Hitlerjugend: Far-right group Oath Keepers plan to use Boy Scouts to get younger recruits: report

[hatrack]

18. We had a speaker at school who grew up in Berlin and was in BDM (Hitler Jugend for girls)

And I'll never forget that presentation. She talked about how fun it all was. Youth leaders ran the show, and there were hardly ever adults around. Camping and hiking and visits to museums, and traveling to whatever the equivalent to a scouting Jamboree was. She said it never felt like brainwashing.

Until later on. It was in mid-April 1945 that a friend of her mother mentioned that there must be a storm coming, with all the thunder they could hear off to the east. Her mother responded: "Strange, there isn't a cloud in the sky" - this was right around the time that Zhukov began the final offensive at Seelow Heights.

I remember her closing sentence verbatim: "And the streets filled up with bodies and rubble, and the trees were filled with people who hanged themselves, and that was the end of my wonderful Hitler Youth experience".