[VideoView]
Dipl.-Vw. Dr. Ludwig Steiner
I never was with the HJ ? an accomplishment
interviewer:
Ruth Deutschmann
photography:
Benjamin Epp
copyright location:
Wien
date of recording:
2008-04-29
English translation by:
Sylvia Manning - Baumgartner
Italian translation by:
Nicole D´Incecco
???iuimd_video_v_zeit_zuordnung_en???:
1938
transcription:
I never was with the HJ and that was a real accomplishment. Together with a former... scout leader I founded a mountain rescue youth group and were able to avoid the Hitler youth. That went well for a while until I was drafted. That was the end of it. But we were drafted to pre-military training by the police anyway. That was like this: we were in plain clothes and had to absolve military training with the HJ in uniform. Among other things there were war games. One group ? a part of Innsbruck's Hitler youth had to attack a certain emplacement. A small group of 12 civilians played the enemy and had to defend this emplacement. This took place near Vill. We watched all this. And when they wanted to overrun the emplacement we ran down at the back and ran away. Then they took the emplacement and we had marched off and were gone. That was one part of it. Another one was that we had to go to ideological schooling ? our parents received a summons from the police for us. And then also ? again military and ideological ? a... during the Poland war there was a SS-Hauptsturmführer, a captain, who had received the Iron Cross first class and was wounded. by a summons from the police to come there. The HJ-Streifendienst, the HJ police so to say, seated us in the first row ? the son of the former governor of Tyrol was beside me and others who had been identified as being anti-Nazi. I was on the seventh place. Then the captain came and said to each of us: "Get up! Why won't you join the Waffen-SS? You're healthy!" and so on. I was the seventh and thought: "What will I say?" Then I remembered hearing a special news cast on the radio in the morning: "The heroic submarine fleet has sunk 25,000 gross register tons in the Atlantic." and so on. When he came to me I said: "I want to join the submarines." The SS didn't have any submarines, but the subs were heroic so he couldn't call me coward. Well, the ones after me all wanted to join the submarines. So that was a bit much. But of course I never did join the submarines. I waited to be drafted. Of course that was a different approach than the Gestapo, where everything was done under duress. But these were things we had to deal with.