In his essay “Youthful Rebellion as Legitimate Resistance Against the Third Reich,” history professor John Charles Marsland II described the acceleration:
By 1942, HJ [Hitler Youth] leaders [in Dusseldorf] could not cross the street without incident and many stopped attending their meetings out of fear of molestation. The EP [Edelweiss Pirates] insulted uniformed soldiers or party functionaries and pushed HJ leaders off their bicycles, robbing them of their badges and daggers of honor…. That autumn, Pirates shot one HJ leader and stabbed another. Official reports complain that due to EP activities, HJ members — take their lives in their hands when they go out on the streets — and cannot perform their duties in EP districts…. The attacks became so frequent and damaging that the HJ could no longer act as Hitler‘s representatives or enforcers in the communities the EP inhabited. In this small way, the Edelweißpiraten not only resisted but also enjoyed a measure of success.
Violence increased. The groups raided army camps to steal weapons and explosives. In Cologne, the head of the Gestapo in Cologne was assassinated. Then, in 1944, an escapee from a concentration camp named Hans Steinbrück established the Ehrenfeld, or Field of Honor Group, in bombed-out Cologne. The approximately 100 members included other former prisoners, Jews, and Edelweiss Pirates. The group stockpiled weapons, stole goods, and frequented the black market with the goal of damaging the Nazi infrastructure. The Nazis arrested Steinbrück and other members of the Ehrenfeld group.
On November 10, 1944, the Nazis hanged 13 Ehrenfeld members in Cologne, none of whom received a trial. At least six of them were Edelweiss Pirates, including 16-year-old Barthel Schink. Schink was later celebrated as a freedom fighter, with the street next to where he died named in his honor. Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust, recognized Schink as “Righteous Among the Nations” for risking his life to hide Jews. The Edelweiss Pirates were finally receiving recognition.
Nevertheless, they remained obscure for many years. There are reasons, apart from the working-class status to which Koch alluded.
One is them: the Allies and the Edelweiss Pirates had a rocky history that pre-dated the occupation. During the war, the Allies hadn’t aligned with the Edelweiss Pirates as they had with other resistance groups, like the maquis in France. The Pirates did distribute the Allied leaflets, and they assisted Allied soldiers who escaped from detainment camps. But the groups were neither pro-American nor pro-British. They were anti-Nazi, antiauthority. The Allies’ Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) existed to support anything that could destabilize the Third Reich. In a report, the PWD described the Edelweiss Pirates: “it is the enemy of our enemy; it is not our friend.” One reasons for this negative appraisal was the burglary and looting committed by some of the groups.
Nevertheless, as the war moved toward its end, Edelweiss Pirates assisted the Allies by intimidating hold-out Nazi resisters and identifying war criminals. After the war, some offered to continue exposing law-breakers and to go on patrols in exchange for official approval from the Allies. The Allies refused.
The Pirates were still seen as criminals. They were also viewed as erratic because they wouldn’t reliably take orders from those in command, which included the Allies and the Communists (Soviet Union). Moreover, the substance of the groups was changing, and not for the better, as original Pirates withdrew and newcomers joined. The article “Were They Anti-Nazi Resisters or Juvenile Delinquents?” explained: “Remnants of Nazi forces drifting from town to town, including SS soldiers [Schutzstaffel, the political police of the Nazi Party], joined the groups, imposed structure on them, and used them to terrorize communities and resist occupying forces. One theory is that the dissolved groups were ‘real’ Edelweißpiraten, while those that remained were rowdies and malcontents taking advantage of the name. By early 1946, occupation forces arrested hundreds of so-called Edelweiss Pirates.”
The Edelweiss Pirates also ran counter to the official narrative. The Allies promoted World War II as “the just war” because Nazi Germany was allegedly populated by those who were pure evil, those who cooperated with pure evil, and those who chose cowardly silence. The narrative of audacious teens who had fought the Nazis even before the war did not fit the Allies’ story. Meanwhile, the German opponents of Nazism who had gone into exile or hidden their politics did not like to admit that they’d left the real resistance to others, let alone to a scattered network of working-class riff-raff.
The Edelweiss Pirates were thus shoved off the pages of history books. Their reintroduction was due to former members, like Fritz Theilen. After his retirement, Theilen and two other surviving Pirates traveled to schools to talk about their experiences during the war. In 1984, Theilen published his memoirs, Edelweißpiraten. Its content led to several legal battles, all of which Theilen won, not only legally but also in terms of recognition.
Germany now acknowledges the Edelweiss Pirates as a resistance movement. A plaque erected at the site of the 1944 hangings in Cologne calls them “fighters against war and terror.” In 2004, Niko von Glasow released his film Edelweißpiraten, which helped to bring the Pirates to the attention of a broader world. Pieces of music, books, essays, and articles. A stage and a radio play did the same. In April 2011, Theilen and the four other survivors were presented with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by Cologne’s governing mayor.
Debate still surrounds the status of the Edelweiss Pirates. Were they resistance fighters, criminals, juvenile delinquents, or all three? Through a tangle of questions, one answer is clear. The Pirates were so complex and varied that they defy easy classifications.
The question should not obscure the most important aspect of the Edelweiss Pirates’ story. Whatever their motives, the Pirates were average people who said “NO!” to Nazi control. The producers of the Edelweißpiraten film understood this when they explained, “the Edelweiss Pirates were no absolute heroes, but rather ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” This should provide encouragement to the world. If impoverished 14-year-olds can stand up to Hitler year after year, then there is hope for us all.
This article was originally published in the March 2024 edition of Future of Freedom.
