The Boy Who Dared Blog Entry # 3

In the book The Boy Who Dared, Helmuth lives in Hamburg, Germany. When he is young he decides he wants to be part of the Hitler Youth. They took kids when they were at a young age. Adolf Hitler said, "These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] ten years of age." They would keep the kids in their own hands for long periods of time. When Helmuth was young and in school he realized that everybody around him was spewing Nazi lies, and believing everything they were told. It was hard for Helmuth because the people around him hated Jews, but he saw no reason for having any hatred towards them. The Nazis who ran Hitler Youth made sure that you had no thoughts of your own, and believed that Jews were bad people, Adolf Hitler said, "And even if they are still not complete National Socialists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months . . . And whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left . . . the Wehrmacht [German armed forces] will take care of that." This passage shows how the Germans made sure that the young kids thought what they wanted to think, and nothing else. In fact, most propaganda was targeted towards young minds to try and get them to be a part of Hitler Youth. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says, "From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful." Helmuth witnessed everyone in his school's beliefs changed, and all children around him that weren't Jewish, U.S.H.M.M. says, "By 1936 membership in the Hitler Youth increased to 5.4 million before it became mandatory in 1939."
The Hitler Youth group targeted young minds, and at first would have had Helmuth if he hadn't eventually realized that what Nazis were preaching was wrong. Yet, people around Helmuth still tried to tell him that what Hitler was doing was right, such as his mother's boyfriend Hugo. All of Helmuth's teachers were constantly pointing out how Hitler was doing such good for the country, U.S.H.M.M says, "Education in the Third Reich served to indoctrinate students with the National Socialist world view...Most educators, however, remained in their posts and joined the National Socialist Teachers League. 97% of all public school teachers, some 300,000 persons, had joined the League by 1936. In fact, teachers joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than any other profession." The second part of this quote shows why so many of Helmuth's teachers were always shoving the Nazi beliefs down the throats of the students. During school one day when Helmuth raised his hand to ask a question about a painting, the teacher misunderstood and took it horribly. His teacher yelled at him saying, "The greatest honor for any soldier is to die for his country rather then to let the flag fall." (p.44). This quote is very important because on the U.S.H.M.M website it says, "In the classroom and in the Hitler Youth, instruction aimed to produce race-conscious, obedient, self-sacrificing Germans who would be willing to die for Führer and Fatherland." This shows another way that the teachers around Helmuth tried to influence him to think a certain way.
All of these quotes and points that I have made are very important because of the role they all play specifically in my book. The Hilter Youth Movement plays a huge part in The Boy Who Dared because of how they all tried to influence Helmuth. All of what I have written are all ways that Hitler Youth was so involved in my book, and how they poisoned the minds of young people in Germany.