The Nazis didn’t just seize power—they were voted in. It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when Adolf Hitler was a name on a ballot in a democratic election. He was openly fascist and anti-Semitic, but the people chose to make him their leader. They supported him while he dissolved democracy.

SEE ALSO: 10 Bizarre Tales About Adolf Hitler

It’s easy to write off the rise of Nazism as a momentary lapse of reason, but the truth isn’t that simple. The people who voted for Hitler really thought they were making the best choice.

10 The War Guilt Clause

The fuse that sparked World War II was lit as soon as World War I ended. When peace was signed with the Treaty of Versailles, the Germans were forced to sign the “War Guilt Clause.” They had to put in writing that the war had been their fault alone.

Major restrictions were put on Germany as a result. They were forced to concede major parts of their territory. They were held responsible for all damages in the war and forced to pay 132 billion goldmarks in reparations, an expense that took up 10 percent of their annual national income.

Their military was kept in extreme checks. The German army was limited to 100,000 men, with no air force allowed at all. To most of the world, this was the beginning of a golden era of peace. But to many Germans, these were unfair restrictions that left them crippled.

From the very start, right-wing groups like the Nazis campaigned to tear up the Treaty of Versailles. They called it a “dictated peace” that oppressed the nation. At first, most Germans were so tired of war that they didn’t fight it. But, as the consequence of the treaty played out, that started to change.

9 The French Occupation Of The Ruhr

The German government couldn’t keep up with its reparations payments. By 1923, they were missing payments regularly, claiming that the burden was too much for them to handle. But the French were sure that this was a deliberate offense meant to test how far the Germans could provoke them. They struck back.

French and Belgian troops marched on Germany and took a part of the country called the Ruhr. This was Germany’s main center of coal, iron, and steel production. Without it, the German economy was completely crippled.

The people of the Ruhr tried to resist the occupation through passive resistance. They marched on strike, refusing to work for the French occupiers. It didn’t do any good. The French arrested the protesters and brought in their own workers to operate the mines. Peaceful resistance, the Germans were learning, was not working.

When the Germans caught up on their payments in 1925, the French left the Ruhr. By then, though, it was clear that land could be annexed and taken from the Germans at any moment. Slowly, the idea of tearing up the Treaty of Versailles was starting to seem more reasonable.

8 Hyperinflation

When the Ruhr was taken, inflation got out of control. The German mark had already been spiraling down in value. During World War I, the Germans had put 160 billion marks into their military. Now they were 156 billion marks in debt and owed 132 billion marks in reparations. With the Ruhr taken, they had lost one of the main forces in their economy.

The inflation in Germany was unbelievable. In 1914, before the war started, US$1 was worth 4.2 German marks. By 1923, the year the Ruhr was taken, US$1 was worth 4.2 trillion marks.

People across the country were starving. Money became completely worthless, and every penny a German had in savings was worth no more than kindling. People started to insist on being paid with food because nothing else had value.

In that year—1923—emigrations from Germany tripled. People were fleeing the country in which they’d lived. The suicide rate was skyrocketing. And in Germany’s darkest year, a young man named Adolf Hitler began his rise to power.

7 The Rise Of German Communism

The Nazis weren’t the only party on the rise. Communism was taking hold in Germany as well. No Communist group outside Russia was more powerful than the Communist Party of Germany.

The Communist Party was formed in Germany in 1918, the year that World War I ended. When the Russian Revolution took over, though, the German Communists changed. They threw their full support behind the USSR. They wanted Bolshevism for Germany.

A minority of people—about 10–15 percent of Germany—liked the idea enough to vote Communist. For the rest of the country, though, this was a threat, and the rise of Communism was something deeply troubling and dangerous.

The Nazis played into this fear. They spread stories about the dangers of Bolshevism and the threat that a Red revolution might happen at home—and it worked. As the Communists became more popular, the rest of the population turned more right-wing in response.

Soon, the Nazis were sending out a group of thugs called the Sturmabteilung to start brawls with Communists on the streets—and it didn’t hurt their popularity at all. Bolshevism, the German people agreed, was a real danger. Hitler was just a man tough enough to keep it at bay.

6 The Barmat Scandal

In 1924, the German government got caught accepting bribes. The Social Democratic Party, led by Chancellor Gustav Bauer, was in power at the time. They’d given millions of dollars to two Dutch investors, the Barmat brothers, who had promised to turn it into a fortune through currency speculation.

The Barmat brothers failed. Their investment company collapsed, and the German government lost millions. People started questioning why they’d been trusted with Germany’s money, and in the ensuing investigation, the answer became clear. Chancellor Bauer had been accepting bribes from the Barmats for years.

Chancellor Bauer was kicked out of office, and the Nazis jumped on the opportunity to make this a propaganda campaign. The Barmat brothers were Jewish, so the Nazis filled their papers with caricatures of corrupt Jewish businessmen. This, they argued, was proof that the government was corrupt—and that Jews were corrupt, too.

As late as 1930, the Nazis were still publishing campaign ads that brought up the Barmat scandal. Social Democrats, they said, were “Jews and Jewish lackeys,” voting for “the candidate of the Barmat block.”

5 Widespread Hatred Of Jews

Anti-Semitism existed in Germany before the Nazi Party came to power. By the early 1900s, there were already parties running on specifically anti-Jewish platforms. After the Russian Revolution, hyperinflation and the Barmat scandal struck in the span of two years. As a result, being a German Jew became a lot more dangerous.

While most Germans were going bankrupt, the Jews were viewed as privileged, rich, and corrupt. Jews made up only 1 percent of the German population, but they were 16 percent of all lawyers, 10 percent of all doctors, and 5 percent of all editors and writers. Generally speaking, they were people who had money while others were starving, which won them a lot of resentment.

At the same time, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was being blamed on Jews. The Germans believed that Jews were behind the growing Communist sentiment and would be a threat down the road.

Anti-Semitism became widespread. It wasn’t just the Nazis—almost every political party used anti-Semitic language in their campaigns. Hotels started refusing service to Jews. Priests started working criticism of Judaism into their sermons.

The Nazis led the charge. They promised to take control of Jewish shops and use them to lower expenses for the poor. The Nazis also started an organization supporting German doctors, helping them take jobs from Jews. They promised to muscle Jews out and keep Germans working—and a lot of Germans appreciated it.

4 The Stock Market Crash Of 1929

On October 29, 1929, the US stock market crashed. This was the beginning of the Great Depression, and few places were hit as hard as Germany.

What was left of the German economy was built on foreign money. They earned their wealth through foreign trade and, since 1924, had covered their costs through loans from the United States. When the Great Depression hit, those loans dried up, and the Americans started calling in the outstanding debts.

Germany was crippled. Industrial production dropped to 58 percent of its previous levels. Unemployment skyrocketed. By the end of 1929, 1.5 million Germans were out of work. By 1933, that number was up to six million.

Hitler was thrilled. With the economy collapsing, the German people were starting to doubt that a Democratic government could get things done. He said, “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented and in these days. For hard reality has opened the eyes of millions of Germans.”

3 The Social Democrats Skirted The Democratic Process

Shortly after the Great Depression began, the Social Democratic Party became more aggressive. As they only had a minority government, they couldn’t get any decisions through without the support of the other parties. So they found a work-around.

Article 48 of the German Constitution allowed the chancellor to make emergency decrees without following the democratic process. The Social Democrats made heavy use of it, first using it to put through a budget without approval from parliament. The people were furious. Socialist leader Dr. Rudolf Breitscheid called the Social Democratic Party a “veiled dictatorship.”

The Social Democrats called another election in 1930, hoping to get a majority so that they wouldn’t have to abuse Article 48. But it backfired. The Nazis campaigned like never before and skyrocketed in popularity.

In the 1928 election, the Nazis had only won 12 seats out of 491. After the reelection of 1930, they were up to 107 seats. In just two years, they went from a fringe party to the main opposition.

The reelection failed. The Social Democratic Party still didn’t have a majority. Although they kept using Article 48 to get decisions through, it didn’t do much to help the economy.

Two years later, another election was held. The German people were tired of the poverty and the corruption. They voted Nazi. What was once considered a group of radical extremists was now the ruling party of Germany.

2 The Reichstag Fire

The Nazis were in power, but they didn’t have a majority. They had only won 37.3 percent of the vote. Like the Social Democratic Party, the Nazis believed that they would have to struggle through with a minority government—until the Reichstag fire.

Days after Hitler became chancellor, a Communist sympathizer named Marinus van der Lubbe burned down the Reichstag, the German parliament building. He had almost certainly worked alone, but the Nazis seized on the opportunity. This, they declared, was proof that the Communists were planning to violently overthrow the state.

The Nazis used Article 48 to put through the Reichstag Fire Decree. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assembly, and restraints on police investigations were all suspended until the Communists could be put under control.

By using Article 48 for three years straight, the Social Democratic Party had already set a precedent. When the Nazis openly raided Communist Party offices and suppressed their publications, many people didn’t see it as a loss of rights. Instead, they saw it as a political party finally taking charge and doing something to make Germany a better place to live.

The Germans held another election on March 5, 1933. This time, though, the Communist Party wasn’t allowed to participate. So, with one opposition party out of the way, the Nazis got a majority government.

1 The Enabling Act

The Nazis were in power, but Germany was still a democracy—until they passed the Enabling Act. With this act in place, the Nazis had full power to enact any law without running it through parliament.

They needed support to do it, though. They need two-thirds of the parliament to vote for it, and they couldn’t do that without the support of other parties. So they pressured the others by reminding them of the Reichstag fire. A Nazi paper headline read, “Full powers—or else! We want the bill—or fire and murder!”

Hitler promised that he would use his increased powers sparingly. He promised, “The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.”

The parties believed him. The Enabling Act won near-universal support. Only one party, the Social Democrats, voted against it. Hitler jeered them, shouting, “You are no longer needed! The star of Germany will rise, and yours will sink! Your death knell has sounded!”

Hitler had absolute power. The other political parties were dissolved, and soon, the elections were stopped altogether. German democracy was over. Fascism had taken control—and the people had voted it in.

The 11th Olympic Games of the modern era was held in Berlin in 1936. It would go down in history as the “Nazi Games,” a vehicle of unabashed self-promotion for Adolf Hitler and his regime. The Nazis had hoped the Games would provide a clear demonstration of Aryan superiority and a vindication of their doctrine of the master race. Never before had politics intruded so brazenly into sports, making for a very interesting and controversial Olympics.

10The Counter-Olympics

As Berlin prepared to host the 1936 Olympics, many people were already suspicious of Nazi ideology and agenda. Sports insiders were particularly disturbed by reports of persecution of Jewish athletes. Many within the Olympic organization felt that participating in the coming Games was tantamount to showing support of the Nazi regime. Calls for boycott began to be heard. The debate was particularly intense in the United States, which traditionally fielded the largest team in the Olympics.

Other countries also had groups opposed to the Games. The new republic of Spain went beyond plans for a boycott and proposed an anti-Nazi counter-Olympics to be held in Barcelona, the city that lost out to Berlin in the 1931 vote for the host city. Barcelona had been greatly disappointed at the decision, believing that it was well prepared to hold the Games. Barcelona already had new, modern facilities used in the 1929 International Exposition, plus the Hotel Olimpico that could house the athletes.

Spain was determined to take the glory away from Hitler and the Nazi propaganda machine. Invitations to the “People’s Olympics” were sent out and answered by radical and left-wing athletes from around the world, including the US. There were German athletes who joined to protest the regime at home. Communists, socialists, anarchists—Barcelona swarmed with players of every leftist stripe, 6,000 athletes from 22 countries in all. To call out Nazi bigotry and racism, the emblem of the People’s Olympics depicted three muscled athletes: one white, one black, and the last of mixed ethnicity. The warm and fraternal atmosphere in Barcelona was evident.

But then, just 24 hours before the opening ceremony, the fascist General Francisco Franco launched the military revolt against the government. The Spanish Civil War had begun, in which Hitler would support Franco and the Nationalists. The People’s Olympics was canceled. Nevertheless, individual players had spoken out their conscience and shamed the Nazis. Eventually, Spain and the USSR would be the only countries to boycott Berlin. Barcelona got the chance to host an Olympic party—legitimate this time—in 1992.

9The Nazi Origins Of The Torch Relay

No moment better defines the modern Olympics than the torch relay, a moving symbol of international brotherhood and cooperation. From the lighting of the sacred flame in Olympia, Greece, to its spectacular entrance into the stadium, it cannot fail to excite and electrify. That’s what German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wanted spectators to experience—not for brotherhood but for the glory of the Nazi regime.

Not many people know that the torch relay is a Nazi invention. The ancient Greeks did run relay races that involved flames as part of their worship to the gods. But all the modern Games before Berlin did not have a torch relay. The idea was not actually Goebbels’s. It was proposed by Carl Diem, secretary general of the Games’ organizing committee and inspired by the flame that burned at the Amsterdam Olympiad in 1928. Goebbels decided to squeeze the last drop of propaganda mileage out of the torch relay, which satisfied Nazi thirst for spectacle and ceremony.

At the lighting ceremony in Greece, the flame was dedicated to Hitler as the band played the Nazi anthem Die Fahne Hoch. By depicting the relay as an ancient tradition, the Nazis were proclaiming themselves heirs of civilization’s progress from Greece, to Rome, and finally to Germany. The torch’s 2,500-kilometer (1,500 mi) route to Berlin passed through Czechoslovakia, where it provoked a clash between ethnic Germans and Czechs. On the last stage of the relay, only blond and blue-eyed athletes were allowed to bear the torch.

Just as Goebbels had hoped, the stirring sight of the flame being carried into the stadium by a fine specimen of Aryan manhood impressed spectators into concluding that the Nazis were strong but not brutal. The New York Times reported that Germany showed “goodwill” and “flawless hospitality.” The Associated Press assured its readers that the Games betokened peace in Europe.

The hollowness of Nazi propaganda was revealed by the catastrophic war years. Nevertheless, at the resumption of the Olympics in London in 1948, the torch relay was retained with a brighter message of friendship and peace. It still remains a symbol of goodwill, one legacy of Nazism we decided was worth keeping.

8Pigeons Poop On Der Fuhrer’s Show

The opening ceremony was a dazzling display of German power. Hitler’s motorcade bore down avenues bedecked with swastikas to the Olympic stadium. In the skies above Berlin, the airship Hindenburg majestically swept the clouds. The Fuhrer and the Nazi hierarchy proceeded down the steps into the arena, to the screams of the delirious and worshipful crowd of 100,000. Here were the gods of the new Olympus. It was Hitler’s day, his moment of glorification. But it seemed the birds had other ideas.

Louis Zamperini, a runner in the US Olympic team, recalled the Chaplinesque moment worthy of Hitler’s mustache when thousands pigeons were released. “And then they shot a cannon and (it) scared the poop out of the pigeons. Literally scared the poop out of them. And we had straw hats and you could hear the pitter-patter on our hats. I mean it was a mass of droppings and it was so funny.” With typical American bravado, Zamperini would later steal the swastika flag hanging outside Hitler’s office building, the Reich Chancellery, outrunning the guards and keeping the flag as a souvenir.

There were other comedies of error. The New Zealand team mistook a German standing erect in front and to the left of Hitler’s dais for the Fuhrer himself and removed their hats to this imposing figure. They then put them on again as they passed Hitler. The spectators apparently misread the French team’s Olympic salute (right arm thrust out sideways) as the Nazi salute (arm out front) and cheered their traditional enemy in genuine approbation. Of all the national teams, only the US refused to lower their flags to Hitler, and an official statement explained the controversial failure to dip the flag as a matter of army regulations.

Another embarrassing incident during the first day involved Liechtenstein and Haiti. Like someone at a party discovering another wearing a similar dress, the Liechtenstein team was surprised that the national flag of Haiti was of the same blue and red pattern as Liechtenstein’s. This spelled potential mix-up in the medal ceremonies. Fortunately, Haiti’s only athlete withdrew, and Liechtenstein didn’t win any medals. To prevent future confusion, Liechtenstein added a crown to its flag a year later.

7The First Televised Games

The 1936 Berlin Olympics was the world’s first televised sporting event. The games were broadcast by the German firms Telefunken and Fernseh. Twenty-one cameras, three of which were the 2-meter-long (6 ft) Fernsehkanonen (“television cannon”), provided live transmission over a 72-hour period to special viewing booths called “Public Television Offices” in Berlin and Potsdam. Around Berlin, 150,000 people crowded into the 28 viewing rooms.

The primitive RCA and Farnsworth equipment produced only fuzzy black-and-white images. But in 1936, it was significant progress from following games via radio, which was how sports fans tuned in since 1921, when Pittsburgh’s KDKA began broadcasting boxing, later followed by baseball and football. It was also a German technological coup that it had beaten the US in the TV race. The Germans conveniently ignored that they were using a technology pioneered by Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian Jew, and Philo Farnsworth, a Mormon—two men whose ethnic and religious backgrounds would have earned them the contempt of the Nazis.

The Germans knew they were engineering the future. The program guide Television In Germany concludes: “From these initial stages of television in broadcasting and telephony, there is a growing up a cultural development that promises to be of unsuspected importance to the progress of mankind.”

America did have one consolation. The first broadcast showed Jesse Owens winning the 100-meter final. It was ironic that German technology would show the African-American Owens stomping on the notion of Aryan superiority.

6Jesse Owens And His Nazi Shoes

Jesse Owens won four golds in Berlin, for the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4×100 meter relay. He was the acknowledged superstar of the Olympics. What is less known is that he got a little help from a member of the Nazi Party named Adolf “Adi” Dassler, a shoemaker whose company, Gebruder Dassler Schuhfabrik, specialized in track and field footwear. Dassler came to the Olympic Village with the intention of having as many athletes as possible wear his shoes. Dassler did not have the marketing and advertising tools to promote his brand, so everything had to be done by word of mouth.

Dassler approached his friend and the coach of the German track team, Jo Waitzer, who supported his endeavor to design running shoes that would improve the performance of track athletes. Waitzer agreed to persuade the runners even from other national teams to try out the shoes. Having read about Owens’s performances in the Olympic trials, Dassler was particularly interested in getting the shoes on the American’s agile feet. Dassler urged Waitzer to hand out some shoes to Owens. The coach was hesitant, as he knew his life could be put in danger if the authorities ever found out he was in contact with the African-American star.

Nevertheless, Waitzer braved the risk and smuggled two or three pairs to Owens, all personally crafted by Adi himself. They were made of glove leather, reinforced at the heels and toes with six track spikes. It was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time. Owens won the 100 meters in his German shoes, and by the third pair, Owens said he wanted only those shoes or none at all. He became the unwitting first pitchman for the product.

Berlin was soon abuzz that the impressive black American had accomplished his record-setting feats in shoes made in the small German village of Herzogenaurach. Dassler’s sales skyrocketed. It was worldwide prominence after that for the shoe company everyone knows today from Adi Dassler’s name—Adidas.

5The Dirtiest Basketball Final

Berlin showcased the first-ever Olympic basketball competition. Dr. James Naismith, the game’s inventor, received the honor of tossing the ball for the tip-off of the very first game, Estonia vs. France. The USA was the clear favorite, being the sport’s country of origin, and true to expectations, they steamrolled the opposition effortlessly before facing Canada in the finals.

Basketball was meant to be an indoor game, but the German organizers were unfamiliar with basketball (Germany had no basketball team) and failed to provide indoor facilities. Instead, the games were played outdoors on a clay tennis court, where goals with wooden backboards had been installed. The players had to make do with a ball that was bigger and heavier than today’s. There was a slit on one side for the bladder, so the ball wasn’t perfectly round. This made dribbling on the clay difficult, even in dry conditions.

The day before the final, there was a torrential downpour, turning the court into a muddy mess. The Germans wanted to get the game over with and did not call a postponement as the rains continued the next day. Americans squared off with Canadians in the dirt surrounded by 500 spectators. Dribbling was now well-nigh impossible, and the ball was moved up the court chiefly by passing. The slippery court substantially slowed down the game. The German referees, who didn’t speak English, officiated atrociously.

In the midst of these difficult conditions, the score only stood at 14–4 by halftime of the 40-minute regulation period. The US inflicted a crushing 19–8 victory on Canada at the end.

4Hitler’s Football Embarrassment

Adolf Hitler was never a football fan. He believed that building up a physically fit German youth could be better accomplished by sports like boxing and athletics. But the Nazis did support a strong football team that could play a part in the propaganda machine. They organized clubs and encouraged people to play. Football was also the most popular sport and guaranteed to make the Nazis money.

Team manager Otto Nerz made the Germans a powerful football team, and in 1936, it was joint favorite with Great Britain. The first match was a devastating 9–0 triumph over Luxembourg, a spectacle so overwhelming that the officials decided to invite Hitler to the next match against Norway. Hitler had never been to a football game before, but surely he would not want to miss his Aryan superstars dominating the opposition, whom they had defeated in their last eight meetings. This one should be a breeze.

Hitler gave in to his underlings and, with 55,000 other spectators, took his place at the Poststadion, preparing to savor the sweet victory of his Wunderteam. The Germans did not disappoint in the early minutes—the Norwegians hardly made it past the half-line. But then, the Germans began bungling their chances. Norway found an opening and crashed through with the first goal. Hitler was agitated and began to explode in a tantrum. The Germans doubled on the attack, with Nerz ordering the defenders into the action. But another Norwegian shot sailed past the goalie. Hitler had seen enough. He rose up in an uncontrollable rage and left his first and only football game in a huff. The score was 2–0 for Norway at the final whistle.

3Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia

The 1936 Games came to be immortalized on film, using pioneering moviemaking techniques that changed cinema forever. The monumental masterpiece was Olympia, directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Unlike the blatant celebration of Nazi power in her earlier Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl’s heroes in Olympia were those who genuinely excelled, regardless of nationality or race. Aside from spectacle, Riefenstahl emphasized the beauty of the human form. To accomplish this, she manipulated the camera lens in ways never done before.

Riefenstahl was one of the first to use a moving camera for traveling shots in a documentary, putting her crew on roller skates as they took the footage. She built a track so the camera could move alongside the sprinters. She had a pit dug so she could film the pole vault against the backdrop of the sky. Riefenstahl developed a special 600-mm telephoto lens for close-ups and compact shots and sent aloft a balloon with a small 5-mm camera for aerial views. An underwater camera that changed speed and focus skillfully managed the tempo of the different diving events.

Riefenstahl edited the shots for maximum dramatic impact. The transition shots from one event to the next were wonderfully fluid. Close-ups captured the sweat and strain of marathon runners, their exhaustion and determination to go on. This was interspersed with crowd reaction shots with synchronized background music giving the athletes’ movements the impression of a dance. This was back in the days when to simply attach any sound to film was difficult. But Riefenstahl did it with impressive precision that stunned audiences. Never before had a documentary been produced with editing and sound.

There is controversy over whether Olympia was overt propaganda or not. On one hand, Goebbels clearly was involved in the film. On the other hand, Riefenstahl featured African Americans Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalf, whose successes Hitler clearly resented. She was also not averse to recording German defeats at the hands of other competitors. Later on, Riefenstahl left overtly Nazi footage on the cutting room floor. Nevertheless, the Nazis used the feel-good and inspirational theme of Olympia to reflect back on the regime.

Olympia won the grand prize at the 1938 International Film Festival in Venice, beating Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney himself welcomed Riefenstahl to Hollywood with open arms, the only studio executive to do so in the wake of Kristallnacht. Even today, Olympia‘s brilliant cinematography continues to mesmerize.

2Art As Sport

Once upon a time, the Olympics awarded medals for art. It was founder Pierre de Coubertin’s vision that the Games should highlight aesthetics as well as athletics. Every Olympics between 1912 and 1948 awarded gold, silver, and bronze in five categories: architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music. All works had to be sports-themed—paintings, for example, could feature athletes in action, while musical pieces might pay homage to a sport or an individual competitor. The German Art Committee proposed to add a Works for the Screen category for 1936, but de Coubertin apparently smelled a rat and turned it down, sensing that it would be a vehicle for purely propaganda films.

In Berlin, the Germans dominated the art competition jury, taking liberties with home court advantage to remedy the situation that saw Germany haul in just one medal in the last two Olympics. Remedy it did—German artists won five out of the nine medals handed out. German musicians made a clean sweep of the Musical Composition Solo and Chorus categories. The only American to win a medal was Charles Downing Lay, with his Architecture entry “Marine Park in Brooklyn.”

Initially, the public showed no enthusiasm for the art competition. But a flurry of propaganda eventually interested 70,000 people to view the exhibition, making it one of the most successful Olympic art competitions. We can only speculate how much money the Nazis raked in from the sales of the artworks, as transactions were made “without the usual formalities,” according to the official report. To the delight of de Coubertin, however, the award-winning musical compositions were played by the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert at the end of the Games.

The amateurism clause of the Olympics eventually killed the art competition. The quality of the entries never seemed to satisfy the jury of art critics, and it became the practice to withhold medals and proclaim no winner. It was discontinued after the 1948 London Olympics.

1Elizabeth Robinson’s Unbelievable Comeback

Elizabeth Robinson’s gold in 1936 came five years after she was given up for dead, her battered body taken to a mortician for burial.

Betty was a native of the Chicago suburb of Riverdale and attended Thornton Township High School. One day in 1928, her biology teacher spotted her chasing a commuter train and was astonished at her speed as she caught up with it. After timing her later as she ran 50 meters (150 ft) down the school corridor, the teacher encouraged Betty to join the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club. Soon, Betty was clocking near-record times at competitive events. In July, she passed the trials and made it to the 1928 Olympics US team.

At 16, having never been away from home, Betty was on a ship to Europe. This was the first time female athletes were allowed in track and field events, over the objections of Baron de Coubertin and Pope Pius XI. In Amsterdam, Betty became the first woman—and the youngest—to win the gold in the 100 meters, setting a world record of 12.2 seconds. She returned to the US a heroine and continued to break records thereafter.

Then, on a hot June day in 1931, tragedy struck. Betty was with her cousin Wilson Palmer in a biplane 200 meters (600 ft) up when the plane stalled and nosedived. The horrific impact left both unconscious. The man who pulled Betty from the debris saw her mangled body and bloody face and thought he was looking at a corpse. He put her in the trunk of his car to a nursing home and left her with the undertaker there. Fortunately, the undertaker noticed she was still alive, and she was taken to the emergency room.

Betty drifted in and out of consciousness for 11 weeks while she was in the hospital. Doctors repaired her damaged left leg by inserting a rod and pins to stabilize it. Doctors feared Betty would never walk again. The media proclaimed her running days over. Betty’s left leg became half an inch shorter than the right. She was in a wheelchair for four months. It was a crushing blow for Betty, who wanted to defend her 100-meter title at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.

But with grim determination, Betty struggled to walk then run again. By 1934, she was back in training. She missed LA, but was ready for Berlin as a member of the 4×100 relay team. Since Betty’s shortened leg made her unable to start in the crouch position, she was allowed to start standing up. Betty ran the third leg, handing over her baton as the favored German team fumbled and dropped theirs. The Americans surged forward, giving Betty Robinson her improbable second Olympic gold. The International Olympic Committee called her comeback “one of the most remarkable in the annals of the Games.”

Betty retired from competition soon after and married Richard Schwartz in 1939. She continued as a coach and gave talks to athletic associations across the US. Elizabeth Robinson Schwartz died in 1999, an almost forgotten Olympic heroine.

+The Muslim Women Who Snubbed Hitler

Halet Cambel personified the new Turkish woman in the 1930s. She exemplified the transformation of Muslim Turkey into a modern secular state led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, where women received the same rights and opportunities as men.

Cambel was born in Berlin to a family with close connections to Kemal. She was a sickly child, falling prey to typhoid and then to hepatitis. Cambel got herself into shape with exercise. She was fascinated by stories of knights, which led her to take up fencing under a Russian coach. She returned to Istanbul in 1924 to study archaeology, but her fencing skills earned her a place in the 1936 Turkish Olympic team with fellow fencer Suat Fetgeri Aseni Tari. They were the first Turkish women to compete in the Games. Cambel was repulsed by Nazi ideology and did not want to go, but the Turkish government prodded her to participate. Her disgust toward Hitler must have been heightened when she saw the Fuhrer’s infuriated reaction to Jesse Owens’s victory.

Cambel and Tari did not win any medals, but they will be remembered as the women who defied Hitler. Cambel recalled the moment: “Our assigned German official asked us to meet Hitler. We actually would not have come to Germany at all if it were down to us, as we did not approve of Hitler’s regime. We said that we would never have come to Berlin if our government had not told us to do so. When the official asked us to go up and introduce ourselves to Hitler, we firmly rejected her offer.”

Halet Cambel settled down to life as an archaeologist after the Olympics.

Larry is a freelance writer whose main interest is history.

It is one of our favorite fantasies: what if someone had killed Adolf Hitler? How different would the world be if somebody had just taken out the future Führer before he could plunge the world into war and horror?

But it’s not as if nobody ever tried. More than a few people did their best to take out the leader of the Third Reich—but Hitler, as it turns out, was surprisingly hard to kill. Dozens of people tried to take out Hitler—at least four before he became Chancellor and more than 40 afterward—but nobody ever pulled it off.

It’s one of the forgotten stories of history: the many, many plots to take out Hitler. Some are stories of heroism, some of madness, and some are just downright strange—but if any one of them had succeeded, the world would have completely changed.

10Johann Georg Elser Missed Hitler by Minutes

On November 8, 1938, Hitler came within inches of death. He was scheduled to make a speech at the Munich Beer Hall, but, worried about the bad weather, decided to rush out 30 minutes early to catch a train back home. And if he hadn’t, he would have died that night.

Less than ten minutes after Hitler left the building, a timed explosive in the column behind his podium exploded.^[1] It killed eight people, wounded sixty, and undoubtedly would have incinerated the Führer if he had not just snuck out of the building.

The bomb had been planted by Johann Georg Elser, a carpenter, a union member, and a communist. He had told a friend a few days before that Germany would never get back on track unless someone brought down Hitler. With him out of the way, Elser believed, the Communist revolution could begin.

Hitler survived because of what is tempting to call an act of God, and Elser was caught trying to flee into Switzerland. He was tortured, sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp, and ultimately killed.

The very day after his plot failed was the Kristallnacht—the day Jewish businesses and synagogues across Germany were burnt to the crowd; the day, some would say, the Holocaust began.

9Maurice Bavaud Tried to Kill Hitler the next Day

Hitler would not have survived another 24 hours if Maurice Bavaud had been a better shot.

Bavaud was a theology student from Switzerland who, whether in a fit of madness or wisdom, convinced himself that Hitler was the antichrist. Hitler, he believed, was a threat to the Christian faith and to humanity itself—and it was his divine duty to kill him.

Bavaud packed a pistol and headed into Germany, where he desperately tried to arrange a meeting with the man he planned to murder. When he realized it would fail, he joined a crowd of eager of Nazi supporters watching Hitler parade down the streets of Munich, his pistol hidden in his pocket.

When Hitler came his way, though, the crowd threw up their hands in salute, blocking Bavaud’s shot. He only had a few seconds to decide whether he should fire and trust that God would lead bullet safely through the crowd and to his target—or if he should put his gun down and be sure he did not accidentally end an innocent’s life.

Bavaud decided not to risk it and ran. Shortly after, on a train ride to France, he was caught using a fake ticket. When the guards looked through his things, they found the gun and a map of Hitler’s vacation home.^[2] For Bavaud, it was all over.

Bavaud was executed by guillotine in May of 1941. “I want to cry, but I can’t,” he wrote his parents on the day before his death. “I feel my heart would explode.”

8William Seabrook Tried to Kill Hitler With Voodoo Magic

While the Germans and the Swiss were trying to take out Hitler with guns and explosives, an American writer was taking a slightly different route. He was going to take out Hitler, William Seabrook resolved, with black magic.

On January 22, 1941, Seabrook gathered a group of friends together in a cabin in Maryland for a “hex party.”^[3] Until the break of dawn, they would drink rum, pound on drums, and try to summon pagan gods to take out the leader of Germany.

They dressed a dummy up in a Nazi uniform, chanting at it, “You are Hitler! Hitler is you!” Then Seabrook led his followers to call the pagan deity Istan to transmit the dummy’s wounds to Hitler while they spat at it, “We curse you!”

With the pounding of drums around them, the drunken occultists hammered nails into the dummy’s heart. Then Seabrook chopped off its head with an ax and buried it deep in the woods, leaving it for the worms to devour.

Hitler, somehow, survived this attempt on his life. Historians remain at a loss to explain how this plan could have failed.

7The First Attempt on Hitler’s Life

By then, people had already been trying to kill Hitler for at least 20 years. That was when the first confirmed attempt on his life happened: November 1921, long before Hitler took control of Germany.

He had been speaking at the Munich Beer Hall, addressing a massive audience of hundreds about the glory of National Socialism. His crowd, though, was not entirely supporters. More than 300 people there were bitter opponents on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, and while they listened to Hitler espouse ideas that went against everything they believed in, they were getting blindingly drunk.

One line set them off, and a mob of people started hurtling beer steins at the stage. Hitler’s supporters struck back, and soon the place had erupted into a full riot. Chairs were flying through the air, lead pipes and brass knuckles were in people’s hands, and the place was getting bloody.

Hitler’s guards started forcing the troublemakers out, but in the chaos, somebody pulled out a gun and opened fire on Hitler.^[4] That could have been the end of the Nazi Party—but he missed.

Hitler was unfazed. He didn’t run for cover—in fact, according to some accounts, he even pulled out a gun of his own and shot back. Then he went on with his speech, talking for another 20 minutes, even while his audience were beating each other bloody and trying to kill him.

6Operation Flash

Not every German was happy when Hitler came into power. As the Nazis started erasing their political opponents and massacring Jews, Gen. Henning von Tresckow vowed to put an end to the Nazi Party. He helped start the German Resistance and promised he would stop at nothing to take out Adolf Hitler.

He got his chance on March 13, 1943. Hitler was flying from Vinnitsa, USSR, back into Germany and, on his way home, would have a layover in Smolensk. There, Tresckow would have his opportunity to strike.

He handed one of the officers flying with Hitler a bottle of expensive Brandy, pretending it was a gift for the Nazi officials in Berlin.^[5] Inside the bottle, though, Tresckow had hidden a bomb set with a 30 minutes fuse. The officer fell for it and put the explosive bottle in the plane, and Tresckow watched them take off, waiting to see Hitler explode in the sky.

The bomb didn’t go off. The luggage compartment it was stored in was too cold, and the explosives failed to ignite. Hitler made it safely home, unaware his life was ever in danger—and a frantic Tresckow had to start calling people in Berlin, begging them to sneak the bottle out before anyone found it.

5Rudolf von Gersdorff Got a Bomb Within Inches of Hitler

Tresckow did not give up. Shortly after, he devised another plot to take out Hitler. Someone would have to be willing to sacrifice their own life to make it work—Nazi General Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff volunteered. He was ready to die if it meant a world without Hitler.

Hitler was scheduled to be in Berlin opening an exhibition of captured Russian equipment on March 15, 1943, and Göring and Himmler would be with him. If Gerstorff could get close enough to them to set off a bomb, he would take out the three most powerful men in the Nazi Party in one blast.

Gerstorff packed his coat pockets with explosives rigged to explode ten minutes after he set the fuse and went to the exhibition, struggling to look calm while he waited for his target to arrive. Hitler, though, was hours late—and Gerstorff was forced to stand around a crowd of Nazis with bombs in his pockets.

When Hitler showed up, a speaker announced he only had eight minutes to spend on the tour.^[6] That meant that if Gerstorff started his ten-minute timer, his bomb would not go off until after Hitler had left. He would blow up himself and an audience of spectators—but the Führer would walk free.

It wasn’t worth the risk. Gerstorff had to stand, smile, and watch Adolf Hitler breeze through the exhibition—and then get out before anyone noticed what he had hidden in his coat.

4The Oster Conspiracy

In 1938, Hans Oster, head of Germany’s Military Intelligence Office, planned to not only take out Hitler but to overthrow the entire Nazi Party. Hitler had demanded control of Czechoslovakia, and Oster was sure his threats would pull Germany into a world war. He was going to stop it.

He planned a coup d’etat. With a team of 60 officers, Oster was going to take Germany from the Nazi Party. He would arrest Hitler and, one way or another, get rid of him. Some wanted to execute him, some wanted to declare him mentally ill,^[7] and Oster himself wanted to gun him down and pretend he was resisting arrest—but everyone agreed that Hitler would have to go.

The coup d’etat never happened. To everyone’s surprise, the Munich Agreement let Germany annex Czechoslovakia without firing a single shot, and the world war Oster had feared did not happen. The conspirators fell apart, believing the crisis was over. And by the time the war had really started, they were too fractured to do anything to stop it.

3The British Snuck Estrogen into Hitler’s Food

Not every assassination plan ended with Hitler dead. Some were just character assassinations—but they were every bit as sensational as the plots to kill him. Like, for example, the British plot to feed Hitler estrogen.

Hitler’s sister was a mild-mannered secretary, and the British were convinced that, if Hitler got in touch with his feminine side, he would become as docile as she was. They had spies on hand who could get access to his food,^[8] and while they were not sure they would get poison past his food testers, they were pretty sure they could get estrogen supplements into his diet.

This wasn’t just a hare-brained plan—they actually did it. The British bribed a gardener to inject estrogen into his carrots, and he agreed to do it. The plot to feminize Hitler went into motion.

It is not entirely clear how it all ended, but it does not seem to have worked. Perhaps the food testers spotted the estrogen-laced carrots, or maybe the gardener sold the spies out. Or—who knows?—maybe the plan worked, and the Nazi invasion of Russia was all just a very confused man struggling with the rush of new hormones that came with transitioning into womanhood.

2The 20 July Plot

On July 20, 1944, Count Stauffenberg came the closest anyone ever would to killing Hitler. He had the chance to step into the Wolf’s Lair, the top secret conference room where Hitler conspired with his most trusted men, and he was going to use that chance to bring the Second World War to an early end.

He brought a briefcase full of explosives with him and snuck off into a room to set the fuses. He only managed to light one, though, before a guard knocked on the door and told him that Hitler was waiting for him. Stauffenberg had to head in with only one bomb triggered to blow and hope it was enough to take out Hitler.

He headed into the conference room with his briefcase bomb and slid it under the conference table, trying to push it as close to Hitler as he could. Then he excused himself, stepped out, and waited for the explosion.

The bomb went off, blowing the room to pieces. Four people died—but with only one fuse lit, it was not strong enough to finish off Hitler. The Führer got out with only a few injuries,^[9] and Stauffenberg was caught and killed.

1Operation Foxley

The British had all kinds of plots to kill Hitler. First, they plotted to bomb Hitler’s private train, and then later to poison his water supply—but they could not get any of them to work.

That changed, though, in 1944, when they captured one of Hitler’s personal guards. They interrogated him and found out that he worked at Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps, and he was willing to tell them what they needed to know to take him out.

When Hitler was at his retreat, the guard told them, the Nazi flag was hoisted over the building. Every day at 10:00 a.m., he would take a solitary walk to a nearby teahouse.^[10] For about 20 minutes, he would be unguarded and alone, walking down a path by a forest where a sniper could easily be hidden.

The British had everything in place to do it. They had a marksman ready, and an inside man who was willing to help him get in—and the plan probably would have worked.

Lt. Col Ronald Thornley, though, managed to convince them that they were better off leaving Hitler alive. Killing him would make him a martyr, keep the ideas of Nazism alive, and a better strategist would be put in Hitler’s place. By then, the war was almost over. The Allies were actually better off with Hitler alive than dead.

The Third Reich, under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, ruled Germany for 12 years. Their reign of terror changed the world forever.

Many Germans were deceived by Hitler. In the early years, they embraced him as the savior who would pull Germany out of a long economic depression and make their country great again. There was a lot of emphasis on national pride. The Nazi Party promised young Germans a new future in a brand-new Germany, and millions of children eagerly joined the Hitler Youth and similar clubs. Not only were the outings fun, but the youth enjoyed wearing uniforms, waving flags, and earning badges.

But not all of the young people in Germany and other Nazi-occupied areas were deluded by the propaganda. In a time when free speech could have deadly consequences, some wrote and distributed pamphlets denouncing the Nazi regime. Others hid Jews or spied for the underground. Some even stole weapons and sabotaged Nazi operations.

Here are their stories:

10 Helmuth Hubener

In 1939, the Nazis passed a law banning all foreign radio broadcasts, even threatening people with execution for listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other Allied broadcasts.

In 1941, 16-year-old Helmuth Hubener (center above) began secretly listening to the BBC. As he listened to British war reports and compared them with German reports, he discovered that he had been deceived. The BBC reported victories and defeats on both sides of the war. The German news only reported German victories.

He held a secret after-hours meeting with his two best friends, Karl-Hinz Schnibbe (right above) and Rudolf Wobbe (left above). All three were fascinated by the broadcast. Helmut located a typewriter, carbon copy paper, and a swastika stamp. He wrote essays including “Hitler the Murderer” and “Do You Know That They are Lying to You?”^[1]

Hubener enlisted his two friends to distribute the flyers. They placed them in apartment buildings, mailboxes, and telephone booths. As a result, the Gestapo arrested all three. They were found guilty of high treason, and Hubener was beheaded on October 27, 1942, aged only 17.

9 Hans And Sophie Scholl (The White Rose)

As a young lad, Hans Scholl eagerly embraced the Hitler Youth. He became a squad leader of 155 boys. He formed an elite squad to train future leaders for the Fatherland. Eventually, however, he became disenchanted.

In 1942, Hans and a few of his med school classmates started the White Rose. Dismayed by all the surrounding propaganda, they wanted to challenge people with the truth. They printed thousands of leaflets on a hand-crafted duplicating machine, stuffed them into stamped envelopes, and addressed them with random numbers from the phone book. Sophie Scholl, Hans’s sister, soon joined the White Rose. Sophie believed that Hitler was trying to destroy Christianity and replace it with Nazism.

When Hans and his friends received orders to spend their semester as medics on the Russian Front, the White Rose temporarily stopped production. Being on the front lines gave these students an even greater desire to wake up the German people. They had seen horrendous conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto. They knew the German army was losing the war, even as German papers boasted of victory. When they returned to school, they stepped up their operation with renewed zeal.

On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie arrived early in the morning to distribute White Rose pamphlets in the classroom buildings at Munich University. Eager to share all the leaflets, they climbed to an atrium above the building and tossed the remaining pamphlets to the floor just as students entered the building.

They were spotted, however, and a Nazi officer arrested them. After a four-day trial, Hans and Sophie were beheaded by the Gestapo. Sophie’s final words summed up her mission: “But what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”^[2]

8 Knud Pedersen And The Churchill Club

Knud Pedersen, 14 years old, was outraged when the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940. In less than one day, Denmark surrendered to the Nazis. In 1941, Knud (upper right above) and seven classmates at Aalborg Cathedral School formed the Churchill Club, named after one of their heroes, Winston Churchill.

They began their war with blue paint in broad daylight. They poured paint on German roadsters that lined the streets and splashed paint on German barracks and Nazi headquarters. They turned newly placed German road signs in the opposite direction or sometimes destroyed them. They told their parents they were playing bridge.

All club members pledged to create acts of sabotage. They stole weapons from the Germans and used them to make explosives. They stored the weapons in the Cathedral School. When the Gestapo uncovered the weapons at the school, all eight members of the Churchill Gang were arrested and sent to Nyborg State Prison.^[3]

In 1942 and 1943, most of Denmark’s resistance came from the Churchill Club. By 1944, Denmark became known for its underground. Smuggled guns were buried in people’s gardens. Underground newspapers revealed the truth about the war, and massive labor strikes challenged German authority.

7 Irene Gut

Irene Gut (later Opdyke) became the live-in housekeeper for Major Eduard Rugemer, a prominent Nazi. Already involved the Polish resistance, she soon began sheltering 12 Jews in the former servants’ quarters located in the basement of the house.

All went well for eight months, until Major Rugemer found three Jews in his kitchen. After getting over the initial shock, he offered Irene a deal: The Jews could stay if she would be his mistress. Irene, though shocked and humiliated, agreed.

Irene confessed the arrangement to a country priest. Years later, she would remember his judgement: “I was expecting him to say ‘Well, you had no choice, a human life is more important’ but instead he told me that I had to turn everyone out, that my mortal soul is more important than anything else. Well, I could not agree with this.”^[4]

Irene Gut Opdyke spent the last 30 years of her life traveling the United States to tell her story to American schoolchildren.

6 Stefania Podgorska

At age 14, Stefania Podgorska was living with the Diamants, a Jewish family in Poland. When the Diamants were forced into the ghetto, they begged Stefania to stay in their apartment. Stefania smuggled food into the ghetto. Eventually, Mrs. Diamant was sent to Auschwitz.

One night, several weeks later, Max Diamant (Mrs. Diamant’s son) knocked on Stefania’s door. He had jumped off a train bound for a concentration camp. Even though she knew she could face the death penalty, she began hiding him. His brother’s fiancee escaped the ghetto and also moved into the house. In a short time, 11 more Jews were living in the attic.

For the last eight months of the Occupation, Stefania was ordered to allow two German nurses and their boyfriends to live in her house. The Jews remained in the attic, quiet and motionless, until the war was over. They all survived.

After the war, Max Diamant, her first tenant, changed his name to Josef Burzminski and asked Stefania to marry him.^[5] They moved to the United States.

5 Diet Eman

Diet Eman was planning her wedding when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. She watched the soldiers marching into the Jewish neighborhood. They broke windows and set synagogues on fire. Her friends received official deportation letters. They were expected to report to the railroad station with a single suitcase. She knew they would be sent to concentration camps.

She and her fiance joined the Dutch Resistance. They located hiding places for Jews and stole identification papers and ration cards from the Germans. They assisted downed pilots in Nazi territory. As Diet biked across Holland, she sent reports to the Allies of German troop movements.

In May 1944, Eman was arrested and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. After four months, she managed to convince the Gestapo that she was harmless and feeble-minded. When they released her, she returned to resistance work.^[6]

4 Hortense Daman

Hortense Daman (later Clews) was only 14 when Germany occupied Belgium. She began her resistance work delivering La Libre Belgique (The Free Belgium), an underground newspaper. Soon, she was carrying critical messages across the country.

Hortense became an excellent courier, able to remain cool under pressure. It was difficult for German officers to take the beautiful blonde seriously. Since her mother owned a grocery store, delivering food became a convenient cover for her spy work.

Before long, she was also delivering explosives. One day, she was delivering grenades hidden under a load of eggs. When intercepted by a German officer, she offered him some eggs (a great delicacy during the war.) He snatched the eggs from her hand before waving her away.^[7]

Hortense and her parents were betrayed and arrested. Hortense and her mother were sent to Ravensbruck, her father to Buchenwald. Hortense became the subject of horrific experiments while incarcerated. Miraculously, however, she and her parents all survived.

3 Fernande Keufgens

In 1942, Fernande Keufgens (later Davis) boarded a train headed to a German munitions factory in Poland, which she had been drafted to work at. She had been told that her father would go to prison if she did not get on the train. She and three others, however, jumped off the locomotive before it crossed the German border.^[8]

After jumping from the train, Fernande walked for miles through the countryside to find her uncle Hubert, a devout priest working for the Army of Liberation, a Belgian resistance group. She begged him to let her join the resistance.

She delivered false identification papers and food stamps to help Jews escape Belgium. She was accosted many times by the Nazis. Because she spoke German, however, officers were more likely to trust her.

2 Swing Youth

On March 2, 1940, German police raided a dance party in Hamburg. They found teens dancing to forbidden swing music from Great Britain and the United States. The young people wiggled and gyrated. They formed circles with jumping and clapping. Girls were wore makeup and painted their nails.

The Swing Youth rejected the Nazi lifestyle. They clearly preferred British and American culture to German nationalism. They rejected wearing uniforms, marching, drilling, and regulated hairstyles. Even though most Swing Youth did not openly criticize the Nazis, the Third Reich considered them a threat to the Nazi philosophy.

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, ordered all leaders of the Swing Youth to be sent to a concentration camp. A special youth camp was opened for them in Moringen in 1940. A camp for girls opened in 1942.^[9]

1 Edelweiss Pirates

The Edelweiss Pirates began as a hiking group in the 1930s. They also rejected the strict rules and regimentation of the Nazi party. They dropped out of school to avoid the Hitler Youth programs and became skilled draft-dodgers. Many of these teens were raised in Communist families, and almost all grew up in poverty. Many had seen their parents arrested and even murdered for their political views.

The Edelweiss Pirates often fought street battles with the Hitler Youth. They were easy to spot with their long hair and brightly colored shirts. They wore the Edelweiss emblem on their collars or hats. “We wore our hair long, we had a knife in our sock and he would not march.” stated former Edelweiss Pirate Jean Julich.^[10]

As the war progressed, they became more involved in resistance activities. They produced anti-Nazi graffiti and stole food and explosives to supply adult resistance groups. They found shelter for German army deserters. Jean Julich and his friends threw bricks through military factory windows and poured sugar into the gas tanks of Nazi vehicles. The Gestapo often rounded up gang members, shaved their heads, and then released them.

They also faced more serious consequences, however. The Gestapo arrested Julich and his friends for their alleged involvement in a plot to bomb the Cologne Gestapo headquarters. At 15, Julich was sent to a concentration camp, where he endured beatings, starvation, and typhus until the Americans liberated him in 1945. The Nazis executed Julich’s friend, Barthel Schink, along with seven adults and five other “pirates.”

Lou Hunley has enjoyed sharing books with children as a teacher and children’s librarian. She created Librarian Lou, a blog about children and young adult books. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys playing pickleball, biking, and zip lining.