SWING KIDS

"I would have been able to free a thousand more slaves if I could only have convinced them they were slaves."
    -- Harriet Tubman*

In the late 1930s there was a new movement on the rise among the teenagers of Hamburg, Germany. Its followers refused to join the Nazi youth organization, the Hitler Jugend (known as the H.J.). They wore their hair long and were obsessed with American movies, British fashion and swing music. They called themselves SWING Kids. The Hamburg Swings were the most daring radicals of all who openly challenged the Gestapo with a series of mass dance rallies. More than once these demonstrations turned violent, with the Swings and the Hitler youth fighting it out in the streets.

This movie got slammed by the critics, even by Roger Ebert who said the "youth don't seem very political," that they were "indifferent to Hitler's campaign against the Jews" and the plot was murky. On the other hand youth generally love this movie saying it brings them to tears. This is a popular movie that shows only one slice of Nazi Germany. It is not a movie about youth who are highly organized to take on the Nazis, it's about youth who grab what's available and develop a culture of resistance. Those who say it's "not political" obviously do not see that resistance takes many forms.

The movie has so many levels. Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) gets caught by Hitler's military police after stealing a radio (that Nazis had taken from a Jewish household) and is forced to join the H.J. He is also grappling with his father, who was a famous musician driven to death by the Nazis for helping some Jewish people. Peter sort of begrudgingly goes along with the program and swings at night. His friend Thomas (Christian Bale) joins the H.J. to give Peter support. Thomas starts to become enamored with the Nazis. The third friend, Arvid (Frank Whaley) has a disability and never gives in to the Nazis. The plot is very good showing the struggle each goes through in deciding where they will stand.

The movie was also slammed as "historically false." Those charges are mainly wrong. During the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, jazz was almost the German national music. When the Nazis came to power, Swing, with its African-American origins, was considered the music of the enemy. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels began a slow crackdown on "degenerate" art, including all music that did not conform to the National Socialists' absurdly detailed and racist code. But Germany's love of Jazz had been going on a long time and, as the Nazis learned, the genie couldn't be put back in the bottle.

Although they denied any political overtones to their in-your-face style, Michael H. Kater in his book Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany writes, "It is clear that their ostentatiousness was meant as explicit challenge to a dictatorial regime that punished individualism and rewarded drab collectivism."

After Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938, the Swing youth were put under great scrutiny: they were put under surveillance and some were arrested. In 1939, Hamburg officially prohibited the "cacophony from the USA." When the Swings continued to flaunt their style, the Nazis took even stronger steps: according to Kater, between 1942 and 1944, 40 to 70 of the most prominent Swing youth were put into concentration camps. Tellingly they were all classified as "political" prisoners.

In Peter Profield's 1991 Himmler biography, he makes it quite clear that the official party line was that Swing was a subversive evil, as much as any White Rose activity. Goebbels referred to swing music as, "the rot of a decaying society." In his book Profield reported Jazz musicians always had one foot in the organized resistance or in the concentration camps, and once again, Jazz came close to assuming its original function as protest music."

By the end of 1941, the Nazi's decided that they needed to be more tough on the German swings. On January 26, 1942, it was implemented that the swing youth "should first of all be beaten, exercised, and then put to work. Their terms of punishment should not be less then two or three years, and they should never be allowed to pursue their studies. Parents were to be examined for complicity and concentration camps and property confiscation should by no means, be ruled out." As one Nazi said, "only if we move with brutality shall we be able to prevent the dangerous spread of such Anglophilic tendencies in a period when Germany is fighting for its very existence." Of all those who were imprisoned, only 5% were ever freed. The rest had to deal with heavy factory labor lasting 11 hours-a-day, minimal nutrition, corporal punishment, and punitive sports exercises. They were with hundreds of other people and guarded by 85 SS Men... and that was in the "better" camps. "Swings who were already around 20 years old ended up in regular concentration camps where they were charged more severely with being political criminals."

The Swing youth included Germans, foreigners and Jews. They came together in their love of the music. Kater describes the Swing youth as defiant examples: "there is evidence that this archetypal movement formed the backbone for opposition... It gave rise to hope for a new kind of German, one who would abhor Hitlerism and embrace humanity itself..."

*U.S. abolitionist, emancipator. "Moses of Her People" escaped slavery at the age 25, but returned to the South 19 times to spirit 300 people to Canada on the Underground Railroad.