What are the Edelweiss Pirates?
The main working class youth group which opposed Hitler was the Edelweiss Pirates (Edelweißpiraten). It was based initially in the Rhineland. Members reacted to the discipline of the Hitler Youth by daubing anti-Nazi slogans and singing pre-1933 folk songs.
What does Emil do to Arvid?
Emil (a former friend and swing-kid-turned-HJ) deliberately stamps on Arvid’s fingers, damaging them severely. Arvid wakes up in the hospital, terrified by HJ uniforms until he realizes it is only Peter and Thomas.
What did the Edelweiss Pirates want?
An alternative movement to the Hitler Youth, the Edelweiss Pirates grew their hair long and risked arrest, torture and their lives to carry out small acts of sabotage against the Nazi regime. Sixty years later they are still officially listed as petty thieves and criminals.
How did the Edelweiss Pirates end?
On the 10th of November 1944, five of them were publicly hanged in Cologne without trials (Kellerman n.d.). The most significant of achievement of the Edelweiss Pirates in their resistance against the Nazi Party would have to be their assassination of the Head of the Cologne Gestapo in 1944.
What did Edelweiss Pirates do?
Why does Arvid commit suicide?
Arvid, who is working at a jazz club, refuses to play a German song, lashing out at the club’s patrons for being blind to the Nazi agenda. After he is badly beaten by Nazis, leaving him struggling to play the guitar, Arvid realizes there is nothing for him in Germany and dies by suicide.
What happened to Thomas’s father Swing Kids?
Arvid is ardently anti-Nazi, perhaps because he has the most to fear. He walks with a limp and a cane; thus, he knows he can not and will not be part of the Nazi “master race.” Peter is also anti-Nazi at the beginning of the story because his father was imprisoned and died in a German jail.
How many Edelweiss Pirates were killed?
But history has so far remembered Cologne’s Edelweiss Pirates as criminals rather than resistance fighters… until now. On November 10th 1944, the Gestapo hanged 13 people in a residential street in Cologne without trial. Six of those killed were teenagers, members of an underground group called the Edelweiss Pirates.
What happened to the Kreisau Circle?
The group began to falter after Helmuth von Moltke was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944 and eventually came to an end when most of its members were arrested following Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944.
Who are the members of the Swing Youth?
The Swing Youth (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg and Berlin. Formed in Hamburg in 1939, they were composed of 14 to 21-year-old boys and girls in high school, most of them middle- or upper-class students, but with some apprentice workers as well.
What did the people who opposed swing wear?
These adolescents dressed differently from the others who were opposed to swing. For example, boys added a little British flair to their clothes by wearing homburg hats, growing their hair long, and attaching a Union Jack pin to their jacket.
Where was the Swing Youth in the 1930s?
The Swing Youth (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg and Berlin.
What did the Swing Kids do for fun?
The Swing Kids were defining a counterculture, shown by their clothing and music. Their behavior, described by many Nazis as “effete”, ran counter to the spartan militarism that the regime was trying to inculcate in its youth. They organized dance festivals and contests and invited jazz bands.