These rebellious teens resisted the Nazis by beating up Hitler Youth, and some paid with their lives
They also liked singing and country outings
On July 17, 1943, the Düsseldorf-Grafenberg branch of the Nazi party reported to the Gestapo on the growth of a new menace. Certain “youngsters,” party members warned, “aged between 12 and 17, hang around into the late evening, with musical instruments and young females. Since this riff-raff is to a large extent outside the Hitler Youth and adopts a hostile attitude toward the organization, they represent a danger to other young people.”
The briefing concerned the so-called Edelweiss Pirates, a collection of adolescent groups engaged in rebellious assembly and behavior throughout the western industrial cities of the Reich. Not especially organized, the Edelweiss Pirates were part clique, part gang, part political resistance, and perhaps most of all an emerging subculture. Their members took illicit trips to the countryside, spread anti-Nazi graffiti, and beat up patrolling bands of Hitler Youth. They were even distinguished by their style, which included signature metal edelweiss-flower badges, short black trousers, white stockings, and checked shirts.
Members were largely working class and brought up in the Hitler Youth during the 1930s. But as the war fractured cities and began to conscript high-ranking Hitler Youth leaders, a vacuum formed, and a tribe of insolent and energetic youth emerged as a sort of simmering resistance to the regimentation and authoritarianism. And they became quite a force. A historical study of the Edelweiss Pirates reports that in the relevant western German cities, “a conservative estimate suggests that 5 percent of the adolescent population may have been involved in these bands, at least peripherally.”
Specific chapters of the Pirates took on names of their own. In Cologne, they were the Navajos, in Düsseldorf and Oberhausen they were the Kittelbach Pirates, and in Essen the Traveling Dudes. It was common practice for Pirates to identify themselves with heroic outlaws and warriors, often drawing inspiration from the imagery and myths of the Americas. “Rio de Janeiro, ahoy, caballero,” goes one lyric from a rallying song, “An Edelweiss Pirate is faithful and true.” Later in the song, they sing
We march by banks of Ruhr and Rhine
And smash the Hitler youth in twain
Our song is freedom, love, and life,
We’re pirates of the Edelweiss.
Music played a significant role in the social structure of the Pirates, and members became adept at rewriting the lyrics to hits, hiking songs, and songs of Nazi youth indoctrination. Members were often high-school aged, between 14 and 17 years old, the range in which one could leave school but still be too young for the army. Since many industrial cities experienced labor shortages, these teenage rebels could hop between jobs and earn a decent wage as unskilled workers. Pirates often convened after work to sing, gossip, and socialize among the sexes, something that the Reich’s gender-divided youth groups prohibited.
Though separated by region, factions of the Edelweiss Pirates united during illicit excursions to the countryside, a bold practice in a time when the Nazis cracked down on free movement of citizens. This provided an important sense of camaraderie among the Pirates and allowed them the chance to bond over their raison d’être: fierce opposition to the Hitler Youth and the authority it represented. Edelweiss Pirates incited brawls with Hitler Youth patrols, beat up Nazis in uniform, verbally harassed and intimidated them, spread anti-Hitler graffiti. They even harvested leaflets dropped by Allied aircraft and disseminated them into local mailboxes. The Edelweiss Pirates were a constant thorn in the side of Nazi interests, and the Gestapo took notice. The secret police closely monitored the growth of the Pirates and kept files on hundreds of its teenage members.
However important—symbolically and otherwise—the Pirates’ contribution was for domestic anti-Nazi resistance, it is not quite accurate to romanticize them as a sort of real-life adolescent casting of Inglourious Basterds. Even historian Detlev Peukert, who argues for the Pirates’ eminence as a crucial example of resistance and nonconformity in the Third Reich, called them only “semi-political,” more motivated by antipathy to the oppressive organization of Nazi youth programs than by fundamental disagreement with the evils of fascism or genocide. Indeed, when Allied control swooped in 1946, the Edelweiss Pirates were no more cooperative when it came to the champions of liberal democracy, and readily absorbed in their ranks rootless Nazi soldiers who came from the front lines to be greeted by unemployment or destroyed and bombed-out homes. They were rebellious teens after all, not revolutionaries—more Johnny Rotten than John Brown.
But one of the Pirates’ greatest anti-Nazi achievements comes from the ruins of western Cologne. In 1944, former concentration camp prisoner Hans Steinbrück established the Ehrenfeld Group. Consisting of some one hundred members, made up of other former prisoners, dissidents, Jews, and some Edelweiss Pirates, the group engaged in weapons stockpiling, theft, and trading on the black market—all with the aim of crippling Nazi infrastructure and undermining the Third Reich’s efforts in the war.
Soon enough, though, the Gestapo caught up with them. After a violent few days of pursuit, which ended in the deaths of a handful of people, Steinbrück was caught, and Heinrich Himmler, then the commander of the S.S., ordered the roundup of remaining Ehrenfeld Group members.
On November 10, 1944, 13 boys and men were hanged without trial next to a train station, watched by an audience of hundreds. Six of them were members of the Edelweiss Pirates, all too young to serve in the army. Today, a street nearby the execution site is named after one of the Pirates, Barthel Schink, who died at the age of 16 while resisting the tide of fascism.
