The Edelweiss Pirates were groups of youths who opposed Nazi rule. The Edelweiss Pirates were primarily opposed to the way the Hitler Youth movement had taken over the lives of youths in Hitler’s Germany.
Life in Nazi Germany
Homosexuals
The Nazi's declared aims to eradicate homosexuality. During their 12 years in power they implemented a broad range of persecutory measures. An estimated 50,000 gay men were sentenced and imprisoned, many of whom faced the death penalty. Up to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps and made to wear the pink triangle symbol on their breast which identified them as gays. Many of these Pink Triangle detainees were subjected to starvation, hard labour, castration, medical experiments and collective murder actions.
Jewishews
The Jews in Nazi Germany suffered appallingly after January 1933.Some rich Jews could afford to leave Nazi Germany (or were forced to) but many could not. Thugs in the SA and SS were given a free hand in their treatment of the Jews. The Jews were frequently referred to in "Mein Kampf" as being filthy, greedy sub-humans who bore no place in civilisation.
Hitler set up concentration camps all over Germany to imprison, torture and eventually sometimes kill Jews in Nazi Germany. These concentration camps were set up solely to annihilate the Jewish population in Germany, Poland and Austria. Over 6 million Jews were murdered, with the number of those tortured extending into 8 figures.
Nazi Youth Schools
The Hitler Youth (HJ) was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It took place from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung (SA). It was made up of: the Hitlerjugend proper, for male youth aged 14 to 18; the younger boys' section, Deutsches Jungvolk (German Youth), for those aged 10 to 14; and the girls' section, the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the League of German Girls).
This was like an alternative to school which taught young boys various things that preperded them for war. They learnt how to calculate projections of guns and several techniques of fighting, making them war machines.
