On 15 February 1943, a ceremony took place for the first time which gave a new dimension to Germany’s mobilisation for war. The 15- and 16-year-old boys enrolled in classes 6 and 7 in the higher schools were sworn in as air force and naval auxiliaries. As they shed their Hitler Youth uniforms for the real thing and swore their military oaths of allegiance to the Führer, many were ecstatic. It was, one Cologne schoolboy wrote, ‘a momentous day’, which filled him ‘with a feeling of pride, for I know that I too can take part in the defence of the homeland’. Among these first two cohorts were
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