Schill youth

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The Schilljugend was a right-wing conservative youth organization founded in 1923 by the former Freikorps and later SA leader Gerhard Roßbach . The seat was Berlin . The name given by Sepp Meierhofer refers to the Prussian officer and free corps fighter Ferdinand von Schill .

Foundation and relationship to the NSDAP

The decisive factor for the establishment of the Schill Youth was the case of the Freikorps fighter Albert Leo Schlageter , who organized acts of sabotage as part of the so-called Ruhr War and was sentenced to death by a French military court after his arrest. His execution on May 26, 1923 made him a hero and martyr for the extreme right, and the parallel to the fall of the freedom fighter Schill emerged.

Edmund Heines

One of Gerhard Roßbach's comrades in the founding of the Schilljugend youth association was Edmund Heine , who later became Röhm's confidante . In 1925 Hitler entrusted him with responsibility for all youth affairs of the NSDAP. Since Roßbach, who was staying in Austria, was still banned from entering Germany, Heines took over the management of the Schill Youth in Germany. He also headed the "Schill Sportversand", which among other things supplied the SA with brown shirts. From 1926 Werner Lass replaced Heines in the leadership of the Schill Youth, which also meant Hitler's recognition of the Wehrjugendbund Schill as the party's youth association. The role of the Wehrjugendbund as a youth organization of the NSDAP was controversial in the party, mainly because of the elitist character of the Schilljugend. Kurt Gruber , the leader of the " Greater German Youth Movement ", which had called itself the Hitler Youth since 1926 , complained that not a single working-class child could be brought into the Schill Youth, which contradicted the attributes of "socialist" and "workers' party" in the party name of the Hitler organization.

Numerous associations with youth associations from 1925

In the course of 1925, the Schill youth stabilized in Germany with numerous affiliations of youth associations and expanded into central and northern Germany. From August 1926, Gerhard Roßbach was federal leader or "boss" at the head of the association. Field Marshal General August von Mackensen acted as patron of the organization. A broad structure of the association was fooled by numerous thematically based offices: There was an office for hiking, a press office and an office for literature, which Ernst Jünger had been in charge of since March 1926 . Under the direction of the designer Felix Wankel there was a technical office for a short time.

The most spectacular amalgamation was the union of the Schill youth with the völkisch youth association " Adler und Falken " in 1926. This association, which is closely related to the migratory bird movement , was founded by Wilhelm Kotzde-Kottenrodt in 1920 as a youth organization for both sexes. With the merger, girls now also belonged to the Schill Youth and at the same time the previously rather paramilitary orientation of the Schill Youth was supplemented by cultural elements such as dance, song and drama. An increased interest in German minorities in Alsace and other formerly German areas abroad also gained importance. Finally, Roßbach initiated the establishment of a "Spielschar Ekkehard", as part of the Schill Youth, which became known throughout the Reich and in Western and Northern Europe through song evenings, folk dances and amateur plays. In 1929 the "Spielschar Ekkehard" made a guest appearance in Bayreuth on Siegfried Wagner's 60th birthday and was represented with a delegation at his funeral the following year. Due to their popularity with around 2000 appearances, the Spielschar survived the Schill youth by a year and was only dissolved in March 1934.

The Schilljugend was regionally divided into Gaue with different membership sizes. In accordance with its elitist character, the association was rather small. When it was integrated into the Hitler Youth in the summer of 1933, the Schill Youth had around a thousand members across the Reich. On August 2, 1933, the dissolution took place in the form that the name was given up and the entire organization was incorporated into the Hitler Youth .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bruce Campbell, The Schilljugend from Wehrjugend to Luftschutz in: Wolfgang R. Krabbe (Ed.): Politische Jugend in der Weimarer Republik , Bochum 1993, p. 186
  2. ^ Tessa Sauerwein: Schilljugend, 1924-1933. In: Historical Lexicon of Bavaria. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, October 9, 2006, accessed on January 20, 2020 .

literature

  • Joachim children: Ferdinand von Schill in the Weimar Republic , in: Veit Veltzke (Ed.): For freedom - against Napoleon. Ferdinand von Schill, Prussia and the German Nation. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-412-20340-5 . Pp. 287-304