Swing Kids

The Swing Youth were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany formed in Hamburg in 1939. Primarily active in Hamburg and Berlin, they were composed of 14- to 21-year-old Germans, mostly middle or upper-class students, but also including some in the working class. They admired the "American way of life", defining themselves in swing music and opposing the Nazism, especially the Hitler Youth. They loosely structured themselves into “clubs” with names such as the Harlem Club, the OK Gang, and the Hot Club. This underground subculture, distinctly nonconformist with a focus on African-American music, was active in the German youth scene. Despite being largely apolitical and unstructured, the Swing Youth were targeted and, in some cases, repressed by the Nazi government. Name The name was a parody of the numerous youth groups that were organised by the Nazis, such as the . The youth also referred to themselves as Swings or ("Swingity"); members were called "Swing-Boy", "Swing-Girl" or "Old-Hot-Boy". Counter-culture During the Nazi regime, all the youth (those aged 10 to 17) in Germany who were considered to be Aryan were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. The leaders of these organisations realised they had to offer some attraction in the area of social dancing to recruit members. Instead of adopting the popular swing dance (because it was viewed as degenerate and tied to the "damnable jazz"), they resorted to the new German community dances. This proved to be unsuccessful, and instead of embracing the Hitler Youth pastimes, city girls and boys crowded the swing dance joints. This seemed to be the case particularly in the town of Hamburg, where the swing scene was huge. These teenage hoppers were known as , a name the authorities called them. The Swing Youth disparagingly (in the context of a predominantly homophobic culture) called the Hitler Youth the "Homo Youth" while the League of German Maidens was called the "League of Soldiers' Mattresses", implying the group existed to have sex with German soldiers. This also would be seen as derogatory in a society praising chaste behaviour before marriage for girls, as the League of German Maidens promoted.