Posted by BDM Historian

Note

I've made some annotations / footnotes to the review below... please scroll to the bottom of the page to read them. I didn't want to include them in the actual text as that may have caused some confusion.


The Hitler Youth - A Review

Osprey recently published "The Hitler Youth, 1933 - 1945", which was written by historian Alan Dearn. Alan Dearn is actually Dr. Alan Dearn; he holds a doctorate in late Roman religious history.

I have to admit that I was excited to see a new book about the Hitler Youth, particularly in English, since the sources on the subject seem to be few and far between, at least the ones worth buying. I was even more excited when I found the book at Borders and got to take a look at it, because it does include some information about the League of German Girls.

Let me start at the very back of the book which includes an interesting photo and the story of a girl by the name of Maria.

As the story is told in the book - I'm paraphrasing - Maria was 15 years old and a member of the BDM when her mother was killed in an Allied bombing raid, at which point Maria vowed revenge on the enemy. Because of her age, she was told she was too young to become a Flak helper, therefore she threw herself into her work as a BDM leader and also volunteered her time at the local Luftwaffe offices.

At one point in 1945, she was approached by a Hitler Youth leader who asked whether she had any interest in joining the Volkssturm, since they needed people to help with cooking and first aid. Maria jumped at the chance. She was trained in the use of a Panzerfaust, grenades, and pistol, and went into battle with the Volkssturm.

She was captured while giving first aid and never actually fired a shot. There's a photo of her, taken by her Allied captors, along with the story, showing her in a military overcoat with a medic's armband and carrying what appears to be a military backpack.

...

You may be wondering why I've chosen to point that part of the book out - it's because I think if you're going to buy the book for the sake of having some information on females in the Hitler Youth, this particular story is going to be the thing that'll make it worth (or not worth) spending your money on this book.

I have to admit that I was very disappointed.

Like most books on the subject of the Hitler Youth, Dearn's book also treats the BDM as a kind of afterthought and only devotes a few paragraphs of text to them, their training, and their uniforms. If you were to place all the text and photos of the BDM that are in this book, together, they would take up approximately one page, not counting Maria's story. The shortness of the BDM material would probably not be a bad thing ... if the information were good, correct, and came annotated with the proper sources. Unfortunately, it isn't and it doesn't.

While I have to give Dearn full credit for stressing that the BDM received no paramilitary training, there is little else he wrote about the BDM that I can give him any kudos for, and his writing generally seems to be lacking sources.

The only source he cites in his BDM sections is Melita Maschmann's "Fazit", which he quotes repeatedly. In part of the uniform description, he makes note of a former member remembering that "her homemade skirt wasn't as smart as the store bought ones", but gives no source for this blurb, not even a name or book reference (2). He also cites that Jutta Ruediger was categorically against a proposed women's unit, and that at the end of the war a small number of leaders were given pistol training which they never put to use thereafter, but gives no source for either. As a researcher and a historian, I would want to know where this information came from. (1)

The other thing that got me was that after the research he has done - he gives an impressive bibliography of secondary and some primary sources at the back of his book - he still got things very wrong. Easy things, at that.

For example, during his description of the BDM uniform, he makes note that girls were only awarded the black neckerchief and leather knot slide after they graduated from the Jungmaedel to the BDM at age 14. I'm not sure what his source for this is, but the Jungmaedel's own manual states that the girls were awarded the right to wear the neckerchief upon becoming a full member of the Jungmaedel. (3)

In the same section about uniforms, he talks about the uniform being worn with either "a blue cap" or black beret in winter. I wish he had been more specific because this "blue cap" is the Jungmaedel cap, which was also nicknamed Teufelskappe and was only authorized to be worn by Jungmaedel.

The other thing that is very confusing about his book is his use of abbreviations. At the front of the book (along with the copyright information), Dearn makes a small note that he is using Hitler Youth to refer to the organization as a whole, and the German abbreviations to refer to the individual groups. In other words, BDM for League of German Girls, and HJ for Hitler Youth.

Where this gets odd and confusing is when he is speaking about the "junior" organizations of both, because he is using DJV and DJM for the Jungvolk and Jungmaedel respectively. I have yet to see a period source where DJV was used for the Jungvolk - it's always been just DJ (Deutsches Jungvolk). And there are no sources referring to the Jungmaedel Bund as Deutsche Jungmaedel or DJM.

In short, I found the book disappointing.

And the thing is, when there are big errors like using the wrong name for the organization or saying that only girls 14 or older wore the neckerchief, it really calls into question the rest of the book. I honestly don't know how good his research and writing on the male Hitler Youth are (not having read them in detail), but I shudder to think the text on the BDM might be any indication.

What's worse is that because Osprey published it, there'll be a lot of people taking it as unquestionable - after all, they're Osprey.


Annotations

(1) I'm fairly certain that the source for those latter two is Dr. Jutta Rudiger's book "Ein Leben fuer die Jugend" since both her vehement protest about a women's unit, as well as mention of BDM leaders taking pistol training are included in her book.

(2) The skirt reference may have come from a variety of sources, including some of the personal narratives on this website, such as that of Giesela Borgwaldt found here.

(3) Jungmaedel were sworn in on April 20th of each year, after which they had six months to complete the Jungmaedel Challenge, which consisted of a series of tests. If all tests were passed, the Jungmaedel became full members on October 2nd of the same year, at which point they were awarded the right to wear the neckerchief.)