The national socialists stressed nationalism, racial purity and a rejection of foreign and especially Jewish influences. They also placed a premium on physical fitness, mental soundness and the desirability of Aryan/Nordic physical characteristics. They also stressed order and cleanliness and felt that the best way to instill these values into the German psyche was to start with the youth. The aesthetic vision of the Nazis was of paramount importance in understanding them. The art of the Nazis was both realist and idealist—a type called “blood and soil.”
They detested anything else referring to it as “entartete kunst” or degenerate art. Dadaist or cubist art, for example, was degenerate and a product of madness that glorified physical deformity. Worse, it was all a plot by the Jews to pervert and ultimately destroy true Aryan culture. The Hitler Jungen or Hitler Youth was Nazi Germany’s answer to the Boy Scouts. The youth learned to live ordered, regimented lives consisting of everything from hiking to games requiring physical stamina to art to schoolwork. Conformity was mandatory and instilled through the wearing of uniforms, drilling and marching to martial-type music.
While many German youths were swept up in the national socialist ideal, many were not and, in fact, detested it. Typical of teens, they wanted their independence and felt a need to rebel against societal norms. There were gangs of working class kids called Meuten, a group called Edelweisspiraten who consciously rejected the norms of Hitler Youth and the more affluent youth who detested the martial and völkisch music the Hitler Youth played and marched to. They loved American jazz, particularly swing, called themselves swingjugend or swing youth but are also known as Swing Kids (and mostly occupied the 14-18 age demographic).
The swing kids marked themselves off from the rest of society by wearing their hair longer than German boys wore it, girls wore their hair long without braids which were considered proper in German society. They dressed in their type of zoot suits: Boys wore long coats with a Union Jack pin and homburg hats (very popular in Britain), carried umbrellas, wore two-tone or checkered shoes with crepe souls, an ornate scarf, an expensive button-down dress shirt with a semi-precious stone. Girls wore the dresses popular among British girls who danced to swing and applied a lot of makeup—deliberately more than German society generally approved of. The swingjugend learned all the swing dances such as the jitterbug and the lindy-hop. They hung out at clubs even though most were underage. If they couldn’t get into the clubs, they held loud swing parties. They were also fond of giving the nazi salute and yelling “Swingheil!” as a taunt to national socialists.
The Nazis hated jazz which they dubbed entarete musik or negermusik which they saw as a product of both Negroes and Jews—the blacks invented it and the Jewish label-owners and jazz club owners promoted it not to mention that the King of Swing was also a Jew.
As jazz was outlawed in Germany, the swingjugend took great pleasure in illicitly procuring swing records even getting record storeowners to order them in if they promised to buy them. Some got hold of short wave radios and tuned into Allied broadcasts of swing. Among the swing youth, there was great prestige in owning the records and they were treated like priceless treasures.
