Leipzig packs

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During the Nazi era, the so-called Leipzig packs were groups of young people who were recruited from the working class of the city of Leipzig and were crushed by the Gestapo in 1939 . Many of the young people were sent to penitentiaries , juvenile prisons, or educational institutions.

history

The so-called packs met in the mid-1930s, especially from 1937, independently of state organizations such as the Hitler Youth (HJ) or the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) for self-organized leisure activities. In doing so, they refused the physical and ideological grasp of the Nazi youth organizations, which were the only dominant force after the suppression and bans of youth organizations from other parties or the churches, as well as the youth of the Bundestag. They were formed based on the youth workers' associations of the time before 1933 and group forms of the Bündische Jugend . Before 1933, numerous members were organized in one of the social democratic or communist children's and youth associations. Accordingly, they mostly referred to themselves as "Bündische Jugend", while the defamatory name "Meute" comes from the National Socialist linguistic usage , especially that of the Gestapo, who viewed the Leipzig packs as a local expression of "wild cliques".

The individual group did not appear as a tightly closed unit under a name chosen by them, but were more or less loose associations. The names usually had a direct reference to the public places where the group members met regularly. In total there were up to 1,500 young people in Leipzig between 1937 and 1939 who were members of a pack, about a quarter to a third of them girls. The best known of the 20 or so groups that were put on record were

  • "Hundestart" in Kleinzschocher , named after the popular name of the old cemetery and
  • "Lille" in Reudnitz , after "Lilienplatz", the original name of Bernhardiplatz, each with about 40 members as well
  • “Reeperbahn” in Lindenau , the largest group with up to 100 members. It gathered in Schlageterstrasse (today Georg-Schwarz-Strasse ), a popular amusement mile with numerous cinemas and restaurants, which was popularly known as Reeperbahn after the street of the same name in Hamburg .

Over time, the members developed their own dress code based on the clothing of the earlier migration movement, left-wing socialist youth groups and the Bündische Jugend, in order to distinguish themselves visually from the HJ and the BDM. The boys mostly wore short lederhosen with suspenders, the girls dark skirts, with checked shirts or blouses, white knee socks and hiking boots. Sometimes red scarves were also worn, as well as skull badges or badges with the initials “BJ”, which stood for “Bündische Jugend”.

Initially more or less ignored and treated as an “outgrowth of urban hooliganism”, the young people increasingly came into conflict with the Nazi regime and, in some cases, actively resisted National Socialism . Just like the Edelweiss Pirates , the Leipzig packs are part of the youth opposition from the working class, while the comparable swing youth was middle-class. Packs often attacked individual members or groups of the HJ and their meeting places and distributed leaflets with slogans such as "HJ verrecke" or "Nieder mit Hitler". For example, members of the “Reeperbahn” smashed the windows of the Hermann Göring Home of the Hitler Youth, near the Adolf Hitler field at the later location of the Leipzig Central Stadium , before its inauguration . The Connewitz pack, which met in front of the Cinema Union-Theater Connewitz , attacked the showcases of the NSDAP and HJ on what was then Adolf-Hitler-Strasse (today Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse) or changed the entrance sign from “Leipzig-Reichsmessestadt” to “Leipzig -Reichsmeckerstadt ". It took on such proportions that the local HJ leadership in Berlin complained that in some districts of Leipzig HJ members no longer dare to go out into the street in uniform in the evening.

This led to increased state repression from around 1938. Since 1937 a number of preliminary investigations have been initiated against members of the pack, which, however, were initially closed by the courts for lack of evidence. At the end of October 1938 there were two trials at the People's Court in Leipzig for “preparation for high treason ”, which ended with prison sentences of several years. After the hoped-for deterrent effect of these exemplary trials had not materialized, the Nazi judiciary began in 1939 to sentence as many members as possible to prison terms in numerous trials. In addition, the Leipzig Youth Welfare Office set up a concentration camp-like “youth training camp” in Mittweida, in which pack members were to be “educated” for several months. Thus the Leipzig packs in their familiar form were largely crushed in the summer of 1939, although some packs existed a little longer.

From 1942 onwards, a new generation of opposition young workers appeared in public in Leipzig. In contrast to the packs of the 30s, they no longer wore hiking clothes, but based their appearance on the American lifestyle. Sometimes they called themselves “Broadway gangsters” based on the American film “Broadway Melodies” and the colloquial term for larger shopping streets in Leipzig as “Broadway”. Their leisure time behavior was analogous to the Leipzig packs of the 30s, but swing records were increasingly heard on suitcase gramophones. There were also fights with the Hitler Youth.

Source situation

The most extensive sources on the Leipzig packs represent around 300 investigation files that were obtained from the Freiberg Special Court between 1937 and 1939 and are now in the Saxon State Archives in Dresden. The Federal Archives Berlin also has some Gestapo interrogation protocols, investigative reports, indictments and judgments from the files of the Reich Ministry of Justice. Saxon police files on the packs can be found in the Saxon State Archives in Leipzig-Paunsdorf, files on the “youth training camp” in Mittweida are in the Leipzig City Archives.

literature

  • Lothar Gruchmann : Youth opposition and justice in the Third Reich. The problems with the prosecution of the "Leipzig packs" by the courts. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Miscellanea. Festschrift for Helmut Krausnick on his 75th birthday. DVA, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 103-129.
  • Sabine Kircheisen: Young opposition to Hitler's fascism. The Leipzig packs 1937–1939. In: Jugendgeschichte , No. 12, Rostock 1990, pp. 23-29.
  • Arno Klönne : Young opposition in the “Third Reich”. State Center for Political Education Thuringia. 2nd edition, Erfurt 2013 ( PDF )
  • Alexander Lange: Packs - Broadway cliques - Young Guard. Leipzig youth groups in the Third Reich. Zugl. Leipzig, Univ. Diss. 2009, Böhlau, Köln / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20594-2 .
  • Sascha Lange (di Alexander Lange): The Leipzig packs. Youth opposition in National Socialism. A documentation. Passage-Verlag, Leipzig 2012, ISBN 978-3-95415-001-4 .
  • Alexander Lange: Broadway gangster. Youth opposition in Leipzig around 1942. In: Leipziger Blätter , Heft 60, 2012, p. 89 f.
  • Alexander Lange: Leipzig packs. Proletarian youth opposition during the Nazi era. In: Leipziger Blätter , Heft 40, 2002, pp. 80 f.
  • Sascha Lange : packs, swings & edelweiss pirates. Youth Culture and Opposition in National Socialism. Ventil Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-3-95575-039-8 .
  • Heinrich Muth: Youth opposition in the Third Reich. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 30, 1982, issue 3, pp. 369-417 ( online , PDF, 2.16 MB).
  • Detlev Peukert : Edelweiss pirates, packs, swing. Youth subcultures in the Third Reich. In: Gerhard Huck (Ed.): Social history of leisure. Studies on the change in everyday culture in Germany. Hammer, Wuppertal 1980, ISBN 3-87294-164-X , pp. 307-328.
  • Kurt Schilde: Leipzig packs . In: Wolfgang Benz , Walter H. Pehle (ed.) Encyclopedia of the German resistance. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-10-005702-3 , pp. 254 f.
  • Jürgen Zarusky : Youth opposition. In: Wolfgang Benz, Walter H. Pehle (Ed.): Lexicon of German Resistance. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-10-005702-3 , pp. 98-112.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Jürgen Zarusky: Youth opposition . In: Wolfgang Benz, Walter H. Pehle (Ed.): Lexicon of German Resistance. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-10-005702-3 , pp. 98–112, here p. 108.
  2. ^ Jürgen Zarusky: Youth opposition . In: Wolfgang Benz, Walter H. Pehle (Ed.): Lexicon of German Resistance. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-10-005702-3 , pp. 98-112, here pp. 109f.