Bann 425 sieger gefolgschaft 1939 Hitler Youth badge pin

Bann 425 sieger gefolgschaft hitler judend HJ, this is one of the rarest Hitler Youth badge pins, it took us years to find one.

The Hitler Youth emerged from the scouting and German youth movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Nazi Party’s second oldest paramilitary organization after the Sturmabteilung, or SA, it was founded in 1922 as the Youth League of the Nazi Party in 1922, and formally named the Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth in 1926. Its female branch, the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel, or BDM) was founded four years later in 1930.

Early Nazi leaders hoped that the organizations would serve as conduits of political mobilization and ideological indoctrination for the young. By 1930, Baldur von Schirach in his capacity as Reich Youth Leader (Reichsjugendführer) became responsible for directing the Hitler Youth. Schirach organized a general membership of boys from fourteen to eighteen, and a corresponding junior branch, the German Young Volk, ranging from ten to fourteen years of age. The League of German Girls was similarly divided, with a Young Girls’ League for younger members.

By the time Adolf Hitler came to power as German chancellor in January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members. In the following year, all other youth organizations were forbidden. The Hitler Youth and its auxiliaries became the only legal youth movement in Nazi Germany. In 1936, the Law concerning the Hitler Youth made membership compulsory for all children over ten years old. Compliance was not universal, however, and two ancillary decrees were issued in 1939 to make youth service compulsory and non-membership a punishable offense.