I have never forgotten the words Hitler addressed to us in his harsh, mesmerizing voice. “You, my youth,” he shouted, “are destined to become the leaders of a glorious future world under the supremacy of our new National Socialist order.” To many of my peers, this promise became a sentence of death. But in that storm of 100,000 voices, screaming in an almost primeval frenzy of assent, I reaffirmed the oath of fealty I would not break as long as Hitler lived.

That evening, in the huge tent city we shared with thousands of storm troopers, we were visited by the Reich leader of the Hitler Youth, 31-year-old Baldur von Schirach, a minor aristocrat whose mother was an American (years later, at a Hitler Youth leaders’ conference, I heard him mention with obvious pride that one of his ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence). After he had inspected our formations, lined up between endless rows of white tents, we crowded around him near a huge log fire to sing songs. That suited Schirach’s naïve, mystical quality perfectly. It was he who had written the words to the Hitler Youth anthem, and he who used to equate Hitler with God (by saying, for example, that “He who serves the Führer serves Germany, and he who serves Germany serves God”).

Certainly there were dramatic religious overtones to Hitler’s appearance at the Party Congress. Elevated on the gigantic granite platform at our head, floodlit and isolated, he looked like the high priest in some gigantic cathedral. This picture of the Party Congress ― of the majesty and power of Hitler and his Germany ― is familiar to anyone who has seen Triumph of the Will. But what I also remember is the emotional celebration of national unity, and the very personal sense of commitment that we young people felt.

The Hitler Youth’s ability to stimulate and organize the young was not unprecedented. More than four million adolescents belonged to various youth groups at the time when Hitler came to power: the churches organized them, as did other political parties. (One of the largest and most active groups, in fact, was the Communist Youth Auxiliary, many of whose members fought the Hitler Youth in pitched street battles before 1933.) Within six months of Hitler’s ascension to power, though, the Nazi Party was the only legal one, and the Hitler Youth began to absorb or subsume other organizations. In December of 1936, a statute declared that “the entire German youth within Reich territory is organized in the Hitler Youth.”

The Hitler Youth, both in the junior Jungvolk and in the Hitler Jugend, was organized along the lines of the Wehrmacht, in squads, platoons, companies, and so forth. The activities of the prewar Jungvolk resembled those of the Boy Scouts, though with much more emphasis on discipline and indoctrination. We had two rallies a week, usually on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and often a parade on Sunday. I belonged to the Fanfarenzug, the bugle corps, for most of my four years in the Jungvolk: we preceded our units in the parades, and had more elaborate uniforms and not as much drill.

After the parades we would be shown movies or newsreels, nearly all of them drenched in Nazi ideology. Team sports were always emphasized, and there seemed to be some sports festival every month. In the summer, we often went on camping trips, but even these were interspersed with marching drills and war games. During the winter, the most common trips were those to ski camps.

Much of the fun ended as soon as the war began. The Jungvolk was then called upon to deliver call-up notices and monthly ration cards, to help collect material for the war effort, and (much later) to work in search operations after air raids. In 1940, the older Hitler Youth members switched to paramilitary training ― precision drills, small-arms handling, sharpshooting, navigation. And from 1939 on, every boy and girl above the age of 15 had to do compulsory land service each summer, helping with the harvest.

My days in the Hitler Youth were happy ones, by and large: I was young, and I was becoming a fanatic. My grandparents, who raised me, were apolitical people whose farm was better off under the Nazis. My father had been a Social Democrat who never applied for Nazi Party membership; it’s possible that he might have challenged my growing allegiance to Hitler, but he and my mother had moved away from the farm to run a family business, and I did not see my parents often in those years. Once during the war years, when he visited and saw me preening in my uniform, he told me I looked like a little clown. Certainly he never had my blind faith in the Führer. For my part, I thought his point of view was simplistic, out of touch with the truth about the Reich: after all, he had never been to high school, and I considered myself better-educated than he. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, in the hysteria after the attempted assassination of Hitler, but was released after one night in custody. He lived to tell me what a fool I had been.