up to continue the same kind of activities as at the weekend, unsupervised. These were moments of temporary freedom.
Other gangs were similar to the Pirates, only more politicised from the outset. In Leipzig between 1937 and 1938, working-class youth had been much more influenced by the socialist and communist climate of their communities and took pleasure in ‘their acts of provocation against the Hitler Youth.’ They were given to ‘speculations about the day when the violent overthrow of the regime would come’.91 Provocation was a political tactic at street level for the irate Pirates as they ‘looked for a new hangout in the reddest part of town…there were often massive clashes, and we were exposed to many a danger’.92
When the knives flash
And the Polish coffins whizz past
And the Edelweiss Pirates attack!
—Martyn Housden in Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich
The Pirates were hardly simple street-corner gangs, and punishment for membership was severe. In 1940, the Gestapo in Cologne arrested 130 Navajos; elsewhere other Pirates were hanged; and in Düsseldorf, 739 were arrested. Also in Düsseldorf, the Edelweiss Pirates battled so frequently with Hitler Youth that in 1942 the latter reported no-go areas. In 1944, the ring-leaders of one Cologne gang were publicly hanged. The Gestapo raided the gangs on Himmler’s orders and arrested hundreds of youths who ended up in special courts, but runaways and deserters increased the ranks of the Pirates as the war went on. In Cologne in 1945, there were reports of twenty groups over one-hundred-strong who raided food stores and attacked and killed fascists. As the war neared its end, some Pirates joined with the resistance, along with anti-Nazi deserters and escapees: ‘They got supplies by making armed raids on military depots, made direct assaults on Nazis, and took part in quasi-partisan fighting. Indeed the chief of the Cologne Gestapo fell victim to one of these attacks.’93
Students also engaged in acts of resistance. Hans and Sophie Scholl organized a small group to distribute anti-fascist leaflets at Munich University, whose alumni mainly consisted of, according to Dulles, ‘girls, cripples and Nazi “student leaders”’.94 They became known as the White Rose group and built a propaganda network in nearby cities as well. The principal protagonists, the Scholls, were caught and executed, and the bravery of these young anti-fascists has been commemorated by a Berlin school and a film. Others fared slightly better on arrest: Anton Saefkow was a member of the communist resistance and a friend of Ernst Thaelmann who was arrested in 1933 and almost tortured to death. Saefkow then spent the next ten years in a camp until he escaped and became a leading figure in the anti-fascist underground.
Make sure you’re really casual, singing or whistling English hits all the time, absolutely smashed and always surrounded by really amazing women.
—Detley J.K. Peukert in Inside Nazi Germany
The Swing Youth were upper-middle-class jazz enthusiasts given over to eccentric dress, a heightened appreciation of the trombone, and resistance through rhythm. Jazz was strictly verboten under Hitler who detested ‘negro music’ and its African-American origins, so adherence to it became a political statement. They faced opposition from the Hitler Youth who reported their ‘long hair flopping into the face…they all “jitterbugged” on the stage like wild creatures. Several boys could be observed dancing together, always with two cigarettes in their mouths’.95 Not only was the music viewed as outlandish but so were the clothes of the Swing Youth: ‘English sports jackets, shoes with thick light crepe soles, showy scarves, Anthony Eden hats, an umbrella on the arm whatever the weather’.96
KPD vs. SPD
One of the most contentious issues in Germany was the relationship between the KPD and the SPD. Both had nothing to gain from the electoral success of the Nazis other than arrest, torture, imprisonment, and death. In 1922, the combined vote of the SPD and KPD was 52.3 percent, which (although dropping later due to rising unemployment, shortage of food and bourgeois reaction) was surely an indication of the potential of left-wing and anti-fascist sentiment. The KPD was opposed to the SPD because the communists were agitating for a revolution, whereas the socialists were in government and had sanctioned state violence to suppress revolutionary activity. It was difficult for KPD to side with the reformist SPD when the socialists had used the police to break strikes and attack workers. During the violence on May Day 1929, the police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators. Not only did this result in twenty-five workers being killed, but it widened the gap between the socialists and communists and saw the communists gain more votes. The SPD police chief was blamed, although it was the police boss on the demo that gave the order to fire.
The split between the SPD and KPD was cultural as much as ideological: it was along lines of unemployed and worker, revolutionary and reformist, younger generation and older, and so on. Members of the KPD were often on the fringes of electoral politics and, like the Nazis, had a particular attraction for the younger and more rebellious elements—something that John Hiden confirms in Republican and Fascist Germany: ‘The KPD supporter was more likely than the SPD follower to be young, unskilled and above all unemployed.’97 These are some of the reasons that a hoped-for left-wing block vote against the Nazis failed to happen.
Endnotes:
1 A.J. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler (London: Macmillan, 1968), 23.
2 Ibid., 24.
3 Ibid., 47.
4 Evelyn Anderson, Hammer or Anvil: The Story of the German Working Class Movement (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), 86.
5 Ibid., 60.
6 Ibid., 74–75.
7 Ibid., 85.
8 Ibid., 53–4.
9 Stephen J. Lee, The Weimar Republic (London: Routledge, 1998), 52.
10 C.C.W. Szejnmann, Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in ‘Red’ Saxony (New York: Berghahn Publishers, 1999), 62.
11 Peter H. Merkl, The Making of a Stormtrooper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 11.
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