The Nazis outlawed hiking, then they turned it into a Hitler Youth travesty
Seeking awe through nature became a crime against the state
The benefits of team sports are well-established. But Nazi Germany turned group leisure into paramilitarized nationalism, and abolished access to individual fitness while they were at it.
Hiking was particularly demonized, labeled an elite, antisocial, and selfish pastime. By the mid 1930s, hiking the countryside from hostel to hostel was an illegal act. Meanwhile, the organization tasked with enforcing state fitness, the Hitler Youth, trained young people through rigorous drills and exercises that pitted individuals against nature, or against each other.
Historian and Bradley University professor John Williams explores Nazi Germany’s villainization of hiking culture in the 2007 book Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940.
Hitler wasn’t the first to vilify hiking, however. The previous government turned on young hikers prior to the Reich.
The late Weimar era (1919–1933) saw an increasingly disenfranchised young populace. Aged politicians had more money and career success than the generation most broadly affected by the Depression. As a result, many young people in the early 1930s cast their votes for antirepublican parties, namely Communists and Nazis. Facing a power crisis, youth programs doubled down on authoritarian techniques that sought to militarize children and teens. They transformed naturist projects like Wandervogel, which had promoted personal liberation through nature exploration and leisure activities, into pre-military training through group drills and terrain games.
President von Hindenburg decreed on September 13, 1932: “The steeling of the body and the training of youth in discipline, the love of order and camaraderie, and the spirit of self-sacrifice for the general good are tasks that the state has a duty to undertake.”
The state announced a return to the Jugendpflege program, a lapsed quasi-militaristic leisure program targeted at young people. A new exercise federation, the National Advisory Board for Youth Training, made a goal to establish 20 sport schools, called Reichskuratoriums, at former army training camps. There, army veterans would teach youth organizers how to make drills seem fun. Instructors were to pass on a core lesson to their students: “Train him to be hard on himself — a trait that he needs in life.”
In particular, the individualistic, roaming nature of hiking, with its emphasis on self-discovery, was to be no more. Reichskuratoriums folded a version of hiking into a curriculum of “terrain games,” which included organized and supervised hide-and-seek, escaping and pursuing, and ambush. Hiking became marching, on 25-kilometer treks with heavy backpacks. Nature was no longer a space that inspired, awed, and liberated, writes Williams; it was territory to be mapped and conquered.
It was only a matter of a few years before the Nazi party, which initially attracted young workers, would further militarize and eventually criminalize hiking.
Between 1933 and 1934, when the party seized power, the Reich absorbed and consolidated youth institutions. As Hitler wrote then, “In Germany’s young generation there is such a great longing for unity that the overwhelming mass can no longer tolerate the splintering of the youth movement.” The regime pushed ahead with the Hitler Youth program and delegated two main tasks: the “deliberate and thorough physical building of the young into a healthy, truly German generation” and “a mental and spiritual appropriation and re-formation of youth through the ideology of National Socialism.” Eager to move past the economic and social failures of the Weimar era, the middle class agreed.
The Hitler Youth condemned Weimar Wandervogel activities like hiking and nature appreciation as bourgeois ideas that excluded the working class. By shaming “elitist” undertakings as selfish and individualistic, the organization could simultaneously mobilize the middle class and extinguish self-realization:
“This little clique of megalomaniacal romantics stands for the eternal spirit of negativity among the young…In place of the “hiking experience,’ the ‘youth league,’ and similar pretty things, we now have an ideal that belongs not to a mere thirty pupils but to the entire nation: the ideal of work.”
If the regime commanded pride in work, the “rootless” ideals of “wild hikers” were the antithesis of patriotism. Painted as shiftless itinerants who wandered without purpose and begged from hard-working Germans, hikers were ostracized as unpatriotic, antisocial leeches.
Between 1932 and 1939 — when participation became compulsory for boys and girls aged 10 to 18 — Hitler Youth membership jumped from 108,000 to 8.7 million.
In 1933, the organization began dissolving the network of hostels that housed young travelers and functioned as cultural centers, calling them “Jewish and Marxist contaminated.” In 1936, the Reich’s surveillance department was instructed to conduct random searches on the remaining hostels; if officials discovered any people with unkempt hair or disorderly behavior, they were considered hikers and reported to the police. Finally, in 1937, any hostel guest without a Hitler Youth uniform and membership was to be reported. Nazi youth leaders even banned the use of the word Wandern.
Naturally, Nazi resistance groups grew underground — and some continued illegally hiking as a form of political protest. The Edelweiss Pirates, for instance, sang old scouting songs and organized co-ed hikes. Catholic hostels, which were viewed with distrust but ultimately allowed, continued to operate. But their physical movement was increasingly restricted as the regime took control of the borders.
After the war, the situation only marginally improved. East Germany also used fitness as a training method for good citizens. The government warned citizens not to adopt a “bourgeois” attitude while hiking or taking weekend trips. They were not to “escape into the ‘freedom’ of nature” or abandon “burning political and economic responsibilities.”
Yearly orientation marches helped train citizens for a high national honor: the BAV Sports Medal. In preparation, the government commanded athletic officials who hosted the events, “The march should be conducted in a relaxed but disciplined form, and the applicants should sing youth songs to create a spirit of joy and enthusiasm.” Teams trained, mapped their routes, and trekked into the wilderness using compasses — throwing hand grenades and clearing riverbeds as they went.
