Swing Kids - The Swing Kids (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing dance fans in Germany in the 1930s, primarily in the port city of Hamburg and Berlin. They were 14 to 21-year-old boys and girls. They admired the British and American youth culture, defining themselves with swing music as opposed to the National-Socialist fashions and behaviours, especially those of the Hitler Youth (German: Hitlerjugend).
Their dress consisted of long, often checked English sports jackets, shoes with thick light crepe soles, showy scarves, Anthony Eden hats, an umbrella on the arm whatever the weather, and, as an insignia, a dress-shirt button worn in the buttonhole, with a jeweled stone. The girls too favored a long overflowing hair style. Their eyebrows were penciled, they wore lipstick and their nails were lacquered.
The Swingjugend rejected the Nazi state, its ideology and uniformity, its militarism, the 'Führer principle' and the conformity of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). They rebelled against all this restriction of personal freedoms with jazz and swing, which stood for a love of life, self-determination, non-conformism, freedom, independence, liberalism, and internationalism.
On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swingjugend were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration camps. The boys went to the Moringen concentration camp while the girls were sent to Ravensbruck.This mass arrest encouraged the youth to further their political consciousness and opposition to National Socialism. They started to distribute anti-fascist propaganda. In January 1943, Günter Discher, as one of the ringleaders of the Swing Kids, was deported to the youth concentration camp of Moringen.
On 2 January 1942, Heinrich Himmler wrote to Reinhard Heydrich calling on him to clamp down on the ringleaders of the swing movement, recommending a few years in a concentration camp with beatings and forced labor.
The Swing Kids of Hamburg at some point had contacts with another famous resistance movement, when three members of the White Rose (German: Weiße Rose) developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal cooperation arose, though these contacts were later used by the Volksgerichtshof ("People's Court") to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda and sabotage of the armed forces. Their consequent trial, death sentences and executions were averted by the end of the war.
There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday of this week.
The inventory of physical bullion in Hong Kong continues to decline.
Stocks were little changed in a very quiet trade.
The Western establishment continues to grind against the impulse of democratic populism.
Swing heil.
Have a pleasant evening.
