Between exclusion and compulsory service: The treatment of the Jewish “Mischlinge” as an example for social inequality creation in the Hitler-Jugend

Abstract

The National Socialist regime was, generally speaking, not interested in an outright levelling of social differentiation patterns, as they were present within the German society around 1933. On the contrary: old hierarchies were to be fought and new ones were to be established—both according to the Nazi administration’s social ideology and, deriving from it, its racial ideology. The Hitler-Jugend, the Nazi’s youth organization, can be subsumed under this conclusion. The following contribution takes a closer look at the particular fate of Jewish “Mischlinge,” classified as such by the Nazi regime, in order to explore the question as to what extent the phenomena of social inequality occurred in the Nazi youth organization and how it can be ordered in a systemized manner. Two difficult fields of research are being united here: on the one hand, there is the research field regarding the Hitler-Jugend that is hardly manageable, but shows desiderata; and on the other hand, the thus-far rarely consequently and systematically conducted analysis ofthe National Socialists’ repressive policies targeting the newly created population group of Jewish “Mischlinge” in Germany.