YOUTH MOVEMENT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4534, 9 February 1942, Page 3

YOUTH MOVEMENT

STRIKING CHARACTERISTICS Dr J. H. Vranek, formerly lecturer in international relations in the University of Wales and now in the Czech Army, lectured to the Ling Physical Education Association recently on youth movements abroad. Forty or fifty years ago, he said, Germany was the pioneer of the youth movements. The movement then was idealistic, unpolitical, above clique,class or party, and liberal in opinion. When they seized power the Nazis! liquidated all existing youth orgpni-' sations. They substituted the Hitler Jugend, and, in 1939, made failure to register in it punishable. Now the Hitler Youth movement is a terrify-, ing instrument by which the State controls the bodies and minds of young men Dr Vranek described youth leadership in Germany as a well-paid, highly organised profession, “accompanied by party politics, cliques, intrigues, vice and corruption. The teaching system is forceand fear and behind it arc the’ Gestapo and the internment’ camp.” Declaring that the Hitler Youth movement was devised to crush individuality and destroy family life, DrVranek said that one of its astonishing characteristics was its inculcation cf contempt for women.—From the “Manchester Guardian.”