The Wandervogel

Although even semi-respectable historians (the BBC's Laurence Rees, for example) try to link the Wanderwogel with the HJs, personally I can't really see the connexion. Apart from both being outdoorsy-type German youth movements, they really have nothing in common. The Wanderwogel were really proto-hippy, young ramblers, who merrily tramped about the beautiful German countryside with their guitars, singing songs about how lovely everything was and how young and handsome they were (or something!). They weren't known for throwing stones at Catholic priests, beating up Jews, informing on their parents or forming teenage SS tank divisions.

In fact the only thing they (probably!) had in common with Hitler's lads was a propensity for a bit of underage boy-on-boy action - and let's face it, adolescent adventures between friends after lights-out don't really compare with having to deal with the attentions of the pervert instructors of the notorious "Homo Youth".

Is this an actual uniform, or are these just normal German student caps?

Nazis with guitars? Now you've heard everything.

So who's first? If you played a stringed instrument you could just stand and watch, presumably.

Gerhard Roßbach and the Schilljugend

Founded in 1924 by former Freikorps leader Gerhard Roßbach and named by him after Prussian Major Ferdinand von Schill, the Schill-Jugend were one of the various forerunners of the more famous Hitler-Jugend. Roßbach actually founded his youth group in Salzburg, having fled Germany itself after Hitler's disastrous Munich Putsch. He had previously been an active Nazi and is supposed to have been responsible for kitting out the SA in their trademark natty brown uniforms. (Courtesy, according to legend, of the colonial army surplus!)

He was also (of course!) a notorious homosexual, who boasted that he had been the man who had originally introduced Ernst Röhm to joys of proper right-wing masculine man-sex.

One of his deputies in the Schill-Jugend was Edmund Heines.

According to Wikipedia,

Roßbach helped start the Schilljugend, a youth organization, to get rid of "intellectual elements" in the youth movements and instill children with "nationalistic, socialistic, authoritative, and militaristic" ideas. He took a special interest in developing its membership. Roßbach organised music festivals which combined folk and classical music to instil national pride and construct radical-nationalist community values.

After World War II he operated an export-import company near Frankfurt and wrote his memoirs in 1950. In his last years he took a prominent part in organising the Bayreuth festivals of Richard Wagner's music.

Hans Blüher

Hans Blüher did not found the Wandervogel movement but he was an early member of it and its first "historian". (Amongst other things he considered it as 'an erotic phenomenon'.) Anti-schools and anti-churches, he was also ideologically anti-family. Having enjoyed sexual relations with other boys from the age of 14 onwards, he became a proponent of Heinrich Schurtz's theory of the Männerbund - the idea that the original "unit of society" in Europe had been not the family but a "homo-social" society of men.

Despite this seemingly somewhat parochial gay iconoclasm, politically Blüher was a staunch conservative and monarchist, even visiting Kaiser Bill during his exile in Holland. Indeed, Blüher vision of homosexuality wasn't the standard cultural Marxist one. Rather than undermining society, his hope was that through pederasty and male bonding within Männerbunden homosexuality would lead to a healthier nation and a stronger state.

It has to be admitted straight off that this is a little bit batty. It's hugely unlikely that our thatched house-dwelling, wagon-driving, dog-owning, mead-drinking Aryan ancestors ever organised their societies around glorified circle-jerk groups rather than along the standard lines of mummies and daddies and kiddies that we have (still, just about!) today. There are cognate words for 'wife' in enough Proto-Indo-European languages to suggest that the concept existed and was an important one, even if the wives themselves were little more than chattels. The family, in other words, was clearly a "thing" even very early on, to suggest that the family has indeed been a "thing" since Proto-Indo-European times. And recent attempts to re-imagine blood brotherhood ceremonies (or. in Christian times adelphopoiesis ceremonies) as pre-modern versions of "gay marriage" are similarly unconvincing.

Such ideas are at least interesting though, partly because they hold out the possibility of homosexuality being a positive rather than a purely negative phenomenon, and partly because the "Männerbund thesis" went on to become a key element of what I call radical National Socialist ideology.* Blüher himself, his pro-Hohenzollern politics notwithstanding, did end up supporting the Nazis, if only as the least worst political option available in a mad and dangerous world.

Despite his ideological opposition to families, Blüher did eventually fall for a member of the opposite sex and settled down and had children. And he withdrew his support for the Nazis after the Night of the Long Knives effectively marked the end of radical National Socialism. Whether Blüher ever actually "saw the light" is a moot point. He died in 1955.

* Indeed, it reached a wide non-Nazi gay audience via Germany's prototype gay magazine Der Eigene. According to Wikipedia, when the magazine was closed down by the Nazis in 1933 all of the materials that had gone into it were handed over to none other than Ernst Röhm.  (Who else!?) As an aside, but somewhat unsurprisingly, modern boylovers have also taken an interest in Blüher and his work.