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“Get Yourselves Under Control!”  
Youth Sexuality in the Third Reich 
 
 
Sydni Zastre 
University of Alberta 
 
 
Abstract  
The Nazis were a party of youth and obsessed with controlling every aspect of the lives of 
young people, including their sexuality. This article explores efforts by the Nazis to divert 
the energies of youth into (re)productively acceptable channels, such as forced 
membership in organizations like the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, 
mandatory service during wartime, and legal policies centered on racial purity. However, 
their efforts proved incoherent, inconsistent, and largely unenforceable. As demonstrated 
by the increase in female sexual freedom and prostitution and homosexual activity in the 
military during the Second World War, young people often disregarded, and even 
challenged, Nazi prescriptions about sexuality and continued to engage in sexual behaviors, 
both “anti-social” and otherwise. 
 
 
Article 
Introduction 
The Nazis were a party of youth.1 The party’s membership was significantly younger than 
that of most other parties, from the rank and file to the leadership, “with a mean age of 
approximately thirty-one for all new joiners in the period from 1925 to 1932.”2 And more 
importantly, the Nazis were the prophets of a cult of youth—obsessed with ensuring 
Germany’s glorious, racially sound future, of which young people were both the substance 
and the saviors. As pioneer of Nazi Alltagsgeschichte Detlev Peukert has noted, “during the 
twelve years of the Nazi state three separate age groups passed through adolescence, that 
is the years between the fourteenth and eighteenth birthdays. Each group had its own 
distinctive experiences.”3 But common to these experiences was a level of control, or 
attempted control, by the Nazi state over every aspect of their lives, mostly by means of the 
mass youth organizations, the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth, HJ) and the Bund Deutscher 
Mädel (the League of German Girls, BDM). Some of the aspects upon which the Nazis 
fixated were sex and sexuality—natural and inevitable parts of youth for many people and 

 
1 The title of this paper comes from “Sexual Indecency on Active Duty,” first published anonymously as 
“…Unzucht in der Soldatenzeit,” in Das Schwarze Korps, 5 March 1936, 8, in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. 
Sander L. Gilman and Anson Rabinbach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 14 (source 
162). The “younger generation” is exhorted to “Show some respect for the great men of our German history 
and get yourselves under control!” 
2 Michael Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10. 
3 Detlev Peukert, “Youth in the Third Reich,” in Life in the Third Reich, ed. Richard Bessel (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1987), 25. 



39 
 

ones which had the potential to either strengthen or destabilize the totalitarian “racial 
state,” a power of which the Nazis were well aware. Despite propaganda efforts and 
bombastic theoretical pronouncements, however, the Nazis were not able to control youth 
sexuality as well as might be expected (or they might have hoped).  Official state policies 
regarding youth sexuality and sex education were often contradictory and difficult to 
enforce; sex played an important, if unofficial, role within the HJ, the BDM, and the non-
state-approved youth groups, such as the Edelweiss Pirates and the Swing Kids; 
Considerations of race and gender often took precedence over lofty ideological goals, 
further weakening the official stance(s) of the Party on youth sexuality. The Second World 
War and the experiences of total war also affected youth sexuality in ways which were 
often beyond the Party’s control, as demonstrated by the increase of female sexual freedom 
and prostitution and incidences of homosexuality in the armed forces. An exploration of 
these topics highlights the variability and inefficiency of Nazi control over the sex lives of 
young people. 
 
Official Policy 
The Nazis came to power on the heels of what has been widely recognized as a period of 
liberalization and experimentation, particularly in the sexual realm: the Weimar Republic, 
marked by, to name only a few examples, the expansion of the science of sexology, the 
popularity of the nudist (or “naturist”) movement, and a push to decriminalize abortion 
and homosexuality. Almost immediately after Hitler’s accession, the party began 
attempting to undo the strides made by the reformers, physicians, and activists of the 
Weimar years—but the backlash was by no means total or consistent; and indeed, in some 
ways, the wave of liberalization continued. As historian of sexuality Dagmar Herzog has 
explored in her important work on sex and the Nazis, great emphasis was placed on sexual 
pleasure within marriage, for both males and females; contraception was more widely 
available than may be assumed; and pre- and extramarital sex were by no means shunned, 
but indeed often condoned, both tacitly and otherwise. However, underlying these positive 
incentives was the racial divide inherent to Nazism, which both disavowed overt sexuality 
as “Jewish” filth and enshrined it as a German privilege. In essence, as Herzog states, “The 
goal was not so much to suppress sexuality. Rather the aim was to reinvent it as the 
privilege of non-disabled, heterosexual ‘Aryans.’”4 This uneven approach is characteristic of 
official Nazi policies towards sexuality; but although initially they seem so contrary as to 
even be hypocritical, historian of sexuality Annette F. Timm has noted that “[i]t is possible 
to make sense of the seemingly contradictory positions [of the regime] if one recognizes 
the underlying consistency of policies that were all directed toward the same goal: the 
creation of a racially sanitized state with the power to rule Europe and beyond. Sexuality, in 
other words, was viewed as a means to an end.”5 This was true for young people as well as 
for adults. Conference minutes from the Horst Wessel School in Kassel decree on 1 
December 1933 that “sex education in the classroom is banned by ministerial ordinance,” 
and just under three weeks later, that “[m]ore emphasis shall be placed on the study of 

 
4 Dagmar Herzog, “Sex and the Third Reich,” Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century 
Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4. 
5 Annette F. Timm, “Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Militarized Masculinity in the 
Third Reich,” in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 225. 



40 
 

genealogy.”6 Race education took precedence over sex education—but as we have seen, sex 
and race were inseparable for the Nazis.  
 
Practical sexual education was far less important than imbuing youth with a sense of their 
place in the machinery of the Nazi regime and the future of the German people. As Geoffrey 
Giles notes, “their bodies were not theirs to do with as they wished, but belonged to the 
Aryan race, the propagation of which they held in sacred trust.”7 Thus, the general tenor of 
Nazi policies toward youth sexuality was twofold: first, youth should be kept pure, 
protected from even the sight or knowledge of unacceptable manifestations of sexuality, for 
example sex work and homosexuality;8 but second, if they were going to have sex, it should 
be with a racially appropriate partner. If that union happened to produce illegitimate 
offspring, they would at least be providing the Reich with one more Aryan soldier or 
citizen, as is hinted at by an order of Himmler’s issued after the invasion of Poland in 
September 1939: “Beyond the boundaries of perhaps otherwise still necessary bourgeois 
laws and customs it will also outside of marriage be an important responsibility for German 
women and girls of good blood, not lightly, but rather in profound moral seriousness, to 
become the mothers of children of soldiers who are going to the front and of whom fate 
alone knows whether they will return or fall in battle for Germany.”9 To prevent both 
domestic and international controversy, however, this particular aim could not necessarily 
be explicitly promulgated on the home front: to do so would have been contrary to what 
historian Robert G. Waite calls the Nazis’ “exaggerated interest in morality.”10 As 
summarized by Herzog, “What a reading of a broad array of Nazi writings on sex suggests is 
that no prior regime in history had ever so systematically set itself the task of stimulating 
and validating especially young people’s sexual desires—all the while denying precisely 
that this is what they were doing.”11 Not all sexual desires were encouraged, however, and 
not all young people were entitled to them. Among the most problematic sites of this 
internal conflict were the Nazis’ own youth organizations, the Hitler Youth and the League 
of German Girls.  
 
Sexual Double Standards in the HJ and the BDM 
As in many other areas, when it came to youth organizations, the Nazis proved themselves 
deeply sexist. A 1932 sex education book proclaimed that “[i]t is particularly seductive for 
the woman to gain power over men by means of the erotic…It is an ancient piece of wisdom 

 
6 “Conference Minutes from Horst Wessel School in Kassel,” 1933, in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Sander 
L. Gilman and Anson Rabinbach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 9 (source 100). 
7 Geoffrey J. Giles, “Straight Talk for Nazi Youth: The Attempt to Transmit Heterosexual Norms,” Paedagogica 
Historica 32, no. 1 (1996): 312-313. As Giles has noted, however, “There is no indication whatever that this 
[sex education] literature did anything to reduce levels of homosexual activity, to curb widespread 
masturbation, to prevent premarital sex, or decisively to assist in building happy relationships” (307). 
8 Timm quotes the Nazi “VD expert” Bodo Spiethoff on the matter of sex work: “It is the duty of the state to call 
a halt to the appearance of prostitution in all its forms and particularly to protect children and youth from 
coming into contact with prostitution.” See Timm, “Sex with a Purpose,” 239. 
9 Quoted in Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 51. 
10 Robert G. Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 3 (January 
1998): 435. 
11 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 18. 



41 
 

when in the very first Bible story Eve is seen to proffer the seductive fruit to the man.”12 
Even the girls of the BDM, custodians of the German future, were not spared from this 
disparaging view. Historian of the Hitler Youth Michael Kater has argued that “nominally, 
Hitler boys and Hitler girls were coequals, in terms of the leadership structure, the basic 
psychological and ideological schooling, and many of the daily tasks to be performed,” such 
as the wearing of uniforms, the mandatory sports encouraged by both organizations, and 
the participation in mass rallies demonstrating support for the Führer, but the 
organizations’ essential qualities and their hopes for their young members were divided 
along gendered lines.13 Boys learned how to drill, march, and shoot, while girls sang in 
choirs and were taught the skills that would prepare them to be good German mothers—
confirming Kater’s assessment of German boys and girls as “future biological partners who 
in the HJ and BDM were being conditioned for their reproductive missions.”14 Most likely 
unintentionally, however, the official structure and activities of the HJ and BDM themselves 
also offered youth new sexual freedoms and a space in which to exercise them. While the 
boarding-school pupil Peter Brückner contended that “young people’s pleasure in using 
their bodies, in fending off their sexual instincts, their liking for physical competition, and 
the ideology of the Nazi state all came naturally together on the playing fields of the Third 
Reich,”15 the official policy of the BDM subgroup, Glaube und Schönheit (Faith and Beauty), 
explicitly linked sports and athleticism with female beauty and sexual attractiveness: 
“Taking pleasure in human beauty must emanate from feminine vanity and must be 
accompanied by a rigorous culture of physical hygiene and a certain elegance. But 
participating in athletics and the desire to maintain a strong and well-trained body are part 
and parcel of the well-groomed appearance.”16 While such emphasis on good looks and 
physical health may have been officially intended to promote racial awareness, driving 
home the superiority of the “Aryan” race to its young members, it is once again difficult to 
separate racial from sexual issues in this case. “Feminine vanity” and “a certain elegance” 
are unquestionably tied up with sex appeal, and it is highly unlikely that the young people 
of the HJ and the BDM would have been ignorant of this. In the youth organizations, sports 
were not only an outlet for sexual energies but also a tool used to prepare German youth 
for sexually desirable and (re)productive futures.  
 
It would soon become apparent, however, that not all young people were willing to wait for 
the “future” to begin these “reproductive missions.” Spates of teenage pregnancies among 
BDM girls have been well-documented by Waite, Herzog, and others, including Elizabeth 
Heineman, who notes that “nine hundred girls from the League of German Girls…returned 
pregnant from the 1936 party rally.”17 At first sight it may seem ironic that party rallies, the 
most public, fervent, and collective expressions of Nazi identity, should be the site of so 

 
12 Quoted in Giles, “Straight Talk,” 306. 
13 Kater, Hitler Youth, 73. 
14 Kater, Hitler Youth, 103. 
15 Quoted in Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. 
Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 147. Emphasis mine. 
16 Günter Kaufmann, “Faith and Beauty,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Anson 
Rabinbach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 9 (source 115). 
17 Elizabeth D. Heineman, “Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 
11, no. 1-2 (2002): 29. 



42 
 

much apparently “un-Nazi” sexual behavior. But as we have seen, these instances of 
premarital sex between healthy young Aryans, resulting in pregnancies which would 
deliver still more Aryans to the Reich, were in fact by no means antithetical to Nazi ideals 
and goals. The diarist Victor Klemperer makes the association between teenage sex and the 
Nazi youth organizations abundantly clear in a 1935 entry from Dresden: “Annemarie 
Koehler tells us in despair that the hospitals are overcrowded with fifteen-year-old girls, 
some pregnant, some with gonorrhea. The BDM. Her brother has vehemently refused to 
allow his daughter to join.”18 Here, the BDM itself is positioned as the source of the 
problem—but how did these young girls get pregnant or infected with sexually transmitted 
infections (STIs) in the first place? No mention is made of the boys or young men with 
whom they had engaged in intercourse, revealing the myopic and misogynistic double 
standard that would define Nazi reactions to teenage sexuality among the ranks of its youth 
organizations. As Kater explains,  
 

It is likely that boys and girls were equally responsible, acting on their own 
accord…But because girls had previously lacked the opportunity for this 
sexual freedom, the change was viewed primarily as an emancipation for 
girls and young women, who thus posed a threat to males. For it is generally 
true in any authoritarian polity that “by all those who see military discipline, 
self-sacrifice, austerity, and worship for the Leader as the highest social 
ideals, the power of female sexuality will be seen as a dire threat.”19 

 
Considering the Nazis’ claims of “emancipation from emancipation” for women, such a 
stance can hardly be shocking.20 Even female sexuality, however, was less feared than male 
homosexuality, a manifestation of youth sexuality that would be preached against and 
pursued within the Hitler Youth all the way until the end of the war.  

In her pioneering work on girlhood in the Third Reich, German historian Dagmar 
Reese has explained: 

 
While for some the demand for a community between the sexes with 
simultaneous strict sexual abstinence led to an atmosphere of “sterile 
innocence,” others feared boys could become more “effeminate” and girls 
more “masculine.” At the beginning of the 1920s, the debate led on the one 
hand to a fundamental acceptance of sexual relations and on the other hand 
to a more pronounced separation of the sexes.21 
 

This separation is evident in the division of the Nazis’ mass youth organizations into girls’ 
and boys’ sections, the BDM and HJ respectively. In line with the fears mentioned by Reese, 
it is perhaps unsurprising that two organizations so rigidly separated by sex should find 
themselves plagued with the specter of homosexuality. Herzog and others have 

 
18 Dagmar Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism,” in 
Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 8. 
19 Kater, Hitler Youth, 107. 
20 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 13. 
21 Dagmar Reese, Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 
chapter 5. 



43 
 

acknowledged the problematic nature of associating fascism in general and Nazism in 
particular with an inherent or latent homoeroticism, and to do so is not my goal here. The 
possibility of homosexuality within the ranks of the HJ, and indeed the Sturmabteilung 
(Storm Detachment, SA) and Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron, SS), was never denied or 
ignored by the Nazis: in fact, they were acutely aware of it as a looming threat, particularly 
after the 1934 Röhm Purge.22 Goebbels went so far as to recommend the introduction of 
the death penalty especially for the boys of the HJ, who ranged from fourteen to eighteen 
years of age: “In one organization every case of homosexuality must be punished with 
death, namely, in the Hitler Youth. If that is one day going to represent the pick of the 
nation, then no other verdict must ever be passed within its ranks.”23 Fortunately this 
appalling policy was never implemented, and indeed little was officially done to combat 
homosexuality within the HJ—for as Giles has observed, “There was a feeling that too open 
a discussion of homosexuality would positively encourage youths to experiment in this 
direction.”24 The very nature of the HJ—single-sexed, with hormonal teenage boys living, 
playing, and sometimes (as on overnight camping trips) sleeping in close proximity, united 
(at least in theory) in shared, passionate idealism—was also, arguably, an encouraging 
factor for homosexual experimentation. But rather than accept responsibility for having 
created an ideological atmosphere which thrived and relied upon the power of male 
bonding, the Nazis chose to blame the youth groups of the Weimar and Kaiserreich years 
for setting a precedent of homosexuality.  
 
In a 1936 article in the SS organ Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps), provocatively titled 
“…Unzucht in der Soldatenzeit” (Sexual Indecency on Active Duty) it is explained that in 
these pre-Nazi youth groups, “a few pathologically inclined leaders exploited the 
susceptibility of a specific age group in order to spread their viciously anti-völkisch 
tendencies. Using an exaggerated sense of camaraderie, they exalted friendship with men 
among these male youth,” which eventually led to overt homosexuality (“same-sex 
aberrations”).25 Such “anti-social” expressions of sexuality were safely distanced from the 
morals with which Hitler Youth boys were imbued. Ironically, however, this passing of the 
blame onto “anti-völkisch” youth groups could not explain the homoeroticism in such Hitler 
Youth training materials as the short story “Pimpfe sind Treu” (Pimpfe are loyal) of 1941, 
in which one Pimpfe (a nickname for a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk or  German 
Youngsters in the Hitler Youth) thinks to himself after witnessing his friend Hanne’s 
bravery during a forest fire, “Hanne, you’re such a great guy. From now on, I’ll go through 
the fires of hell for you any time!”26 Such language of ardent devotion was read as an 

 
22 More data is available for the HJ than for the BDM, reflecting a deeper Nazi anxiety about male homosexuals 
than about lesbians, and the focus of this section will be skewed accordingly. 
23 From Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1996), 272. Quoted in Geoffrey J. Giles, 
“Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler’s SS and Police,” in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New 
York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 268. Emphasis in the original. 
24 Giles, “Straight Talk,” 312. 
25 “Sexual Indecency on Active Duty,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Anson 
Rabinbach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 14 (source 162). 
26 Anonymous, “A Hitler Youth Scout Is Loyal and True!,” first published as “Pimpfe sind Treu,” in 
Sommerlager und Heimabendmaterialfürdie Schulungsund Kulturarbeit (Berlin: Reichsjugendfuhrung der 
NSDAP, Summer 1941), 24–26, in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Anson Rabinbach 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 5 (source 112). 



44 
 

expression of nationalism and loyalty to one’s Hitler Youth comrades rather than as a 
reflection of personal feeling and especially not if those feelings might have been same-sex 
desire. This is in line with the Nazi state’s conception of love and emotions in general, as 
European historian Alexander Geppert explains in his work on love letters to Hitler: “At 
least in theory, emotional ties and bonds were supposed to be exclusively oriented toward 
the State, the Volk and, above all, the Führer, and far less toward a personal ‘significant 
other.’”27 However, it is not difficult to imagine that such passionate language could easily 
provide an acceptable smokescreen for real, “aberrant” feelings. Whether or not they were 
acknowledged by the HJ or the state, homosexual incidents certainly did occur within the 
ranks of the youth organizations, and with such frequency that even Das Schwarze Korps 
felt bound to comment—being sure, however, to suggest that homosexual “potential” was 
“unconsciously” inherent in every man and was especially liable to emerge 
circumstantially, particularly during puberty, thus absolving young men of blame and 
assuring them that they were not “real” homosexuals and therefore had nothing to worry 
about.28 The bombastic Schwarze Korps thus essentially admitted that combating 
homosexuality among the youth groups was a functionally fruitless endeavor.  
 
Despite attempting to channel young people’s sexual energies into productive, state-
oriented channels such as sports and national loyalty, the Nazi youth organizations 
ultimately could not prevent incidences of teen pregnancy and homosexuality from 
occurring at an alarming rate. Some of this can likely be attributed to the sex-segregated 
nature of the HJ and the BDM, which both provided convenient opportunities for 
homosexual encounters and made the opposite sex into “forbidden fruit,” likely inciting 
increased sexual desire which was then more easily acted upon in the youth-centered, less-
supervised atmosphere of HJ and BDM activities, such as camping trips and party rallies, 
than it would have been at home. However, such incidents also occurred outside of the 
youth organizations. As Waite has noted,  

 
the Hitler Youth organization worked hard at keeping teenagers in line, but it 
also contributed to a general uneasiness. Some parents held it responsible for 
the misbehavior of their children…Some of the children returning home got 
into trouble as they roamed the streets. Other teens went truant, telling their 
parents they were going to the meetings but in fact they hung out with 
friends.29 

 
Some young people simply did not attend HJ and BDM meetings or join the groups at all—
and these teenagers still found opportunities for sexual experiences, without having to 
worry whether these experiences conformed to Nazi ideology or were examples of 
appropriate behavior for young “Aryans.” This can be seen for example in the 

 
27 Alexander C.T. Geppert, “‘Dear Adolf!’: Locating Love in Nazi Germany,” in New Dangerous Liaisons: 
Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, eds. Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C. 
T. Geppert (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 160. 
28 See Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 35. 
29 Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” 447. 



45 
 

countercultural youth movements, particularly the Edelweiss Pirates and the Swing Kids, 
as explored in the next section. 
 
Sexuality in Non-Nazi Youth Groups 
In 1944 Heinrich Himmler issued a Decree on “Youth Gangs”: 
 

Gangs are associations of youth who are not in the Hitler Youth and who lead 
a separate and extraordinary existence based on principles not in accordance 
with National Socialist ideology. They all share a rejection of or disinterest 
toward their obligations within the Volksgemeinschaft or the Hitler Youth; 
this is especially evidenced in their lack of willingness to conform to the 
exigencies of war. These gangs have made their appearance under a variety 
of names (clique, mob, gang, pack, the Platters, the Shufflers, the Edelweiss 
Pirates, and so on). A centralized organization does not, in general, exist. 
Outward association is often only very loose and irregular. Occasionally they 
wear special identifying insignia (for example, an edelweiss emblem, death’s-
head ring, colored pins, and the like). Membership dues are usually not 
collected, but in some cases identification insignia are issued.30 
 

The very fact of this decree, as well as the alarmist language of its first sentence, make clear 
the apparent threat which these so-called gangs posed to the regime. Like the Hitler Youth 
and the BDM, the countercultural youth groups represented a continuation of the (“anti-
völkisch”) youth movement which dated back to the imperial era, including such groups as 
the Wandervogel (Wandering Bird) and other bündisch (free youth) organizations. Unlike 
the HJ and BDM, however, groups like the Edelweiss Pirates stuck much closer to their 
roots, defining themselves not in accordance with any particular set of political ideals (and 
often, in fact, identifying themselves apolitically), and instead devoting themselves to the 
more earthly pleasures of youth: hiking through the countryside, making music, taking 
train-trips, and more—including “bash[ing] Hitler Youth patrols doing their rounds”—with 
their friends.31 It ought not be surprising that sex was among these pleasures. Also unlike 
the state-sanctioned organizations, the Edelweiss Pirates and other countercultural groups 
were mixed-sex, and as Peukert has noted, “The presence of girls at the evening get-
togethers and on the weekend trips into the countryside gave the adolescents a relatively 
unrestricted opportunity to have sexual experiences.”32 In his examination of the Edelweiss 
Pirates based on Allied intelligence archives, however, Perry Biddiscombe has pointed out 
that “it was suspected…that the Edelweiss [Pirates] was a gathering point for young 
homosexuals.”33 In all likelihood, just like the teenagers of the HJ and BDM, members of the 

 
30 Heinrich Himmler, Decree on Youth Gangs “Erlass des Reichsführers SS und Chefs der Deutschen Polizei, 
Heinrich Himmler,” 25 October 1944, first published in Detlev Peukert, ed., Die Edelweisspiraten: 
Protestbewegungen jugendlicher Arbeiter im Dritten Reich: eine Dokumentation (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1983), 
123–33. See The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Anson Rabinbach (Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 2013), chapter 30 (source 406). 
31 Peukert, “Youth,” 30. 
32 Peukert, “Youth,” 32. 
33 Perry Biddiscombe, “’The Enemy of Our Enemy’: A View of the Edelweiss Piraten from the British and 
American Archives,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 1 (1995): 44. 



46 
 

Edelweiss Pirates were simply eager for sexual experimentation in whatever form it might 
take, and found such opportunities in their youth-centered activities; the countercultural 
groups did not even have to contend with the supervision of older “leaders,” as did 
members of the HJ and BDM. Additionally, as Peukert has observed,  
 

in a comparatively high number of instances the fathers [of Edelweiss 
Pirates] are recorded as being dead…This seems to indicate that it was easier 
for those young people who were not subject to paternal authority to 
undertake extended weekend excursions, pick quarrels with the boss, or 
spend their evenings outdoors with friends in contravention of the Decree for 
the Protection of Young People.34 
 

Parental absence, an unfortunate side effect of their working- or lower-middle-class status, 
proved a blessing in the realm of sexuality for the Edelweiss Pirates. But another 
countercultural group had additional advantages when it came to sexuality. The Swing Kids 
came from the middle- and upper-middle classes, and the privileges of their social standing 
extended to their opportunities for sex. 
 
Swing Kids were aficionados of American jazz music and “English ideals, language, 
demeanor, [and] dress.”35 Boys wore plaid jackets, “eye-catching scarves,” and “an 
umbrella over the arm in every kind of weather”; their hair was long, as was that of the 
swing girls, who penciled their eyebrows and wore lipstick and fingernail polish.36 All 
devoted themselves, not to the Nazi state, but to “a cult of ‘casualness’ (Laessigkeit) and 
‘sleaziness’ (Lottern),” and this rebellion (unpolitical and self-centered as it was) did not go 
unnoticed by the authorities.37 In his 1944 decree, Himmler warned that “[t]he members of 
these gangs come primarily from the ‘upper middle class’ and want to pursue their own 
pleasure and sexual or other excesses. They thereby soon conflict sharply with National 
Socialist ideology.”38 This pursuit of pleasure was made much easier by the Swing Kids’ 
station in life: “A relaxed regime in their parents’ houses, or lack of nighttime supervision 
offered ample opportunity for gaining sexual experience,”39 which, according to the fear-
mongering and voyeuristic reports of the Party, included group sex, sex with minors, 
homosexuality, and even sex with “fully Jewish girls between fifteen and eighteen.”40 The 
Swing Kids’ transgressions included not only the passive resistance of not joining state-
sanctioned youth organizations but also the explicit inversion of Reich sexual mores by 
(allegedly) sleeping with members of the same sex and with “non-Aryans.”41 Despite the 

 
34 Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 163. 
35 Himmler, “Decree on Youth Gangs.” 
36 Kater, Hitler Youth, 142. 
37 Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 167. 
38 Himmler, “Decree on Youth Gangs.” 
39 Peukert, “Youth,” 38. 
40 Kater, Hitler Youth, 143. 
41 As Peukert has noted, “sexual life in these groups was no doubt much less orgiastic than contemporary 
authors of official reports believed, or wanted others to believe” (“Youth,” 32). However, these examples have 
been chosen from among the Nazis’ many claims as being more reasonable: Jewish teenagers were accepted 
by the Swing Kids, and homosexuality seems a more likely occurrence than, say, frequent orgies.  



47 
 

internal hypocrisies and contradictions of Nazi policies on youth sexuality, it was 
abundantly clear that the Swing Kids, like the Edelweiss Pirates, stood in inherent 
contradiction to all of these policies because of their non-Nazi orientation. The extensive 
lists of exceptions and bent rules—most often granted in accordance with racial and 
gendered considerations—were not extended to include the Swing Kids’ behavior. In this, 
at least, the Nazis’ views on sex were consistent: those not aligned with the Nazis and their 
project could be almost certain to find their sexual behavior deemed transgressive. Swing 
Kids, however, remained a threat from within the Volk, while the advent of war would bring 
about a new host of sexual enemies from outside it. 
 
Youth Sexuality on the Home Front 
On the home front, the war led to greater sexual freedom, especially for women. When the 
war started, many fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends, and other men who may 
previously have been able to exercise some control over the sex lives of the women in their 
lives were called away from home. We have already seen that the state youth organizations 
were not effective in controlling, and in some cases even provided opportunities for, the 
sexual behavior of young people; and other state apparatus—such as the 
Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service, RAD), in which all youth were supposed to serve 
a year—were no more conducive to sexual morality. As Herzog describes:   
 

One woman remembered the Reich Labor Service as having a “very sexual 
climate…a thoroughly sexual climate.” Females in the Reich Labor Service 
were deliberately brought together with young military men for coed “social 
evenings”; the expectation was clearly that romantic pairings would 
occur…The overall message young people received was that Nazis were in 
favor of premarital sex.42 

 
Amid the stress, excitement, and generally extenuating circumstances of wartime, it is 
hardly surprising that young people, especially young women, sought new sexual 
experiences regardless of marital status. Moreover, the new presence of foreign forced 
laborers—and, as the war progressed, prisoners of war—on German soil presented on one 
hand the threat of racial contamination, since most came from the “inferior” Slavic races of 
Eastern Europe, and on the other a new sexual opportunity. The Reich Ministry of Justice 
warned in 1943 that “German women who engage in sexual relations with prisoners of war 
have betrayed the front, done gross injury to their nation’s honor, and damaged the 
reputation of German womanhood abroad.”43 However, as we have previously seen, official 
Reich policies did not often reflect or affect the sexual lives of its citizens, and it soon 
became apparent that many German women and girls were happy to indulge in forbidden 
relations with foreigners. For example, as Waite notes, “In Detmold, an eighteen-year-old 
girl was prosecuted in early 1945 for affairs with French POWs. At the same time, two 
school girls, ages fourteen and sixteen, came before a special court in Nuremberg because 
of their involvement with French POWs two years previously”; he adds that “girls involved 

 
42 Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy,” 17. 
43 Birthe Kundrus, “Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans and Foreigners, 1939 to 
1945,” in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 205. 



48 
 

with foreigners were sometimes arrested by the Gestapo and frequently received severe 
jail sentences.”44  
 
Incredibly, however, the Nazis’ sexist double standard still applied, favoring and protecting 
German men even when the offence was as gravely damaging to the Volk as sex with a 
foreigner. The Gestapo ruled that “sexual intercourse with female foreign workers, even 
when they are citizens of an enemy state and a significant affront to the public is apparent, 
cannot be prosecuted.”45 Considered in the light of the Nazis’ overarching views—namely, 
that “the male’s sexual gratification was deemed to take precedence over the female’s” 
(and, apparently, even over “racial” considerations)—this hypocrisy makes sense.46 
However, the double standard did not go so far as transgressing prewar social norms, such 
as allowing German sex workers to ply their trade with foreign laborers. Instead, 
designated brothels for foreigners were soon established: “The official justification for this 
policy was that providing foreign workers with prostitutes (particularly when the 
prostitutes were themselves foreigners or ‘Gypsies’) would protect German women from 
sexual danger and defilement.”47 With female foreigners sleeping with other foreigners or 
with German men (and thereby chancing the spread of German seed, at no potential legal 
cost for the man), young German women and girls found themselves able to take advantage 
of an economic opportunity: that of prostituting themselves, whether overtly or “covertly,” 
to German soldiers. 
 
“Support Our Boys” 
The attraction of young women to soldiers was not a new or even exclusively German 
phenomenon—one need only look to the First World War in Britain to find ample evidence 
of “khaki fever,” when respectable young women were supposedly driven mad with lust by 
the sight of Tommies in uniform.48 Coupled with the much-touted Nazi ideal of soldierly 
manliness and the widely propagated injunction to racially fit Aryan women to produce 
more children for the Führer, it is unsurprising that similar results arose when war broke 
out in Germany. As Waite writes: 
 

soldiers stationed at bases near villages and cities and the frequent movement of 
troops through the railway stations, some local officials maintained, attracted 
teenage girls. The striking uniforms and demeanor of older men, some not much 
older than themselves, and war propaganda to “‘support our boys,” led some girls to 
shamelessly chase after the soldiers.49  

 
Not all young women slept with soldiers for money, or at all, but enough of them did that, 
as Kater notes, “soldiers got to know this situation well and ruthlessly took advantage of it, 

 
44 Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” 455. 
45 See Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” 457. 
46 Timm, “Sex with a Purpose,” 226. 
47 Timm, “Sex with a Purpose,” 247. 
48 For an excellent exploration of this phenomenon, see Angela Woollacott, “‘Khaki Fever’ and Its Control: 
Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War,” Journal of 
Contemporary History 29, no. 2 (1994): 325-347. 
49 Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” 448. 



49 
 

to the point where authorities were charging them with gross irresponsibility, indecency, 
and rape…Because the BDM, as well as somewhat older RAD (Reich Labor Service) girls, 
often accepted small gifts and even money from men, authorities were inclined to speak of 
‘covert prostitution.”50 “Covert” did not mean “harmless”: Kater indicates rising rates of 
STIs and illegitimate pregnancies, which Waite would surely include among his assessment 
of the "sharp rise in immorality” during the war, including the “alarming” trend of younger 
and younger teenagers having sex.51  
 
But young German women were often flippant about their “immoral” activities, with 
frequent (and clever) retorts to criticism including “The Führer wants more children, does 
not he?” and “What do you want, I’m a German mother,” or even, in direct defiance of the 
Nazis’ sexism, “The boys do this, so we can do it too.”52 These women perceived the 
loopholes and inconsistencies in Nazi sexual regulations and took full advantage of them, 
seizing hold of opportunities for their own gain, both material and sexual. And those “boys” 
were indeed “doing it,” too: older HJs were drafted into the Wehrmacht and SS with the 
outbreak of war and encouraged to make use of military brothels like other soldiers. 
Herzog cites the testimony of one Christian HJ-turned-soldier who was markedly 
uncomfortable with the army’s sexual climate: “‘Every little Hans must have a little Sabine’ 
[Jedem Hänschen sein Sabinchen], that was the motto. It was disgusting. The Nazis 
constantly insisted that sex before marriage or outside of marriage was morally acceptable, 
even necessary.”53 Even policies as “liberating” as this one—which it might be imagined 
would have been eagerly welcomed by young, unmarried people curious about sex—were 
not universally taken to heart, demonstrating once again the Nazis’ inability to fully 
reshape the sex lives of their citizens. Overall, however, the increased sexual opportunities 
and license wrought by the war seem to have been eagerly (and sometimes profitably) 
seized upon by many young people, from freshly minted soldiers to newly unsupervised 
girls on the home front. Homosexuality, though, remained taboo even within the chaotic 
and liberalized conditions of wartime. 
 
Homosexuality in the Armed Forces 
Das Schwarze Korps’s report on “Sexual Indecency on Active Duty” was first published 
three years prior to the outbreak of war but soon became relevant. The article describes 
soldiers soliciting sex workers and then contracting venereal disease: “some foolhardy, 
promiscuous girls show up, the beer and the booze help things along. Many a young man 
who began his tour of duty pure and clean comes home with dark stains on his conscience, 
and perhaps even with some disease in his body.”54 But another threat lurked between the 
lines: “You’re all thrown together as a group of young men, all bursting with health and 
brimming with the exuberance of youth—by that fact alone, there is a great risk of sexual 
indecency on active duty.”55 Even the temptations posed by “foolhardy, promiscuous” girls 

 
50 Kater, Hitler Youth, 111. 
51 Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” 445 and 449. 
52 Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” 445. 
53 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 60-61. 
54 “Sexual Indecency,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Anson Rabinbach (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 2013), chapter 14 (source 162). 
55 “Sexual Indecency.” 



50 
 

were not so severe as the danger posed by “the aberrant tendencies of youth who are 
attracted to members of the same sex,” merely hinted at by the euphemistic language and 
mention of a single-sex environment—but “which, if they are not discovered in time, can 
have a devastating detrimental effect on the Volk as a whole.”56 As Peukert has explained, 
the Nazis’ “dominant image of the ‘strict’ soldierly man” was one of the sources of their 
homophobia; such a man was “obliged to repel with brute force all temptations to ‘soften’ 
the identity and sexual role indoctrinated into him,” including of course an attraction to the 
same sex, whether present in himself or others.57 The thought that soldiers themselves 
might engage in homosexual acts was therefore abhorrent to the Nazis, as can be seen, for 
example, in the swift removal of Ernst Röhm as the head of the SA on several pretexts, his 
homosexuality being one which should not be ignored. Paradoxically, however, the Nazis’ 
party structure and ideology rested on an emotionally charged brand of male 
“comradeship” that had its roots in notions also borrowed by the pre-Nazi gay rights 
movement, specifically the idealized male community or Männerbund. As historian Giles 
has noted in his work on homosexuality and the SS,  
 

Whether comrade or friend, many Nazis developed relationships with other 
men that were laden with emotion and eroticism and often ran too close to 
the edge of sexuality to be pulled back…The Nazis celebrated bonds with 
members of their own sex as more noble than relationships with women, but 
they were too embarrassed to admit that there was an emotional and 
therefore and labile and not easily controllable side to them.58 
 

Intense, arguably homoerotic devotion to male friends, comrades-at-arms, and fellow party 
members gave the Nazi party and military its strength, and yet homosexual acts and 
expressions of romantic love between men were ruthlessly ferreted out and often punished 
quite severely, including when occurring among youths in the form of harmless “sexual 
horseplay” such as mutual masturbation.59 But while on one hand, “the central office for 
combating homosexuality continued business as usual, even when the country was 
collapsing,” in characteristically inconsistent Nazi fashion, even punishment for 
homosexual offences among the armed forces—the very seat of German masculinity—was 
by no means evenly enforced.60 Giles cites the case of two young SS men, aged seventeen 
and eighteen, found naked in bed together in early 1940, in which the court ruled that 
“lying side by side in a bed does not in itself constitute an indecent act in the sense of the 
criminal code.”61 From this sterile legal language, Giles makes a strangely touching 
inference: “Perhaps [the court] realized that soldiers in wartime do sometimes sleep 
together, simply for warmth or companionship.”62 The irregular and often irrational Nazi 
policies of sexuality did occasionally—even if accidentally—allow for human tenderness.  

 
56 “Sexual Indecency.” 
57 Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 219. 
58 Giles, “Same-Sex Incidents,” 260-261. 
59 Giles, “Same-Sex Incidents,” 311. 
60 Giles, “Same-Sex Incidents,” 288. 
61 Giles, “Same-Sex Incidents,” 265. 
62 Giles, “Same-Sex Incidents,” 265. 



51 
 

 
Conclusion  
Youth sexuality is arguably always a slippery and frustrating issue to police, even under a 
repressive totalitarian regime like the Third Reich. Teenagers having sex will go out of their 
way to conceal this fact from their parents and from the law. As Elizabeth Heineman has 
wryly noted, “We can only conclude that, well, young people had sex,” despite the 
repressive regime that tried to stand in their way.63 Even regimented organizations that lay 
claim to young people’s free time, like the HJ and BDM, cannot prevent youth from having 
and acting upon sexual desires; in some cases these very organizations may even incite 
sexual experiences, purely by virtue of putting plenty of young people in close quarters and 
removing them from parental supervision. As long as these youth did not engage in “anti-
social” behaviors, such as homosexual sex or prostitution, they did not face legal 
consequences, even in the case of teenage pregnancy. Youth acting outside these approved 
constraints, however, including the Edelweiss Pirates and Swing Kids, were subject to 
intense scrutiny due to their alleged homosexual and cross-racial sexual contacts. The war 
changed the priorities of the regime to some degree, with the law’s primary focus shifting 
to preventing sex between foreigners and Germans in the name of maintaining the purity of 
German blood. But the Nazis’ inconsistency also revealed itself in cases such as casual 
homosexuality within the armed forces, incidences of which, despite the fiery rhetoric 
against it, were by no means always punished. When it came to youth sexuality, as to many 
other situations, the Nazis’ policies were incoherent, exaggerated, and quite often 
unenforced, if not unenforceable.  

 
63 Heineman, “Sexuality and Nazism,” 29. 


	Introduction
	Official Policy
	Sexual Double Standards in the HJ and the BDM
	Sexuality in Non-Nazi Youth Groups
	Youth Sexuality on the Home Front
	“Support Our Boys”
	Homosexuality in the Armed Forces
	Conclusion

