On This Day in History: October 25

The Edelweiss Pirates

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Imagine this. It’s 1936 and you’re a teenager in Hitler’s Germany. Membership in the Hitler Youth has just become mandatory, but you say no fucking way because fuck that Nazi bullshit. What do you do? Answer: you become a pirate.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 25, 1944--

At the time, you were allowed to leave school at age 14, but if you were 17 you were going to get conscripted. If you stayed in school, you’d be forced into the Hitler Youth in order to be indoctrinated into Nazism and work to convert others into the murderous cult. Many young people quit school and formed their own resistance group called the Edelweiss Pirates, and they loved to punch Nazis.

Besides the whole allegiance to Hitler stuff, being in the Hitler Youth sucked. It was highly regimented fascist paramilitary bullshit and totally the death of fun. Hitler Youth was boys only; girls were made to be part of the League of German Girls. Edelweiss Pirates were all about freedom of expression and growing long hair and mixing genders and fucking up those Nazi punks.

They numbered in the thousands, and in addition to just enjoying being teens and playing that “degenerate” jazz and blues music and exploring their sexuality, they’d hunt down Hitler Youth patrols and beat the shit out of them on a regular basis. The pirate slogan was “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth.”

Before the war the pirates were seen as little more than an irritation, but during the war they did things such as gather up Allied propaganda dropped by airplanes and push it through people’s mailboxes to spread the word that Hitler was bad. They also helped German Army deserters disappear. They added sugar to the gas tanks of Nazi vehicles, pulled down Nazi flags, and even derailed munitions trains. On October 25, 1944, the Nazis finally took them seriously and Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s right-hand man, ordered a crackdown. The following month, 13 people, many of them Edelweiss Pirates, were publicly hanged in Cologne.

The Nazi regime kept up the pressure on the Edelweiss Pirates, imprisoning many and even sending some to concentration camps, but their spirits would not be broken. History was unkind to the pirates, viewing them as criminals rather than a true resistance group. But efforts have been made to rehabilitate their image and view them as an important part of resistance to fascist authority during World War II.

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