Pré-HJ {01}

«The Bund der Artamenen (Artaman League) was another youth group that influenced the future HJ. The name came from the ancient Indo-German word “Artam” that was supposed to mean “revival through forces of the origin.” The Bund der Artamenen was a tiny organization of young ultranationalists created in the early 1920s by a young man by the name of August Georg Kenstler. Participants were devoted to the concept of soil and to the idea of German race. The idealist members of the back-tothe-land league wished to escape decadent and corrupt urban life through farming. They preferred to work on farms in lieu of military service. The Artamans were strongly chauvinist, anti–Slav and urged that Polishfarmers living in Germany be returned to their own country. Sympathizing with the Nazis, they had a flag displaying a swastika and a motto: “We want to march to the East!” Their device was “Blood, Soil and the Sword”—a slogan which was to become a basic principle of the SS. Many Artamans journeyed to farms in eastern Germany to defend the fatherland against the Slavs. The movement intended to mobilize hundreds of thousands of young Germans, but never succeeded in enlisting more than 2,000. It was not a success because the leaders quarreled, and also the idealism of these young people from the cities appeared insufficient to pass the severe test of agricultural labor. It was easier to rhapsodize about blood and soil than to buckle down to a working day of ten hours. The Artamans were also preoccupied with occultism and mysticism; they held that by communing with the ghostly spirits present in nature, mysterious veils of the past would be lifted. Their rituals tried to recreate that primordial kinship with nature which they supposed ancient Germans to have had. They abhorred science and reason as enemies of the life of the soul. Many of them became vegetarians and teetotalers, a few observed abstinence from sex, as they believed that the purification of the physical body would help the soul to see “reality.” They threw over orthodox medicine for spiritual and herbal healing, which were somehow felt to be closer to the primal source. They were thus open to the theory of the Nazi “philosopher” Richard Walther Darré (1895–1953), who preached selective breeding, the agrarian philosophy of Blut und Bodem (blood and soil) and the protection of the peasantry as the “life source of the Nordic race.” More and more the movement took on the character of an anti–Semitic society seeing the Jews as the exemplar of the bourgeoisie, and the urban bourgeoisie as the source of all misery. As the situation deteriorated in the late 1920s, some of the Artamans were drawn deeper into politics, and engaged in a holy war against their enemies: liberals, democrats, Free-Masons and Jews. Eventually many members of the Artaman League turned to National Socialism. Among the Artaman leaders in 1924 were two men destined to infamy in the Third Reich: Heinrich Himmler, who would later become Reichsführer SS, and Rudolf Hoess, later the commander of extermination camp Auschwitz. The small league was dismantled and incorporated into the Hitler Jugend in October 1934 as the Nazi youth movement gained strength.»

Trecho retirado de Hitler Youth, 1922-1945, Jean-Denis G. G. Lepage, MacFarland and Company, 2009. {Na fotografia, Wolfram Sievers}