Hitler Youth leader who died in 96. This is in German. I've searched the Google Machine looking for a written transcript. Anyone know of one in either German or English?

Danke

First part:

The hosts asks him to explain the Hitler Youth "not from the distance of time, but as it was back then."

This is filmed for the 50th Anniversary of the end of the war.

He chose to do this because the German documentary company did a program on it nonjudgmentally, and he accepted this interview because he wants to talk about the subject.


3:46 "In my family, politics was not discussed. My family was not politically active."

He was born in 1913, son of a worker in Westphalia. (The interviewer says this. He later contradicts it saying his father was severely sick and unemployable and died in 1916). His mother was a single mother in WWI and worked in a factory.

What jobs did you want as a kid? As a kid played on trains, so wanted to drive trains.

5:35 What first interested you in the Hitler Youth?
"It was the unique experiences one had in youth. I attended the higher schools and we wore back then school caps."

Schlermtze




"And it happened that we were bullied by young unemployed kids who saw these bright caps and wanted to knock them off our heads and sometimes beat us up and stole them and insulted us. 'Fascist sons, traitors to workers, and that got me at the time to thinking, my mother was a single worker, how was I, as a youth, a traitor to workers? That was, for me, impossible to understand."

7:19 "I realized back then, even kids were taking part in class warfare."

Then he saw a poster in Berlin that said "Against Class Warfare for the Folk Community."

"And from my experience, and that of my schoolmates who thought the same as me, that interested me particularly. Then one night I was walking from Berliner Wedding (Berlin region) to Wilmersdorf (Southwest inner Berlin) and came across a rally and heard these same ideas. And that, at 15 years old, was my first contact with the National Socialist movement."

8:33 "Who was Hitler to you at this time?"

"The name Hitler I barely knew back then. I first learned this name as my older brother Kurt, who was six years older than me, showed me a photo of Hitler and one of Dr. Goebbels. That was the first time, 1928."

9:27 "At 15, you can't have a clear political understanding. As I said, this early connection came from my youth experience. Only in later times, as one attends later meetings, informed oneself, had more schooling, as one developed one's own individual understanding, then you gradually build your own view. But at the beginning, stood this experience."

He joins the Hitler Youth movement in Wedding.

"I actually founded the Hitler Youth in Wedding in 1928, based on what I heard in these first meetings."

More about class struggle. Hitler Youth is something that rises above class struggle.

11:28 "At that time, the regional leader of the Hitler Youth was Goebbels. How did you first get to know him?"

"He spoke at this first meeting I was at. In the auditorium, I had a seat next to the walkway and first saw him as he came into the room. What impressed me most was his youth. He was at that time about 30 years old, and that impressed me as a youth. And then he was a master of speaking with clear diction, who could be very convincing.

"He said, at this meeting, among other things, this sentence that personally reached me: 'The young people who secretly sneak into our meetings today will one day break the chains of our people.' That struck me, and the consequences were that I began to work for the Hitler Youth in Wedding."

"Had you read Mein Kampf at that time?"

"No, no. I didn't read it until much later."

Thanks for doing that.