A Duty to Forget? The ‘Hitler Youth Generation’ and the Transition from Nazism to Communism in Postwar East Germany, c. 1945–49

摘要

In Soviet-occupied East Germany during the mid- to late 1940s, a remarkable but scarcely remarked-upon transition took place. Hundreds of thousands of young Germans who had previously been members of the Nazi youth organizations, the Hitler Youth (HJ) and the League of German Girls (BDM) flocked to join the Communist-led Free German Youth (FDJ), a unisex ‘united youth organization’ founded under Soviet auspices in March 1946. This paper examines the experiences of this ‘twice betrayed’ generation, whose members rapidly—though with varying degrees of enthusiasm—switched allegiance from Nazism to Communism after the Second World War and ultimately exchanged life in one authoritarian youth organization for life in another. Drawing on archival and interview material, it first seeks to outline Communist attitudes towards denazification among the young in the postwar period, before going on to examine from a grass-roots perspective the experiences, motivations, and attitudes of those who exchanged their HJ or BDM membership books for those of the FDJ. Despite, or perhaps because of, East Germany's strongly-espoused and rigidly dogmatic ‘anti-fascism’, open discussion of the Nazi past was—for a variety of reasons—taboo during the immediate postwar period, particularly among the young. This paper concludes by discussing the reasons behind this ‘pact of silence’ between the Communists and the ‘Hitler Youth generation’—and how it impacted upon subsequent generations of young people ‘born into socialism’.