From an earlier answer

Part I

One of the problems with analyzing the “HJ/Flakhelfer-Generation” and their postwar outcomes is that the numbers of German youth involved in either the Hitler Jugend (HJ) or Bund deutscher Mädel (BDM) was quite vast. In 1939, for example, of the 8.87 million Germans aged 10-18, some 8.7 million were enrolled in both the HJ and BDM. The numbers grow even larger with older cohorts who were born before 1929 and spent some of their formative teen years in the 1930s in NSDAP youth organizations. Nor was the HJ/BDM experience universal; the patriarchal state lavished more resources on the HJ as opposed to its female counterpart, but even within the HJ, experiences with the organization could vary. The war adds a further complication as the older 1920s cohort experienced the brunt of the fighting while those on the younger generation came of age during the years of defeat. These generational experiences and the sheer scale of the sample make it very hard to estimate the precise nature of the HJ-Generations during the postwar period.

Such problems were not lost on the Allied military governments that occupied Germany during the postwar period. National Socialism prided itself on being a “young” movement and although its youth leaders seldom received much in the way of genuine power, this was an impression that stuck in the minds of many of the Allied administrators when they grappled with the idea of how to reform Germany. Films like Disney’s luridly-titled Education for Death were not just propaganda, but did reflect a certain panic about the discipline and regimentation of youth under fascism. One of the minor subthemes in American wartime discourses on the Nazi mind and society was that the excessive militarization and regimentation of organizations like the HJ had created a generation of technocratic automatons. In his preface of the 1938 English translation of the HJ’s primer, Harwood L. Childs noted that this National Socialist youth programs were part of a coherent strategy to mobilize German youth and inculcate a sense of national superiority. The former American ambassador to Germany William A. Dodd wrote in an afterward to Childs’s translation that the idea behind Hitler’s youth policy was to prepare

the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and modern freedom is to be suppressed. Is modern civilization to be converted into such a system?

Nor were such thoughts limited to Americans, a number of exiled Germans feared that they were in the process of losing German youth because of the influence of ideological socialization. SOPADE reports in the 1930s often noted that while some HJ members complained about ideological indoctrination, there was little in the way of a youth resistance in Germany. Writing in the 28 January 1945 NYT, the émigré sociologist Leopold Schwarzschild averred that:

all we have learned during this war seems to confirm our surmise that this generation actually has been deformed as thoroughly as could be expected under the circumstances. Hundreds of thousands of German war prisoners are now held in American and British camps. All observers agree that skepticism or hostility towards Nazism is now and then only amongst the oldest age groups. Among the younger ones, the products of the Hitler era, such symptoms are as good as absent.

The Soviet military government (SVAG) likewise identified HJ members as the likely culprits behind so-called werewolf groups and instructed its political police, the section K-5, to be on the look-out for evidence of HJ involvement in resistance.

Although the four Allied occupation governments had different polices for youth, there were three broad axes for the denazification of the HJ-Generation. The first leg of the Allied approach was the complete disestablishment of Nazi youth organizations and an immediate form of reeducation for captured HJ-members who fought on the front lines. Eisenhower had actually signed an executive order in 28 September 1944 nullifying compulsory service in the HJ and this policy continued in the US military government (OMGUS). The second leg of denazification was to be a reform of the school system and rooting out Nazified faculty who would continue to spread Nazi ideals. The final element of youth denazification was the sponsorship of alternative organizations and youth activities that would educate German youth to rejoin the global community. It was in these last two axes that the denazification of German youth went on slightly different trajectories after German division.

The destruction of the HJ and BDM as an organization was one of the immediate tasks for the occupation governments. The Allied Control Council (ACC) decreed that both the HJ and BDM, along with other NSDAP organizations were now formally disestablished by virtue of Allied victory. Although the formal denazification process varied in all four zones, the ACC decided to adapt a more flexible approach to youth both on account of pressure from their German collaborators and because the denazification courts were already overburdened and understaffed. All the military governments instituted some form of a de facto amnesty for those born after 1929 that exempted the bulk of German youth from having to appear before the Spruchkammer (denazification tribunals). Exemptions to this amnesty included those in the HJ or BDM who had achieved a certain rank, had used these youth organizations to gain rank in the NSDAP or SS, or were paid volunteers of the organizations. The lack of homogeneity for these amnesty exemptions created a degree of chaos for the Spruchkammer, but most of the youth applicants for denazification received their “Persilschein” both on account of their youth and the overall leniency of the Spruchkammer process.

While the disestablishment and dissolution of Nazi youth organizations was relatively easy, reestablishing a functional German school system was much harder. The bombing campaign and occupation of Germany had destroyed a good deal of infrastructure and the hungry years of 1945-47 also meant many surviving schools were bereft of basic supplies like lighting or heat. One of the constant motifs from memoirs in this period and backed up by various contemporary accounts was the lack of windows and firewood made school lessons quite distressing. The emerging Cold War as well as fears they might lose Germany if they did not reopen schools immediately also forced Allied military governments towards expedient solution. Thus denazification of faculty and textbooks sometimes took a backseat to having the schools function. Older class materials remained and they became a source of embarrassment to the occupation governments when they were brought to light. For instance, there were some schools in the AMZONE that had racist biology texts or arithmetic word problems using antisemitic language.

This created a case where teachers from the Third Reich found themselves back into positions of power. This trend was more pronounced in the Western zones where it was not atypical for a school to be reopened and then suddenly shut because of reports of Nazi-attitudes or a discovery that certain faculty had lied about their involvement with the Third Reich. In contrast, both SVAG and the SED placed a much greater emphasis upon promoting up a new generation of teachers, the Neulehrer program, who were born in the 1920s and early 1930s and were thus not tainted by deep involvement with Nazism. However, the Neulehrer program did have significant drawbacks as the pedagogical training of these new teachers was limited and instruction was often excessively ideological in nature. The newly minted teachers often stressed antifascism over the poorly-defined rubrics for education SVAG put out. Higher education in the Soviet zone also had a soft-denazification as expertise trumped the need for the elimination of Nazism. One of the many postwar disappointments of the German Jew Viktor Klemperer was that he noticed that some of the individuals that had either hounded him out of academia in the 1930s or looked the other way while the Jewish faculty were purged remained at their posts.

One of the persistent themes in both the Occupation press and various directives issued by the occupation governments was over the idleness and hooliganism of German youth. For all the fears and paranoia about the HJ and BDM’s militarization of German youth, there was a strong undercurrent of admiration of the Third Reich’s ability to give youth both structure and a purpose among a number of Allied commentators. David Smart of Coronet Films got his idea for short pedagogical films that would become ubiquitous in 1950s American classrooms from a trip he took in Germany in the 1930s. OMGUS surveys of the AMZONE Germans usually had HJ and BDM control over youth commonly listed as one of the few positive achievements of the Third Reich, and this was a sentiment that likely was shared in the rest of Germany. The war’s disruption of family life, either through the loss of one or both parents, also made some type of order and outlet for German youth the be desirable. Therefore it became contingent for each occupation to sponsor its own youth movement.