Adolf Lenk

Gustav Adolf Lenk (born October 15, 1903 in Munich ; † 1987 ) was a German right-wing extremist political activist. Lenk was the founder of the youth union of the NSDAP , the predecessor of the Hitler Youth .

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Lenk was a trained piano polisher. After hearing several speeches by Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1920 , he submitted an application to join the NSDAP, which was rejected because he was under eighteen years old. Since the party's youth organization did not yet exist at that time, Lenk suggested founding one. The then party leadership under Anton Drexler followed this suggestion, but Lenk did not make any progress with his project.

When Hitler, meanwhile party chairman, casually mentioned a possible youth organization in a speech in December 1921, Lenk, now a party member, came back to his idea. In March 1922, on Hitler's initiative, a call for founding was published in the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter . At the founding meeting of the youth union on May 13, 1922 in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich , Lenk appeared as a youth leader together with Adolf Hitler as a speaker. Organizationally, the youth union was subordinated to the leader of the SA , Hans Ulrich Klintzsch . Initially limited to Munich, further local groups were founded in Bavaria and Central Germany in 1922 and their own newspaper was published.

After the unsuccessful Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in November 1923, in which Lenk was involved, the youth association was banned, but it was continued by Lenk under different names. On May 6, 1925, Lenk resigned as a youth leader after Hitler increasingly relied on the Greater German Youth Movement under Kurt Gruber . With an order dated May 6, 1925, Hitler officially transferred the party's youth work to Edmund Heines from the “ Schill Youth ”. After the Hitler Youth was founded in 1926, the party finally had a youth organization again, which Lenk's organization later no longer recognized as a forerunner.

In March 1932, Lenk rejoined the party and became active in the SA. In 1941, Lenk, who meanwhile worked in the SA Reichsleitung in Berlin, was expelled from the party because he had unjustifiably carried the " blood order ". Another application for membership was unsuccessful.

literature

• Brenda Ralph Lewis: "Hitleryouth - The Hitler Youth in War and Peace 1933-1945" , 2000.
• Hansjoachim Wolfgang Koch: "The Hitleryouth - Origins and Developement 1922-1945" , 1975.