The Hitlerjugend had its origins in the Jungsturm Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Boys' Storm Troop), and SA (Sturmabteilung; Storm Troopers) offshoot founded in 1922. It changed its name to Hitlerjugend in 1926. Originally a boys' movement only, from 1928 it also admitted girls, into a separate organisation that in 1930 became known as the Bund Deutscher Maedel (League of German Girls; BDM). In 1931, Baldur von Schirach was appointed Reich Youth Leader (Reichsjugendfuehrer) in the Nazi movement. Schirach's immediate goal was to bring the different youth organisations in the party under a single authority; these included, in addition to the BDM, the NS-Schulerbund (League of Nazi Students) and the Deutsches Jungvolk (German Young Folk), which inducted youngsters at the age of ten. Schirach achieved his goal when he was appointed Jugendfuehrer des Deutschen Reiches (Youth Leader of the German Reich) in June 1933. By 1935, the HJ was a huge organisation, comprising 60 percent of the country's youth. The HJ admitted children at the age of ten; its membership was organised into two age brackets, from ten to fourteen and from fourteen to eighteen. The organisational chart devised by Schirach followed the military pattern, involving squads, platoons, and companies. The HJ and its organisational form were outgrowths of Hitler's ideology, in which the young generation represented the reserve manpower that would ensure the continued existence of the "Thousand-Year Reich." Accordingly, Nazi educational doctrine was based on Hitler's anti-intellectualism, and on a preference for body building at the expense of the mental and intellectual development of the individual. One of the guiding principles of Nazi education was to keep the young people in constant action and to constantly spur them to activism. This was the system to which a boy was subjected from the moment he entered the HJ until he became a soldier or an SS man. He was equipped not only with a uniform, but with a bayonet as well. When boys reached nineteen, they were drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labour Service), which stressed physical work and iron discipline, with thousands of the youngsters put to work on the land. As soon as they had completed the compulsory term in the Labour Service, the young men enlisted in the armed forces. This process enabled the Nazi party to control and supervise German youth from age ten to age twenty-one. The objectives of the BDM were based on the Nazi ideal woman - in other words, the racist ideal. The values that were to be implanted in the girls by their training were obedience, performance of duty, self-sacrifice, discipline, and physical self-control. Two-thirds of the time the girls spent in the BDM was taken up with sports, and one-third with ideology. The main goal for which the girls were trained was to become mothers of genetically healthy children, whom they would in turn educate in the spirit of National Socialism. The BDM members were indoctrinated with "racial pride" and the consciousness of being "German women," who would shun any contact with Jews. During the war the BDM became increasingly involved in the war effort, at the expense of ideological training. Political and ideological indoctrination in the HJ played a much larger role than in the BDM. The activities in which the HJ members were engaged overshadowed the formal education they were receiving and estranged them from their families; quite often the youngsters became their family's Nazi propagandists--and ideological supervisors. The propaganda used for the implanting of Nazi ideas also drew on the mass media, and sophisticated methods were employed to gain German youth's support for the HJ ideals. The film Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Boy Quex) is a typical example of the Nazi style of brainwashing. Produced in 1933, the film tells the life story of a boy imbued with Nazi ideas.
