August 18th,1941 : Swing Kids

On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swing Kids were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration camps. This mass arrest encouraged the youth to further their political consciousness and opposition to National Socialism.

They started to distribute anti-fascist propaganda. In January 1943, Günter Discher, as one of the ringleaders of the Swing Kids, was deported to the youth concentration camp of Moringen.

On 2 January 1942, Heinrich Himmler wrote to Reinhard Heydrich calling on him to clamp down on the ringleaders of the swing movement, recommending a few years in a concentration camp with beatings and forced labor. The crackdown soon followed: clubs were raided, and participants were hauled off to camps.
"My judgment is that the whole evil must be radically exterminated now. I cannot but see that we have taken only half measures. All ringleaders (...) are into a concentration camp to be re-educated (...) detention in concentration camp for these youths must be longer, 2-3 years (...) it is only through the utmost brutality that we will be able to avert the dangerous spread of anglophile tendencies, in these times where Germany fights for its survival."

The Swing Kids (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg (St. Pauli) and Berlin. They were composed of 14- to 18-year-old boys and girls in high school, most of them middle- or upper-class students, but some apprentice workers as well. They sought the British and American way of life, defining themselves in swing music and opposing the National-Socialist ideology, especially the Hitlerjugend.

In 1993, a film called Swing Kids examined this underground culture of rebellion during Nazi Germany in some detail. Directed by Thomas Carter and starring Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Frank Whaley, and Kenneth Branagh (uncredited), the picture was not a commercial success but sustains a large underground following and is nonetheless a moderately accurate history-based film.