“Young Siegfrieds”: The German American Bund’s Youth Divisions in Comparative Perspective

“Young Siegfrieds”: The German American Bund’s youth divisions in comparative perspective

This paper investigates the role of the “Young Siegfrieds”, a youth division of the German-American Bund, on the eve of the Second World War. In the 1930s, the leadership of the German-American Bund invited German American children and adolescents to summer camps, such as “Camp Siegfried” on Long Island, where they were instructed in hunting, shooting, and eugenics. Transnational alliances between the young Bundists and the Hitler Youth were forged through trips to Germany such as on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. The purpose of the paper is threefold. First, it attempts to show how the effort by the National Socialist Party to indoctrinate Germany’s youth was adopted by pro-Nazi organizations in the United States. I argue that the symbolism employed by the young Bundists merged elements from American and German culture so as to create a uniquely German American manifestation of ethnic pride that would reflect the German American Bund’s belief in (German) fascism as a form of (American) democracy. Second, the paper traces shifts in representation with regard to the German-American Bund’s youth divisions in American public space and links these to the changing status of the Holocaust in American life. Third, it examines the potential conflicts between the young Bundists and Jewish American organizations, which equally entertained youth summer camps on the East Coast in the years before the outbreak of the war. By examining the local, regional and transnational interrelations between different youth divisions of fascist organizations and their anti-fascist antagonists, my paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the entangled histories of youth organizations in transatlantic relations on the eve of the Second World War and to address the recent politics of commemoration linked to these narratives.