The surpising attitude of Germany's youth in 1933

Hamilton's article begins to shed some light upon why the youth of Germany were so susceptible to Hitler's propaganda, although her description of Hitler youths' enthusiasm is still extremely surprising from this 21st century American perspective - much more in-depth study and contemplation would be required to truly get any grasp on the motivations of Nazi youth. Without any prior information about Nazi Germany, I would have expected the young people to be very resistant to Hitler; and even with some background knowledge, I found their fervent devotion to Hitler's campaign shocking. In my experience, young people are generally the ones questioning authority, fighting for "progressive" ideals (i.e. anti-racism, anti-authoritarianism), giving the finger to censorship, rejecting harsh discipline, etc., at least far more so than their grandparents. The German youth, however, apparently had the exact opposite mentality: they were the ones burning books, turning out professors for expressing dissenting opinions, advocating that government programs be made mandatory, wanting more discipline, discriminating against Jews. This entire picture of the young people of a society seems completely counter-intuitive and topsy-turvy to me.

The article gave some explanation for this bizarre phenomenon by commenting on the German youths' sense of purposelessness and their extremely impoverished conditions. American youth of the 21st century, by and large, come from a very different set of circumstances - starvation is not seen as a norm, for example - and perhaps that is one underlying reason for these diverging tendencies between these two groups of young people. There are also some similarities: both groups of young people seem more likely to advocate idealistically for change than their older counterparts, and perhaps the fact that they advocate for two very different types of society is a result of the immediate social circumstances. That is to say, youth often like to rebel against the status quo, but the direction of their rebellion can be shaped - this challenge of tradition is not always progressive, as seems to be the dominant case here. Another similarity seems to be the overwhelming need in both the Nazi youth and 21st century American youth to belong. This need was obviously exploited by the Nazi party in Germany, whereas currently American youth have the less sinister outlets of informal social cliques.

The influence of the Nazis seems all the more frightening to me because it reached even and especially the young people, who seem like they should be the ones naturally questioning authority. I find the need for more enlightenment on what causes led to that mindset, how easily that occurs, and whether the youth of the 21st century are really so far removed from this attitude or if that is just an illusion.