, and that the people now had hope. ‘You must have faith in the Führer!’ she said.

      We have already noted the quasi-religious quality of the Dunkirk evacuation, but this pales beside the secular sanctity of the Third Reich, where Hitler and the Fatherland stood for God and Heaven. The young woman was invoking Hitler just as a Christian invokes Jesus or a Muslim invokes Allah. And two years later, shortly before Kristallnacht, Melita Maschmann was having another of her euphoric, quasi-religious experiences, this time at a meeting of leaders of the League of German Girls. The sense of being young, of belonging, of loving each other, of sharing a common task – making Germany great again – filled her with overwhelming joy.

      But Melita’s greatest joy and intoxication were to come once the war had begun on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. Depicted in Germany as a legitimate action to liberate Germans living in occupied territories, the invasion saw Melita being sent in an official capacity to a town on the Polish border. Arriving by train, she was seized by a feeling of invulnerability. All sense of fear dropped away as she felt an identification with something greater than herself. Fulfilling Robert Ley’s ideal, she was no longer an individual. She had become Germany.

      But it was not just fear that Melita lost when the war began. She was sent, in 1940, to Wartheland, an annexed area containing a large number of Jews and Poles and only a small minority of Germans. Together with a Hitler Youth leader, she was driving across the Warta river when they became stuck. Stranded, with the waters rising, their car was eventually towed to safety by a team of gaunt, bearded men who lived locally. These, it turned out, were Jews forced to live together in ghetto fashion. Once ashore, the Jews worked busily to clean the car of mud and slime. And just as Melita was about to climb in again, one of the men stopped her; he had found one more tiny piece of dirt that he wanted to remove.

      When the man had finished, Melita and the Hitler Youth leader drove away without saying a word to the Jews who had gone out of their way to help them. She had not even looked them in the face. She despised them for being Jews and for wanting to help those who despised them. But she was also ashamed of her attitude. She knew she should have thanked these people.

      But how could she acknowledge their humanity? They were not individuals. And nor was she. She had become Germany.

      The United States

      The Germans, of course, were not the only western people to suffer economic difficulties between the wars. The United States had undergone a great stock market crash in 1929, and suffered a grinding depression for years afterwards. Nearly all levels of society were affected. But as wages dropped and work became harder to come by, it was the poorest who experienced the greatest suffering.

      With Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘new deal for the American people’, and specifically the introduction of the National Youth Administration, members of the struggling generation were finally offered hope. They were provided with grants in return for part-time work, allowing them to remain in high school and college. And they were placed in job training programmes or full-time work by local Youth Administration offices.

      This was a large-scale federal programme which, to some, seemed un-American in its focus on collective welfare. Indeed, with his youth organisations and work camps for young people, his conservation projects stressing the importance of physical fitness and the outdoor life, and his myriad new agencies and regulations, Roosevelt’s initiatives could seem remarkably similar to Adolf Hitler’s.

      Certainly, both leaders inherited ravaged economies. They were both trying to restore their nations’ self-respect as well as their finances. And they were both placing huge importance on their young people. The young were the bearers of national resurgence, and they were set aside for special treatment.

      But that is where the similarities end. In Hitler’s Germany, the state set about stripping away the individuality of its young people. A young German faced a future of service and obedience to the Fatherland, its needs eclipsing his or her own. Roosevelt’s initiatives may have been collective, but he had no desire to brainwash America’s youth. His New Deal offered individual growth alongside the nation’s. And how could it have offered anything else in America – a country built on self-reliance and self-expression?

      We are very used, nowadays, to youth culture coming out of America before spreading around the world. And it was in the late 1930s, as Roosevelt’s measures had their impact and the depression started to ease, that genuine youth culture was first seen. While jazz music had been popular for some time, this was the period when it exploded into Swing and spread among all levels of society. And while the word ‘teen-ager’ would not be used for a few more years, and rock and roll was still a decade and a half away, the right music, the right clothes and the right attitudes took on a new importance among American ‘teens’ (a word that was in use).

      In large part this was thanks to the New Deal. Three-quarters of those aged between fourteen and eighteen were now staying in high school, a far higher proportion than ever before. No longer so influenced by their parents, or at all by their senior workmates, they began to create a distinct identity inside their teen bubble. When sociologist August Hollingshead conducted a study of the young people in a

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