Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

by Julia Boyd

However, on closer inspection these youthful cartels were not quite as innocent as they seemed. Cicely Hamilton sounded a note of caution. ‘There is danger in the Youth Movement,’ she wrote, ‘which may be summed up in the one word – Politics.’ She had been quick to notice that the majority of these groups were junior branches of existing church societies or political parties intent on indoctrinating the young with their own particular brand of sectarianism. ‘Some of these young people’, Hamilton noted, ‘are taking to their politics early and taking to them vigorously.’ On her weekend rambles she would often meet ‘parties of imps – little creatures who, as yet, should know nothing of politics – trudging out into the woods, in crocodile formation, with the Red Flag marching at their head.’ Nor was it only young communists who made her uneasy. ‘The Brown Shirts are the most striking example of youth trained to partisan thinking,’ she observed, adding, ‘They are not an unfavourable example. Their doctrines may be dangerous and their methods provocative but the lads themselves – so far as I have seen them – are of clean, upstanding type.’ She went on to inform her readers that ‘the young Brown Shirts were a branch of the National-Socialist-German-Workers-Party’, a title, as she points out, that is much too long for everyday use so ‘has mercifully been shortened to – Nazi’.47

Politicisation of youth movements in Weimar Germany