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’s promises. In the early years he was hailed as the saviour who would pull Germany out of a crushing economic slump and restore national greatness. Youth groups flourished, with children eagerly joining the Hitler Youth, donning uniforms, marching in parades, and earning badges – a seemingly harmless pastime that masked a dark indoctrination.

Yet not every youngster bought into the propaganda. In a time when speaking out could mean death, a handful of brave teens wrote and distributed anti‑Nazi leaflets, hid Jews in secret rooms, spied for underground networks, and even sabotaged German war machines. Their stories prove that courage knows no age.

Why These 10 Young People Matter

10 Helmuth Hubener

In 1939 the Nazis outlawed any foreign radio broadcasts, even threatening the death penalty for anyone caught tuning into the British Broadcasting Corporation or other Allied stations.

Two years later, 16‑year‑old Helmuth Hubener slipped a tiny receiver into his room and began secretly listening to the BBC. The contrast between the British reports – which mentioned both victories and defeats – and the German press, which only boasted of triumphs, opened his eyes to the regime’s lies.

He gathered his two closest friends, Karl‑Hinz Schnibbe and Rudolf Wobbe, for a clandestine meeting. Using a typewriter, carbon paper, and a swastika stamp, Helmuth drafted incendiary essays such as “Hitler the Murderer” and “Do You Know That They Are Lying to You?”.

The trio scattered the flyers in apartment complexes, mailboxes, and telephone booths. Their daring distribution led the Gestapo straight to them. Convicted of high treason, Helmuth was beheaded on 27 October 1942, just 17 years old.

9 Hans And Sophie Scholl (The White Rose)

Hans Scholl entered the Hitler Youth with enthusiasm, eventually becoming a squad leader of 155 boys and training future “leaders” for the Fatherland. Over time, however, his idealism soured.

In 1942 Hans, together with a handful of medical students, launched the White Rose resistance. Their mission: expose the regime’s cruelty by printing thousands of leaflets on a hand‑crafted duplicator, stuffing them into stamped envelopes, and mailing them to random addresses drawn from phone books. His sister Sophie soon joined, convinced that Hitler was eroding Christianity and replacing it with a brutal ideology.

After a stint as medics on the Russian Front, the siblings returned with fresh horror – they had witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto’s devastation and recognized that Germany’s war machine was faltering despite propaganda claims. Reinvigorated, they resumed leaflet distribution.

On the morning of 18 February 1943, Hans and Sophie entered Munich University’s atrium, scattering the remaining pamphlets onto the floor just as students streamed in. A Nazi officer spotted them, leading to their arrest. After a swift four‑day trial, both were executed by guillotine. Sophie’s final words echoed her resolve: “What does my death matter if through us thousands awaken and are stirred to action?”

8 Knud Pedersen And The Churchill Club

Fourteen‑year‑old Knud Pedersen was outraged when Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, forcing the nation’s swift surrender. In 1941 he rallied seven classmates from Aalborg Cathedral School to form the Churchill Club, named for their hero Winston Churchill.

Their first acts of rebellion were bold and colorful: they splashed blue paint on German roadsters, vandalized Nazi barracks, and reversed newly installed road signs – all under the pretense of playing bridge with their parents.

The club swore to sabotage the occupiers. They pilfered weapons, fabricated explosives, and stashed the armaments within the school itself. When the Gestapo uncovered the cache, all eight members were arrested and dispatched to Nyborg State Prison.

Between 1942 and 1943 the Churchill Club became the backbone of Danish resistance. Their daring inspired underground newspapers, massive labor strikes, and the burial of smuggled guns in gardens, all of which strained German control.

7 Irene Gut

Irene Gut, later known as Irene Opdyke, worked as the live‑in housekeeper for Major Eduard Rugemer, a prominent Nazi officer. Already engaged with the Polish resistance, she began sheltering twelve Jews in the servants’ quarters beneath the house.

Eight months later Major Rugemer discovered three of the hidden Jews in his kitchen. Shocked, he offered Irene a disturbing bargain: the Jews could stay if she became his mistress. Humiliated but determined, Irene reluctantly agreed.

She later confided the arrangement to a country priest. Decades afterward, she recalled his chilling verdict: “I expected you to say ‘You had no choice, a life is more important.’ Instead, he told me to turn everyone out, claiming his mortal soul mattered more.” Irene spent the next thirty years touring the United States, sharing her harrowing testimony with schoolchildren.

6 Stefania Podgorska

At fourteen, Stefania Podgorska lived with the Diamant family, a Polish Jewish household. When the Germans forced the Diamants into a ghetto, they begged Stefania to stay in their apartment. She smuggled food into the ghetto, and after Mrs. Diamant was deported to Auschwitz, the danger intensified.

Weeks later, Max Diamant, who had escaped a death‑train, knocked on Stefania’s door. Despite knowing the death penalty loomed, she hid him. Soon, his fiancee and eleven more Jews found refuge in the attic, while two German nurses and their boyfriends were forced to share the house.

For eight months the hidden Jews remained silent in the attic, surviving the occupation. After the war, Max, now Josef Burzminski, asked Stefania to marry him. They emigrated to the United States and built a new life together.

5 Diet Eman

When the Nazis rolled into the Netherlands, Diet Eman was planning her wedding. She watched soldiers storm Jewish neighborhoods, shatter windows, and set synagogues ablaze. Friends received deportation orders, forced to march to stations with a single suitcase – a one‑way ticket to concentration camps.

Diet and her fiancé joined the Dutch Resistance, locating safe houses for Jews, stealing identity papers and ration cards, and aiding downed Allied pilots. She cycled across Holland, sending intelligence on German troop movements to the Allies.In May 1944 the Gestapo captured Diet and sent her to Ravensbrück. After four months she convinced the Nazis she was feeble‑minded and harmless, securing her release. Undeterred, she returned to resistance work.

4 Hortense Daman

Only fourteen when Germany occupied Belgium, Hortense Daman (later Clews) began smuggling the underground newspaper La Libre Belgique. Her duties soon expanded to delivering critical messages across the country.

Her striking looks – blonde hair and a charming smile – often disarmed German officers, allowing her to slip past checkpoints. Her mother’s grocery store provided the perfect cover for moving food, while Hortense also ferried grenades hidden beneath egg cartons. When a German officer intercepted her, she offered him fresh eggs; he snatched them and waved her away.

Eventually, the Gestapo betrayed Hortense and her parents. Hortense and her mother were sent to Ravensbrück, her father to Buchenwald. She endured horrific medical experiments but survived, as did her parents.

3 Fernande Keufgens

In 1942, Fernande Keufgens (later Davis) was slated for a German munitions factory in Poland. Threatened that her father would be imprisoned if she didn’t board the train, she and three companions leapt from the locomotive before it crossed the border.

She trekked miles through the countryside until she reached her uncle Hubert, a devout priest in the Army of Liberation, a Belgian resistance group. She begged to join their cause.

Fernande then supplied false identity papers and food stamps to help Jews escape Belgium. Her fluency in German often earned her the trust of occupying officers, allowing her to slip past dangerous checkpoints.

2 Swing Youth

On 2 March 1940 German police raided a dance hall in Hamburg, discovering teenagers swaying to forbidden swing music from Britain and the United States. The youths formed circles, jumped, clapped, and painted their nails – a vivid rebellion against Nazi cultural strictures.

The Swing Youth rejected the Hitler Youth’s uniformity, instead embracing British and American fashions, music, and hairstyles. Though many did not openly denounce the regime, the Third Reich saw their subculture as a dangerous threat to Nazi ideology.

Heinrich Himmler ordered the leaders of the Swing Youth sent to concentration camps. A special camp for boys opened at Moringen in 1940, followed by a girls’ camp in 1942.

1 Edelweiss Pirates

The Edelweiss Pirates began as a hiking club in the 1930s, but they quickly rejected the Nazi regime’s strict rules and militaristic indoctrination. Many members dropped out of school to avoid the Hitler Youth, becoming adept draft‑dodgers. Most grew up in impoverished, Communist‑leaning families, with parents often arrested or killed for their beliefs.

They frequently clashed with the Hitler Youth in street battles, recognizable by their long hair, bright shirts, and the Edelweiss emblem sewn onto collars or hats. “We wore our hair long, we had a knife in our sock and we would not march,” recalled former pirate Jean Julich.

As the war progressed, the Pirates expanded their resistance: they spray‑painted anti‑Nazi graffiti, stole food and explosives to support adult resistance groups, and hid German army deserters. Jean Julich and his comrades shattered factory windows with bricks and poured sugar into Nazi vehicle fuel tanks.

The Gestapo eventually cracked down. Julich, only fifteen, was sent to a concentration camp where he endured beatings, starvation, and typhus until liberation in 1945. The Nazis executed his friend Barthel Schink alongside seven adults and five other “pirates.”

Celebrities, whether they act, sing, play sports or even just enjoy the limelight as politicians, seem to get away with a lot more than the average person does. Or maybe that’s just our perception because the things celebrities do are under scrutiny so much. But there has long been a history of well known men taking an interest in remarkably young women, which is to say children, that has gone on for quite a while and is often overlooked or shrugged off as just something these kinds of men do.

10. Pablo Escobar Met His Wife When She was 12 and Cheated with Many Underage Girls

Pablo Escobar achieved fame by being one of the most notorious drug dealers in the world. He was also one of the wealthiest criminals in history with an estimated fortune of at least $25 billion. He was a drug lord, he reportedly killed around 4,000 people and he also met his wife Maria Victoria Henao when she was 12. He was 23 at the time.

The two got married in 1976 when Henao was only 15 years old. She said she fell in love with his great desire to help people and his compassion, if that gives you any idea either how well he was able to pretend to be something he wasn’t. And even as his true colors must have come to light, she stayed with him until 1993 when he was killed despite claiming to hate everything he’d become.

Escobar cheated on Henao frequently as well, also with underage girls as he clearly had a preference. The show Narcos was criticized for unjustly romanticizing him and making him look almost heroic by ignoring details like this and many others.

9. Grover Cleveland Met His Wife As a Baby

Grover Cleveland has a few claims to fame, one of them being he’s the only president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms. In the modern era of social media that may not have happened since more people might know that he met his wife when she was a baby and then took over a semi-parental role for her after her parents died.

Cleveland married Frances Folsom when she was 21, and he was 48. Folsom’s father, a good friend of Cleveland’s, died when she was 11. She used to call him Uncle Cleve. Some sources state that Cleveland then became her legal guardian at this point while others say that’s not true. What does seem to be true is that, if not legal, he was certainly a strong influence in her life.

Frances’s mother, the widow of Cleveland’s friend, expected that the future President would ask her to be his wife since he had taken over a provider role for both mother and daughter. The press thought this as well and asked Cleveland why he hadn’t married. His answer was “I’m waiting for my bride to grow up.”

8. Rolling Stones Bassist Bill Wyman Slept With His Wife When She Was 14

If you’re not familiar with the name Bill Wyman, he was the bass player for the Rolling Stones. As with many musicians he clearly had a pretty wild and crazy life. But Wyman’s story goes into levels of weirdness you might expect on a soap opera, and also includes the fact he started sleeping with his wife when she was 14.

Wyman was 47 when he first saw his future wife. She was 13, and he said that he felt like he was hit on the head with a hammer. They got married when she was 18 and Bill was 52. His wife, Mandy Smith, long held onto the lie that they never had a sexual relationship until she was of age, but then later backtracked and admitted it started when she was 14. The two got divorced when she was 20.

In what qualifies as a hu
gely unpredictable twist to this story, Wyman’s son from another relationship would go on to marry the mother of Mandy Smith who was, at least for a time, his own step grandmother.

7. Steven Tyler Got Guardianship of a 16-Year-Old Girl and Impregnated Her

To this day, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler is one of the biggest names and most iconic voices in all of rock n roll. The band rose to fame in the 1970s and had a string of huge hits in the 90s as well. All of this fame and notoriety has been saddled with the rumors of Tyler’s behavior back in the 70s as it related to a girl named Julia Holcomb.

Tyler was a rock star, a drug user at the time, and a man in his late twenties. He met Holcomb when she was 16 and became enamored with her. He managed to convince Holcomb’s mother to sign over legal guardianship so he could cross state lines with the girl. Holcomb’s mother had gone through some hard times herself but Tyler evidently told the woman he needed the paperwork to help her daughter enroll in school. She didn’t even learn this from her own mom; it was Tyler who told her. Within a few months she was pregnant with his child. She claims he later coerced her into having an abortion. Tyler has acknowledged that the relationship and the abortion all happened as well.

6. Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers Admitted to Having Sex with a 14-Year-Old

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have made a career out of singing about California and in one way or another but less well known is that singer Anthony Kiedis knowingly and admittedly slept with a teenage fan in Louisiana when he was 23-years-old. He says they had sex only minutes after meeting and spent the night together.

The following day, the band was set to play Baton Rouge, so they took the girl along. Kiedis said that, along the way, she told him her dad was the chief of police in Baton Rouge and the whole state was looking for her since she’d been gone all night. Also, she was only 14.

In response to this news. Kiedis said he wanted her to get home but then also admits he had sex with her one more time, after acknowledging he was aware of her age. He went on to write a song called “Catholic School Girls Rule,” inspired by the event.

5. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page Had a Relationship with a 14-Year-Old

If you’re keeping track, this is the 3rd story about a musician from a hugely popular band with a 14-year-old girl. This time, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page is involved, and the girl was Lori Maddox, who we’ll see again shortly. Maddox was a model and Page had seen her photos before meeting her in Los Angeles.

He tried to pick her up several times. Once, he followed her into the bathroom at a club and began kissing and groping her in front of everyone in the room as she tried to get him to stop. She said her friends warned her that he would be violent. At some point, Page had the band’s manager “kidnap” her and bring her to Page’s hotel. They had dinner together and then slept together, keeping the relationship secret for a time thereafter, perhaps not so much because of her age but because he was also in a relationship at the time. That ended when he went to a party with his real girlfriend but left, publicly, with Lori.

4. Ted Nugent Admitted to Dating Many Underage Girls

Ted Nugent is best known these days for getting involved in politics and even occasional punditry but he achieved fame for being a musician in the 70s. It’s also long been rumored that he’s had a number of encounters with underage girls.

Nugent himself has admitted to a lot of his own behavior at one time or another. The man actually sang a song called “Jailbait.” In a Behind the Music episode on VH1 it’s claimed that he started a relationship with a 17-year-old girl and got her parents to sign over guardianship though that particular claim has not been verified elsewhere.  In his own words he got her parents “stamp of approval” however, whatever that means.

Nugent used the word “addicted” to describe his feelings about girls back in the 70s and then explains that the parents were on board because “better Ted Nugent than some drug-infested punk in high school.”

3. David Bowie Also Had a relationship with 14-Year-Old Lori Maddox

Remember Lori Maddox? Also known as Lori Mattix, she was the girl that Jimmy Page was involved with. Well, before she met Page, she met David Bowie. He had a relationship with her when she was 14. He would have been somewhere in his 20s at the time.

People love David Bowie and his legacy is one of a brilliant musician who walked his own path, so few people are willing to bring up the fact he also engaged in such things. According to Maddox he wanted to take her back to his hotel the moment he met her, but she refused. However, he came back to town 5 months later and that time she did not. They went to dinner, then back to his hotel room with one of Maddox’s friends. She said Bowie asked her to bathe him in the tub and the two later had sex. Later they had a threesome with her friend.

2. Prince Was the Guardian of His Future Wife When She was 17

Prince died in 2016 but to this day he remains a beloved and influential musician whose style, voice and oddly quirky behavior made him an icon for decades. Less well known about the Purple One was that he had once been married to a woman named Mayte Garcia. Prince met her in 1989 and proclaimed that she was his future wife. She was 16 at the time. Prince was 31. This was after his relationship with 17-year-old Anna Garcia.

Garcia was a dancer, and her parents wanted her to work with Prince so she auditioned. Clearly he was impressed and the song “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” was written about her.

Garcia says they became friends and he would call her and write to her frequently. She was never allowed to call him. She started singing for him at 17 and he became her legal guardian at that time. She made $300 a week and had to sneak food from room service carts in hotel hallways.

But by the time she was 18 he promised she’d be dancing on his tour. She says he saw some cookies on her station once and, even though they weren’t hers, he docked her pay for it because she needed to maintain her figure. He once sent her home for showing up in sweatpants.

When the tour was over, Prince told her it was time to get on birth control. She was 19 by that time and she lost her virginity to him.The couple later had a child but in 1996 he passed away. She claims Prince avoided her and refused to come see her in the hospital after she developed an infection. She became depressed and later had a miscarriage. She says Prince told her he had to work. He then met a fan online, invited her to come work with him, and would later make her his second wife.

After they divorced, Garcia learned he burned everything that reminded him of her from their home. He even got rid of their son’s ashes.

1. Larry Hillblom of DHL Shipping Fathered Many Children with Underage Girls in Asia

Larry Hillblom may not be a household name, but he was definitely a prominent figure in the business world. If you have heard of DHL Shipping, then you know Hillblom. He was the “H” in the company name.

Thanks to his business he was a millionaire but the man also had a penchant for travel and would frequently go to Asia. What no one realized for some time was that Hillblom was going on sex vacations where he fathered at least four children in Palau, Vietnam and the Philippines. Hillblom had travelled extensively and paid for sex with underage girls. Paternity tests confirmed him as the father of several children after he died in a plane crash, forcing his estate to provide millions of dollars for the children after initially resisting the accusations.