He was a Nazi youth: Professor emeritus comes to terms with past

It began as another activity to do with friends, another venue to eat delectable rye bread and salami sandwiches, to learn some new games, to have a goof or two after school.

Jurgen Herbst will read from Requiem for a German Past: A Boyhood Among the Nazis on Friday, Nov. 12, at 3:30 p.m. in the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St. Information: Susan Jevens, 224-3891.

But after he had joined the National Socialist Jungvolk in 1938, Jurgen Herbst began to realize that something was profoundly wrong in that organization, and, in fact, everywhere in Nazi Germany.

Nevertheless, Herbst remained in the Jungvolk, and later was drafted into the German army. Herbst’s family initially saw value in the Nazis’ co-opting Siegfried, Goethe and Wagner in the devastating aftermath of World War I. Of course, the Nazis went far and fatally beyond those heroic ideals. But at first, the sinister nature of the regime was not obvious.

“I changed my mind about them step by little step,” says Herbst, professor emeritus of history and educational policy at UW–Madison. “First you sense something might be wrong, then you don’t want to believe it. Then comes the time when you finally have to believe it.”

Herbst outlines his ideological transformation in “Requiem for a German Past: A Boyhood Among the Nazis,” just published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Herbst joined the Jungvolk at age 10, shortly before Kristallnacht. The morning after that night of terror for German Jews, Herbst walked to school amid shards of broken glass and other debris of the looting. As he went along, he puzzled over what had happened.

At lunch, a fellow Jungvolker described how police had taken away his neighbors, the Morgensterns, in the middle of that night. Herbst found the story disquieting. He told his mother about the incident when he got home from school. She explained that had the Herbst family been Jewish, they too would have been rounded up and hauled away.

His accidental good fortune further unsettled Herbst, but competing against his discomfort were the satisfying friendships developing for him in the Jungvolk, where he eventually rose to a leadership rank.

“These years were for me a most exhilarating time,” he writes. “It gave me responsibility at a young age and taught me what it meant to become a leader of men. It was the comradeship of us boys and the awareness of the duties the war imposed upon us that sustained my enthusiasm and made life meaningful.”

However, other meanings and voices grew increasingly louder over the years, ultimately leaving Herbst with the disturbing task of reconciling with his own history. “I wrote the book for myself, and also for my children, who are now adults, and for young people everywhere.

“I’m not a believer in ‘lessons’ – (the idea that) if people listened to history and learned from it, we wouldn’t have the Kosovo atrocities. But I thought if I described my own situation, readers might ask themselves what they would have done,” he says.

And what they and their families are doing now, in this outwardly very different time and place. Subtle and direct pressures from seemingly every quarter urge citizens of all ages to engage in activities immoral and/or harmful to themselves or others; Herbst says while he can offer no answers, he does have a bit of advice for making hard choices in difficult times.

“Usually you know when something is wrong,” he says. “You try to shut out that knowledge, but you discover you can’t. Instead, you must face your choices and their consequences. If you are able to do that, your self-awareness will increase and you will be able to accept yourself more fully.”