8 - Preparing German Youth for War

Summary

It is tempting to construct a genealogy that leads inexorably from the numerous calls for premilitary training of young males in Bismarckian and early Wilhelmine Germany to the rapid proliferation of militarized organizations for male adolescents in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I. Such a temptation, however, should be stoutly resisted. After all, Field Marshall Freiherr Colmar von der Goltz, who in 1911 founded the largest of such organizations, the Young Germany League (Jungdeutschlandbund), had advocated the systematic premilitary training of primary school students since 1876. Yet his proposals had invariably been dismissed as well meant but potentially dangerous. Conservatives associated these proposals with French conceptions of “the nation in arms,” and the Prussian War Ministry worried that the implementation of such training would embolden and lend credibility to left-leaning and socialist proponents of short-term militia-type armies. Thus, premilitary training threatened to undermine military professionalism. Indeed, up until 1914 such apprehensions about professionalism impelled the military to enforce an inviolable taboo against teaching young males to handle weapons before enlistment.