How Did Hitler Deal with Opposition?
There are many ways in which the Nazis dealt with opposition. While all of them contributed to the defeat of the resistance, was the reaction against the youth the most important one? This will be analyzed in the following paragraphs.
The Nazis were opposed by two groups of young people: the Swing movement and the Edelweiss Pirates. The Swing movement was composed of young middle-class people, including Jews, that went to parties with English and American music. They were open about sex and kept their looks untidy on purpose. The Edelweiss Pirates was the name the Nazis gave to many different groups of both boys and girls from the working class aged 14 to 17 years old since they had similar characteristics. They mocked Germany through changed lyrics of songs and taunted members of the Hitler Youth as well as having a free attitude about sex. The Nazis couldn’t send the teenagers to concentration camps or have them killed so they broke up the groups, arrested them or simply ignored them. Eventually their activities became more serious, they helped deserters and escaped prisoners, stole armaments and attached the Gespeto so the Nazis killed their ‘ringleaders’.
On the other hand, Hitler won over German industrialists by showing he was against socialists through the murder of Strasser, a socialist Nazi, and the alliance with the Conservative Nationalistic Party. He gains power over the Catholic Church by signing a Concordat that disallows priests from political activities and collapses the Center Party as well as getting the Lutheran Church to agree to a Reich Church. The army was won over since they supported the Nazis’ nationalistic aims and were obliged to swear allegiance to Hitler after he became ‘Fuhrer and Chancellor’. Hitler also dismissed the War Minister, over a scandal of him marrying a former prostitute, and the Army Commander-in-Chief, over a false charge of homosexuality, in order to replace them with people he could control. In the Night of the
The Nazis were opposed by two groups of young people: the Swing movement and the Edelweiss Pirates. The Swing movement was composed of young middle-class people, including Jews, that went to parties with English and American music. They were open about sex and kept their looks untidy on purpose. The Edelweiss Pirates was the name the Nazis gave to many different groups of both boys and girls from the working class aged 14 to 17 years old since they had similar characteristics. They mocked Germany through changed lyrics of songs and taunted members of the Hitler Youth as well as having a free attitude about sex. The Nazis couldn’t send the teenagers to concentration camps or have them killed so they broke up the groups, arrested them or simply ignored them. Eventually their activities became more serious, they helped deserters and escaped prisoners, stole armaments and attached the Gespeto so the Nazis killed their ‘ringleaders’.
On the other hand, Hitler won over German industrialists by showing he was against socialists through the murder of Strasser, a socialist Nazi, and the alliance with the Conservative Nationalistic Party. He gains power over the Catholic Church by signing a Concordat that disallows priests from political activities and collapses the Center Party as well as getting the Lutheran Church to agree to a Reich Church. The army was won over since they supported the Nazis’ nationalistic aims and were obliged to swear allegiance to Hitler after he became ‘Fuhrer and Chancellor’. Hitler also dismissed the War Minister, over a scandal of him marrying a former prostitute, and the Army Commander-in-Chief, over a false charge of homosexuality, in order to replace them with people he could control. In the Night of the