Edelweis Piraten
Motståndsgrupp under Nazismen i Tyskland.
Text från The Telegraph - om Jean Jülich, en av medlemmarna
He was born on April 18 1929 in the working-class Cologne suburb of Sülz and was just seven years old when his father, a member of the Communist Party, was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour. Jean’s grandmother and aunt were also imprisoned for six months and Jean was placed in an orphanage until they were released, when he went to live with his grandparents. Later he was sent to a Nazi Reichsbahn (railway) training centre in the Nippes suburb of Cologne which, he recalled, “consisted of a factory, school, Hitler Youth – all in one”. In 1942 he dropped out and joined the “Edelweiss Pirates”. The Pirates (named after the edelweiss emblem they wore on their collars or hats) had emerged out of a (non-political) youth hiking movement of the 1930s called the “Bündische Jugend” in response to the strict regimentation of the Hitler Youth. A loose-knit group based in and around Cologne, they consisted of working-class youths of both sexes, mainly between the ages of 14 and 17, who had evaded the Hitler Youth by leaving school while also young enough to avoid military conscription.
To begin with, the Pirates’ rebellion was more to do with gang rivalry than ideology. They specialised in taunting and fighting pitched battles with the Hitler Youth, from whom they distanced themselves by growing long hair, sporting brightly coloured shirts and singing popular songs that owed nothing to the German Volkish music approved by the Nazis. “We wore our hair long, we had a knife in our sock, and we wouldn’t march,” Jülich recalled. Individual groups of Edelweiss Pirates hung around in cafés, parks, or street corners in the evenings or weekends, or took hikes or rode bicycles into the country for camping trips. They also indulged in sexual relationships, an aspect of teenage life frowned upon by the strictly segregated Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls.
As the war progressed, however, the Pirates became involved in more serious resistance activities. As well as writing anti-Nazi graffiti and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, including those dropped by the Allies, they stole food, other supplies and even some explosives to supply small local adult resistance groups. Some offered shelter to German army deserters or escaped prisoners from concentration camps and forced labour camps, while others committed acts of sabotage. Jülich recalled how he and his friends threw bricks through munitions factory windows and poured sugar into the petrol tanks of Nazis’ cars. Other groups derailed train carriages loaded with munitions. By 1944 as many as 5,000 teenage tearaways were involved. The Gestapo declared the group criminals, and gang members were often rounded up and released with their heads shaved. In 1944, at the age of 15, Jülich was arrested with several of his friends for allegedly being involved in a plot to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Cologne. He spent four months in a cell at the Brauweiler prison on the outskirts of the city, where he was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. Though he survived, on November 10 1944 his friend and fellow prisoner, Bartholomaeus (Barthel) Schink, was executed without trial on the public gallows at Ehrenfeld railway station, along with seven adults and five other “Pirates”. Jülich was later transferred to a concentration camp where he survived beatings, starvation and typhus until the camp was liberated by the Americans in 1945.
After the war ended, Jülich eventually became the proprietor of a popular “music pub” in Cologne and in 1984 he was declared a “righteous Gentile” by Israel. Subsequently, in 1988, the Edelweiss Pirates were collectively recognised as ”Righteous among the Nations” by Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
Yet in Germany, while the efforts of the White Roses, a similar but smaller group based at Munich University, were celebrated from shortly after the war, the Edelweiss Pirates, possibly because of their “proletarian” background and their refusal to become involved in the officially-sanctioned political youth groups formed under Allied supervision after the war, continued to be regarded as criminals. In 1946 one Pirate was sentenced to death (though later reprieved), by a military court for his “very active part in carrying out the nefarious schemes of the Edelweiss Piraten”. In 1987 an investigation by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed that their Gestapo criminal records should stand. “The position of the authorities is that the Edelweiss Pirates were insects, anti-social elements and criminals,” Jülich complained.
With another former Pirate, Gertrud Koch, Jülich led a long campaign to have the group recognised as resistance fighters, but it was an uphill task. When, in 2004, the film director Helmer Niko von Glasow made Edelweiss Pirates, dedicated to Barthel Schink and two other Pirates, it was shown around the world, but had difficulties finding a distributor willing to take it on in Germany. During the campaign Jülich made a recording of the Pirates’ tramping song, Es War In Shanghai, a romantic anthem banned by the Nazis that tells of an encounter in a Shanghai bar between two German youths from Hamburg and Jim Parker, their friend from San Francisco. Jülich’s efforts were finally crowned with success in 2005 when the Pirates were “politically rehabilitated” by the German government, their criminal records were annulled, and they were officially recognised as “resistance fighters”.
