Reply #130: How exactly does a 14 year old fight the Nazi movment by himself?

[davepc]

Of all the criticisms of the man, being conscripted into a mandatory national organization is the most baseless. People who actively resisted were sent to camps. Some were executed outright. If the Nazis thought that his parents had supported any active resistance moment or fostered it THEY would of been sent off to camps as well.

Sure is damn easy from 60 years in the future to criticize adolescents for not single handily taking on a totalitarian police state.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-04-23-new-pope-defied-Nazis_x.htm

Renate Augerer, 75, remembered the brothers from the town's school, where they were both known as being serious, scholarly, pious and kind — two Catholic priests in the making.

"He was very certainly not for Hitler," Augerer said of Joseph Ratzinger. "Absolutely not. They couldn't do anything about it. ... You can't forget the times."

Max Fiedler, 77, said he also was compelled to join the Hitler Youth when the Nazis took over the Catholic youth group he was in and merged it into their organization.

"It was automatic," said Fiedler, who had joined Augerer at a reception in the small Traunstein town hall following a Mass in Ratzinger's honor last week.

Some 80 to 90% of Germans joined the Hitler Youth and refusing to sign up could mean being sent to a youth "reeducation camp," akin to a concentration camp, said Volker Dahm, director of Nazi-era research for Munich's Institute for Contemporary History.

"You could try to avoid it but it was very, very difficult," Dahm said. "It was a bit easier to avoid it if you lived in a big city where you could hide yourself in the crowd, but in the countryside it was nearly impossible because everyone knew you."

...

In Germany, opportunities for outright defiance were limited — and dangerous. Those who did resist met horrible fates, such as two famous student leaders in Munich, Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in 1942 and executed by guillotine.