# data[].attributes.body
Gaddy, K. R. Flowers in the Gutter, The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis.

This is the true story of the Edelweiss Pirates which was a group of teenagers who came together and did everything they would to resist the Nazis. The story focuses on Fritz, Gertrude, and Jean.

# data[].attributes.body
When Jean was 4, everything changed. His dad left. His mom couldn't afford to support him and his brother, so he went to live with his grandparents. Jean's family was broken and would never be put back together again.

Quote #1: "Jean's father was an official in the Communist Party and saw what was happening with the arrests and fights after Hitler came to power. He left" (26).

# data[].attributes.body
At 6 years old, Jean starts his first year of school. Despite Hitler gaining power, Jean's grandparents tried to do everything they could to make Jean happy, and he was happy. Jean's family was still separated, but sometimes he got to see his mom and his dad.

# data[].attributes.headline
Jean gets Taken to Klapperhof Home for Boys in the Innenstadt - 1937

# data[].attributes.subject
Jean gets Taken to Klapperhof Home for Boys in the Innenstadt - 1937

# data[].attributes.body
Once Jean joins his brother at the orphanage, they find the place to be awful. The nuns told the boys scary stories them quiet at night and forced them to pray. The food was disgusting.

Quote 2: "He couldn't stand the taste. The slime hit the back of his throat and it was too much...so back into the bowl the vomit went with the rest of the soup he hadn't eaten. A nun had seen...He didn't have a choice-he ate the soup-vomit mixture" (38).

# data[].attributes.headline
Jean's Bunker gets Bombed - Winter of 1941

# data[].attributes.subject
Jean's Bunker gets Bombed - Winter of 1941

# data[].attributes.body
The bombings in Cologne were becoming more and more frequent. One night, Jean hears the droning of airplane engines followed by the sound of a bomb falling from the sky, coming closer and closer. Then, it happened. The air pressure changed and there was a loud pop, followed by a rushing noise. Stones fell from the ceiling and dust clouded the room. The lights went out. Screams erupted from everywhere. Everyone rushed to find a way out. Jean goes to the stairs, but goes back to find his grandma coughing and in a place where the ceiling was about to collapse. They safely made it out.

# data[].attributes.body
Just after midnight of this day, the familiar sound of airplanes whirring goes across the city. Everyone knows this means an attack is coming. The allied bombers fly over Cologne. A bomb drops every 6 seconds.

Quote 3: "Out on the street, the burned homes left a sweet, toxic odor. The air was thick and hot as flames flipped in the wind and smoke clouded the streets...Only when they could stop and look around did they see how bad the neighborhood looked and realize they'd narrowly escaped death" (88).

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/02/opinion/IHT-1046-bombers-but-cologne-lived.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Devastated on the night of May 30, 1942, by the first of the Royal Air Force's 1,000-bomber raids on Germany, Cologne today stands as tall and proud as its awe-inspiring Gothic cathedral, in refutation of the military dictum then prevailing that wars could be won merely by destroying the enemy's main cities and thereby shattering civilian morale.

Bathed in pale moonlight filtering through a curtain of fleecy cirrus clouds, the sleeping Rhine-side city was awakened just after midnight that half-century ago by the wailing of air-raid sirens. An armada of no less than 1,046 RAF bombers was approaching. They passed over the city at the rate of one every six seconds, dropping a total of 1,500 metric tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, one bomb every other second, for what seemed, at least to the victims, an interminable hour and a half.

When at length the all-clear sounded, about 600 acres (240 hectares) of Cologne had been flattened, including 90 percent of the central city, 5,000 fires had been ignited (the glare of the flames was visible to returning RAF aircrews up to 150 miles away), 3,300 homes had been destroyed and 45,000 people left homeless.

The casualty toll reached 474 killed and 5,000 wounded, and would have been much higher except for air-raid shelters and the deep cellars under so many homes in old Cologne.

When survivors of the world's first 1,000-bomber raid ventured warily out of their shelters, there before their unbelieving eyes, towering majestically above the hellish carnage stood their beloved cathedral - superficially damaged, but with its twin spires still silhouetted defiantly against the bomber's moon.

This miraculous sight strengthened the people's morale and determination through the rest of the war, as the Allies continued to pound an already flattened city long after any real targets remained.

Instead of falling prey to the hysteria expected of them, the citizens of Cologne displayed the same sort of stoicism that so many British civilians had shown in the earlier blitz of London and other cities.Within two weeks of the May 30 bombardment, life in Cologne was functioning almost normally, though the population had been reduced considerably by the evacuation of many young and old people to less vulnerable areas.

Cologne, which had been on the receiving end of about 1,200 RAF sorties before May 30, was to be deluged by an additional 20,000 metric tons of bombs before the war ended. Many of the bombs were dropped by the high-flying B-17s, or Flying Fortresses, of the U.S. Air Force. The city's population shrunk from a 1939 level of 768,352 to a mere 40,000. But by December 1945 the numbers had grown againto 447,000, as people returned to clear up the rubble and begin the work of reconstruction.

Typical testimony to the success of this work was the cathedral, the largest of its kind in Europe, with twin steeples towering 515 feet (155 meters) above the city. The restoration of the lofty high choir was completed by 1948, and services were resumed in the nave in 1956. Its nine bells, the largest of which weighs 25 tons, still summon the faithful to worship.

(Aerial bombardment has a longer history than is generally known. The revolutionary notion of dropping bombs from the air was tested by Italy in its 1911 war with Turkey. Small cargoes of bombs were unloaded on Tripoli in that year, to little decisive effect. And in 1849, Austrian forces launched hot air balloons containing small explosive charges against Venice. Most of the balloons exploded in the air or fell into the water, however, and the city later surrendered not because of the bombs but because of cholera and starvation.)

In Britain, the theory of strategic air attacks was developed by the newly founded Royal Air Force after the 1915-16 attacks on London by Zeppelin airships and the 1917-18 forays by German Gotha bombers. But Britain's bomber force at the end of World War I com- prised only nine squadrons, which included only three aircraft capable of bombing Germany. Even on the eve of World War II, the RAF, victim of penny-pinching during the Great Depression, possessed no force capable of an effective and sustained strategic bombing of Germany.

That situation changed rapidly after the Battle of Britain, which stopped Hitler's plans to invade the British Isles and focused the War Cabinet's attention on a counteroffensive in Europe.

The only avenue for such an offensive at that time being the air, the British Bomber Command was directed early in 1942 to concentrate its operations "on the morale of the enemy civil population, and in particular on industrial workers."

Churchill's decision to concentrate the air war on German cities was made on the advice of his scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann, who was German-born. Lord Cherwell, as he was titled in 1942, told Churchill that every ton of bombs dropped on Germany, in his estimation, would make 100 to 200 people homeless.

And the destruction of a person's home, Lord Cherwell argued, would do more to shatter his morale than would the deaths of relatives or friends.

If the RAF concentrated its resources on building and deploying bombers, it would be possible, Churchill was told, to destroy half of allhomes in the larger cities of Germany, as well as inflicting crippling damage on factories and communications lines.And so the bombing campaign over Europe proliferated, and continued for three years.

The Allies released an incredible total of 1,996,036 metric tons of bombs on Germany and German-occupied Europe, more than half of which fell on cities and communication facilities. Some 593,000 civilians were killed, and 3.3 million dwellings were destroyed, leaving 7.5 million people homeless.

The most frequently bombed city was Berlin; many other urban areas were close behind.

And yet it was necessary for the Allies to invade the Continent, and to fight to the very gates of the capital before Germany finally capitulated in May 1945, three years after the first saturation bombing of Cologne.

The writer was a flight lieutenant and flying instructor with the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II; some of his students flew in raids on Cologne. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | 1,046 Bombers but Cologne Lived (Published 1992)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Devastated on the night of May 30, 1942, by the first of the Royal Air Force's 1,000-bomber raids on Germany, Cologne today stands as tall and proud as its awe-inspiring Gothic cathedral, in refutation of the military dictum then prevailing that wars coul

# data[].attributes.headline
Julich joins the Edelweiss Pirates - Fall of 1942

# data[].attributes.subject
Julich joins the Edelweiss Pirates - Fall of 1942

# data[].attributes.body
By the time Jean was 13, he had returned from the countryside and started school again. Jean and his best friend first saw these kids in funny clothes, they looked different, and Jean liked it.

Quote 4: "The kids allowed Jean and Fan to join their group. They called themselves the Edelweiss Pirates. Jean loved the songs they sang, and gave himself the nickname Schang..."(98)

# data[].attributes.body
https://allthatsinteresting.com/edelweiss-pirates

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In stark contrast to the Hitler Youth, the Edelweiss Pirates resisted Nazism in any way they could at a time when doing so was a criminal offense.

Despite leaving behind little information on their exploits, a group of German teenagers known as the Edelweiss Pirates played an important role in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

Much like the tenacious edelweiss flower clinging to the crags of Austria's Alps that the group was named after, these young Germans resisted Nazi indoctrination.

They saw themselves as the opposite of the infamous Hitler Youth, rejecting their paramilitary structure, Nazi ideology, and gender segregation.

Hailing from working-class backgrounds, the Edelweiss Pirates resisted Nazism in any way they could - all before their 18th birthdays.

The Hitler Youth

According to Sally Rogow of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center, the Edelweiss Pirates was "one of the largest youth groups who refused to participate in Nazi youth activities."

To understand the Pirates, we first have to understand what they were up against. Formed in 1922 as the Youth League of the Nazi Party, it was renamed the Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth, in 1926 and was comprised of German boys aged 14 to 18. Four years later, the Nazis established an equivalent organization for teenage girls called the Bund deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls.

At its height, the Hitler Youth had eight million members, making it the largest youth organization in the world. Although the Youth initially focused on standard activities such as camping, sports, and games, it increasingly became militarized, training its young boys for armed combat.

It soon became clear that the goal of the Hitler Youth was to indoctrinate Germany's young people with Hitler's aggressive, Nazi worldview.

As Adolf Hitler himself described it in 1938:

"These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] 10 years of age, and often for the first time get a little fresh air; after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years....And even if they are still not complete National Socialists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months....And whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left...the Wehrmacht [German armed forces] will take care of that."

Who Were The Edelweiss Pirates?

The Edelweiss Pirates, or Edelweißpiraten, was a collective of local anti-Nazi resistance groups founded largely in western Germany. Aged 14 to 17, these teenagers rejected the Hitler Youth's and League of German Girls' dark aspects: restrictions on teenagers' fun and freedom of thought, and training kids for military service.

Many of them left school at age 14 - which was common for working-class teens at the time - in order to sever ties with the Nazis, and some dropped out of the Youth. Membership was compulsory beginning in 1936, and in 1939 - the same year World War II began - non-membership became a punishable offense.

But the Edelweiss Pirates had only a few years of freedom since they were typically forced to join the army when they turned 18.

Everything the Hitler Youth stood for was everything the Edelweiss Pirates stood against. The Youth wore their hair high and tight and closely shorn, while the Pirates wore theirs long and free. The Hitler Youth were segregated by gender, whereas Pirates were coed and some engaged in sexual experimentation. The differences extended further.

While the Youth wore standardized uniforms and listened to Nazi propaganda music, the Edelweiss Pirates wore checkered shirts and lederhosen and played music composed by Jewish musicians and other non-state-sanctioned songs.

The Edelweiss Pirates' Antics

More than just a proto-hippie fantasy, these anti-fascists were flesh and blood teens. Many of their adventures were kept secret, so information on them can be hard to come by.

Much of the Edelweiss Pirates' time was spent in youthful rebellion to Nazism. One former Pirate recalled pouring sugar in the gas tank of Nazi officers' cars, hurling bricks through the windows of munitions factories, and graffiti-ing messages like "Down with Hitler" and "Down with Nazi Brutality."

They listened to the verboten BBC world service on the radio. When the Allies dropped anti-Nazi propaganda from their airplanes, the Pirates made sure to gather the leaflets before the Nazis snatched them up; they would organize leaflet drops in nearby towns so the local police wouldn't recognize them.

Meanwhile, their more daring activities included shielding German deserters and escaped concentration and labor camp prisoners, and supplying adult resistance groups with explosives.

Anything that could weaken the Nazis' morale was fair game to the youthful Pirates. And many of them faced brutal punishment, from forced head-shaving to torturous prison sentences to public hangings.

Indeed, the Edelweiss Pirates were real people, with beating hearts, and parents - and names.

Walter Mayer And Barthel Schink

Walter Mayer, from Düsseldorf, recalled a meeting with fellow Pirates at a pool hall. A member would ask, "'What are we going to do next?' and maybe one would say, 'You know the Hitler Youths? They all store their equipment at such-and-such a place. Let's make it disappear.'"

The raids began small and then snowballed.

"We started maybe by deflating the tires. Then we made the whole bicycle disappear."

Mayer's father was deeply anti-Nazi, and while Mayer did join the Hitler Youth, he fought against them by hiding Jewish friends in the basement and working with the Edelweiss Pirates.

At one point, he was found stealing shoes and was arrested by Nazi authorities. Mayer remembered the prosecutor pushed for the death penalty, but the judge, considering the boy's athletic achievements, sentenced him to one to four years in prison.

Mayer was lucky. Most infamously, the Gestapo publicly hanged 13 people, including six of Cologne's Edelweiss Pirates, including 16-year-old Barthel Schink, on the morning of Nov. 10, 1944. The group was accused of planning an attack on the local Gestapo headquarters. None of them had been tried.

Now, the street near where they were hanged is named after Schink.

Gertrud Koch

Gertrud Koch, born in Cologne in 1924, refused to join the League of German Girls. Instead, she co-founded Cologne's Edelweiss Pirates chapter.

She later remembered how her family hid a Jewish musician in their garden from 1938 to 1939. "We took him food there for about a year and a half," she said.

Later, she led the Pirates' leaflet drop from the top of Cologne's train station. For that she was jailed for nine months at Brauweiler, where the Gestapo beat her and once threw her down the stairs, breaking her arm.

Her father, a communist, died in the Esterwegen concentration camp in northwest Germany.

Koch had once dreamed of becoming a Montessori school teacher. Now her only wish was to make it out of the war alive. She and her mother fled to the mountains to hide for the last two years of World War II.

Until her final days in 2016, she went by her Pirate codename "Mucki."

Fritz Theilen

Fritz Theilen was another Pirate who faced the corrupt Nazi court system. He apprenticed at Ford Motor Company plant in Cologne when he left school at 14 and became disillusioned by the slave labor of the outfit.

He donned his Pirate badge - a metal pin depicting an edelweiss flower - in 1942, and was picked up by the Nazi secret police in 1943. Brutalized and released after a few weeks, Theilen had many more run-ins with the Nazis. He even escaped from a sub-facility of the dreaded Dachau concentration camp in 1944.

When the war ended, he wished to return to Ford, but the management wouldn't let him. Nazism was still alive and well in many circles; to them, Theilen wasn't a hero, but an agitator and common criminal.

"I never thought I would have to justify myself," he said.

He only got hired back with the help of the British forces occupying western Germany.

Hans And Sophie Scholl

The Edelweiss Pirates were one of the biggest youth groups to resist Nazi control, but they weren't the only one. Another was the White Rose nonviolent resistance group, which counted German siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl as members.

The Scholls' father detested the Nazi regime. He told his children: "What I want most of all is that you live in uprightness and freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that proves to be."

The Scholl siblings and other members of the White Rose took his message to heart, leaving the Nazi party and working against it.

Moved to resist the Nazis' mass murders on the Eastern Front on moral, ethical, and religious grounds, the group printed leaflets with messages like: "the German name will be forever defamed if German youth does not finally arise, avenge, and atone, if he does not shatter his tormentor and raise up a new intellectual Europe."

The Scholls and Christoph Probst were sentenced to death by beheading. Even though Sophie was offered a lighter sentence if she denied her work with the White Rose, she chose to die with her brother for their beliefs.

They were beheaded by Nazi forces on Feb. 22, 1943. To this day, the Scholl siblings and the White Rose, or Weiße Rose remain a symbol of German resistance to Hitler's Nazi regime.

The Edelweiss Pirates' Legacy

While the White Roses - a group composed of university students and professors - have been celebrated for their resistance since the end of the war, it took 60 years for the Edelweiss Pirates to be officially recognized as full-fledged resistance fighters instead of criminals.

"We were from the working classes. That is the main reason why we have only now been recognized," Koch declared.

"After the war there were no judges in Germany so the old Nazi judges were used and they upheld the criminalization of what we did and who we were."

Today, the Edelweiss Pirates' bravery, righteousness, and resistance to Nazism at a time when much of Germany willfully followed Hitler's authoritarian regime is rightfully celebrated.
After reading about the teenaged Edelweiss Pirates' anti-Nazi resistance, learn about Meyer Lansky's Nazi-punching gang and Che Guevara's incredible life fighting imperialism in Latin America.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Anti-Hitler Youth: Meet The Badass Teenaged Resistance Fighters Of Nazi Germany

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite leaving behind little information on their exploits, a group of German teenagers known as the Edelweiss Pirates played an important role in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. Much like the tenacious edelweiss flower clinging to the crags of Austria's Alps that the group was named after, these young Germans resisted Nazi indoctrination.

# data[].attributes.headline
Edelweiss Pirates Take a Trip to the Seven Mountains - Late 1942

# data[].attributes.subject
Edelweiss Pirates Take a Trip to the Seven Mountains - Late 1942

# data[].attributes.body
After joining the Edelweiss Pirates, Jean and his new friends take a weekend trip to the Seven Mountains. They had campfires, slept in caves, sing songs, and talk. He and many others loved getting away from the city and the destruction of the war with people who he cared about. As they started up a mountain, they ran into an Adolf Hitler School and started a fight. They luckily survived.

# data[].attributes.headline
Edelweiss Pirates Have One Last Meet-up - December of 1942

# data[].attributes.subject
Edelweiss Pirates Have One Last Meet-up - December of 1942

# data[].attributes.body
With the ongoing war, the Edelweiss Pirates knew that anything could happen in the future. So they planned one last meet-up, one last time to laugh and enjoy the night. They brought the little food they had and crowded together in a little room at the back of a bar. The mood was heavy. They sang songs together and tried to enjoy the time together before a Gestapo officer catches them.

# data[].attributes.body
At this point in the war, Cologne continues to be bombed and most people have left. Jews have escaped and many people life illegally beneath the rubble. Transportation through Cologne is almost impossible.

Quote 5: "In Cologne, it's hard to say that a city even still exists. Standing on the Hohenzollern Bridge, you see only destruction: collapsed shells of houses and rubble in the streets, and the smell of smoke lingers in the air. Ninety-nine percent of structures are destroyed. The Cathedral still stands, but the bombs have destroyed the stained-glass windows" (192).

# data[].attributes.headline
Jeans gets Ordered to Westwall - September 29th 1944

# data[].attributes.subject
Jeans gets Ordered to Westwall - September 29th 1944

# data[].attributes.body
When Jean is on his way to the pharmacy to get some medicine, a Hitler Youth registers him to be shipped to the Westwall to dig trenches. Fan, Jean's best friend, agrees to go with him the next day. The military duty was very poorly organized and Jean and Fan sneak out in the middle of the night and get a ride back to Cologne.

# data[].attributes.headline
Officers Search Jean's Apartment For His Dad - October 10th 1944

# data[].attributes.subject
Officers Search Jean's Apartment For His Dad - October 10th 1944

# data[].attributes.body
When Jean gets home, he realizes that something is wrong. Jean gets punched by a Gestapo officer and is forced to sit on the sofa for an hour by this officer along with his mother and grandma.

Quote 6: "They marched Jean out of the apartment, guns pressed against his back. Jean's father had put up a fight when he was dragged out of the apartment, but so much had changed in the last eight years" (211).

# data[].attributes.headline
Jean gets Taken to the EL-DE House - October 10th, 1944

# data[].attributes.subject
Jean gets Taken to the EL-DE House - October 10th, 1944

# data[].attributes.body
When Jean was taken to the EL-DE House, the Gestapo had a different interrogation technique in mind for Jean. They brought him into a room and told him to stand next to a metal bed. He was forced to watch a man start kissing a woman on the bed and they started undressing. Jean was so embarrassed. After this, he was interrogated and beaten.

Quote 7: "When he stopped tumbling, all he could do was lie on the cold cement floor of the basement. He thought he'd broken something. His head hurt and his body hurt, but he was afraid of what was coming next. He didn't know the exact reason he had been arrested, and he didn't know what the Gestapo knew" (212, 213).

# data[].attributes.body
https://museenkoeln.de/ns-dokumentationszentrum/default.aspx?s=764

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NS-Dokumentationszentrum Köln - House prison

# data[].attributes.body
Jean finds out that one of his friends and fellow Edelweiss Pirates turned him in. His friend was the reason he had gone through so much pain and had to leave his family. Barthel hadn't meant to turn Jean or Fan in, he was in so much pain and wanted them to stop beating him. He says that he was "at the end". He asks for forgiveness and Jean realizes how much Barthel has changed.

# data[].attributes.body
While in jail, Jean and his friends communicated through the window. In the jail, they could hear the screams from the interrogation room, which gave them a chance to communicate with each other. They had whistles they'd used as Edelweiss Pirates so they used those to communicate when they didn't want to talk or didn't want the guards to know what they were saying. From this new communication method, Jean found out there were 7 Edelweiss Pirates at this jail and 5 more at Westwall and ensured that the Gestapo officers couldn't get names or places from them.

# data[].attributes.body
The Gestapo were harsh. They would force the prisoners to stand against a wall, come behind them, and then hit them so their noses smashed into the wall. It seemed as though the officers took pleasure from hurting the prisoners. Fan got interrogated and Jean had to hear the whacks against his friends flesh. At night, they had to strip and give the guards their clothes to make sure they were uncomfortable and wouldn't run out into the cold night. The next day, they were forced to do physical exercises when they had no energy.

Quote 8: "...down, up, down, up, jump, march, march. Some of the older men collapsed. Jean cut his hand on a rock in the path. Pain shot up his arm as he pressed his body down to the ground, and as a red spot remained when he got up again. The next time he went down, he dropped down onto the lawn instead of the gravel path. That didn't escape Officer Kutter's notice. 'The lawn is too good for you,' Kutter said...'Besides, soon you'll be under the grass anyway, '"(234).

# data[].attributes.headline
Jean’s Friends get Transferred - Fall 1944

# data[].attributes.subject
Jean’s Friends get Transferred - Fall 1944

# data[].attributes.body
When Jean looks out his window one day he sees a group of prisoners chained together. They move from the building, across the yard, and are loaded into a truck. Jean knows that some of his friends are in that group because he gets two new neighbors. None of the prisoners know what is about to happen with those thirteen prisoners, but they are about to get executed.

# data[].attributes.body
On this day, 5 teenagers and 8 adults are hung, many of which Jean knew or was friends with. Hangings aren’t supposed to happen in public like this, but the Nazis are desperate. Once the prisoners are hung, they stay there until the evening and then are taken to Westfriedhof Cemetery and are buried. A little over two weeks later, a group of people including six Edelweiss Pirates are executed at the same place on November 10th, 1944.

Quote 9: "Barthel and the others walk up the planks and stand on the board. The officers pull down the ropes over their shaved heads and skull-like faces. In a normal hanging, the force of the drop between the surface the condemned is standing on and the end of the rope breaks the person's neck, resulting in immediate paralysis and death. That drop is usually four to six feet. This drop is less than three feet, so the nooses tighten around the necks of the prisoners and they strangle to death. Instead of instant death, strangling by hanging can take as long as twenty minutes" (245).

# data[].attributes.body
On this day, Jean finds out about how his friends had been publicly hanged. Jean fears that he is next. Jean continues to stay in jail all through November, December, and January and on February 10th he gets transferred from Brauweiler to Seigburg. In a way, Seigburg is better than Brauweiler because Jean gets to be in a cell with Fan. They sing songs together and play air guitar to pass the time. Despite this, Siegburg's conditions were worse. Everyone had typhoid fever or typhus. Fan gets sick, and Jean takes care of him. Jean and Fan kept getting transported father and father east. They know they Americans are coming.

# data[].attributes.body
The American's arrive! While Jean is in prison, one of Jean's cellmates yells that he sees the Americans and Jean can't believe it. They were free. In May of 1945, Jean goes back to Cologne with Fan and they laugh and talk the whole night. They bike back to where the transports are and take a bus back to Cologne.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/great-depression-and-world-war-ii-1929-1945/world-war-ii/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fort Belvoir,Virginia, 1941
Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. a few days later, and the nation became fully engaged in the Second World War.

U.S. involvement in the Second World War was quickly followed by a massive mobilization effort. With millions of men and women serving overseas in the nation's armed forces, most of those who remained at home dedicated themselves to supporting the war effort in whatever means was available to them. Women, who had worked as homemakers or had held jobs outside military-related industries, took jobs in aircraft manufacturing plants, munitions plants, military uniform production factories, and so on. As the need for steel and other resources increased, American citizens participated in rationing programs, as well as recycling and scrap metal drives. Americans also supported the war effort with their hard-earned dollars by purchasing Liberty bonds. Sold by the U.S. government, the bonds raised money for the war and helped the bond purchasers feel they were doing their part for the war effort.

The U.S. entry into the war helped to get the nation's economy back on its feet following the depression. Although just ten years earlier, jobs were very difficult to come by, there were now jobs for nearly everyone who wanted one. With the creation of 17 million new jobs during the war, workers were afforded the opportunity to pay off old debts, as well as to begin saving some of their earnings.

Not all Americans remaining at home gained favorably from the war. Fearing that Japan might invade the West Coast of the United States, the government rounded up thousands of Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast, and confined them to internment camps. By 1948 when the internment program ended, tens of thousands of Japanese had suffered as internees. In addition, German Americans, Italian Americans, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians were also interned.

On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945, and the Second World War came to an end. The war cost the lives of more than 330,000 American soldiers. Many more were permanently injured or maimed.

To find more documents on this topic in Loc.gov, search with such terms as internment camps, defense workers, atomic bomb, and the names of world leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler.

Documents

Women Defense Workers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
World War II | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. a few days later, and the nation became fully engaged in the Second World War.

# data[].attributes.body
After the war, Jean didn't tell anyone about his life as an Edelweiss Pirate but that changed in the late 1970's. Jean gets thanked for his kindness and gets invited to be honored by Yad Vasham. Interviews on Jean were also done and put up at the Nationals Socialist Documentation Center.

Quote 10: "In February 1984, Jean received a letter. Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims and heroes of the Holocaust, wanted to honor him 'for the bravery and human kindness you showed in risking your life in order to save Jews during the Holocaust.' Such honorees are called 'The Righteous Among the Nations'"(260).

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jean-julich-one-of-the-edelweiss-pirates-who-resisted-the-nazis-6259542.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jean Jülich, who has died in his native Cologne aged 82, was one of the last surviving Edelweiss Pirates, the working class German teenagers who ran wild in the ruins of the city during the last years of the Third Reich. By 1944 as many as five thousand tearaways were living as outlaws in Hamburg, Leipzig, Frankfurt and in the heavily bombed cities of the Rhine and Ruhr valleys. Known sometimes as Navajos, Ruhrpiraten, Harlem-Club or even Meuten [wolf packs], they were usually under military age and had evaded the compulsory Hitler youth organisations.

Boys and girls wore long hair, short shorts and distinctive checked shirts decorated by a small badge or pin in the shape of the edelweiss flower.

Jean Jülich tramped the hills south of Bonn with his guitar, singing attheir secret meetings. He had lived with his grandparents from the age of seven, after seeing his communist father badly beaten by SS men and jailed for high treason. In a deserted bomb-disposal bunker, the Navajo group of the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne supplied black market food and shelter to runaway forced labourers, concentration camp escapees, fugitive Jews and German army deserters. They attacked Hitler Youth patrols, derailed ammunition trains, catapulted bricks through the roof of a munitions factory and sabotaged machinery.

Their plan to blow up the Gestapo headquarters in Cologne, using detonators extracted from unexploded British bombs, was discovered after a 24-year-old Edelweiss Pirate had shot dead a Nazi informer.

Jülich was arrested at the age of 15, held in solitary confinement without trial and tortured for four months. His 16-year-old friend, Barthel Schink, was hanged with 11 other Pirates on a public gallows at Ehrenfeld railway station, without trial, on orders from Heinrich Himmler. Jülich survived a year of beatings, starvation and typhus in a concentration camp until liberated by American tanks in 1945.

In "year zero", after the defeat ofGermany, feral surviving Pirates living on their wits in the ruined cities were frequently arrested by Allied military police. One Pirate was sentenced to death, though later reprieved, by amilitary court in Lower Saxony inApril 1946 for his "very active part in carrying out the nefarious schemes of the Edelweiss Piraten. An organisation such as this might well threaten the peace of Europe."

In the Soviet zone, Edelweiss Pirates were routinely jailed for 25 years. In West Germany, the courts ruled that wartime teenage criminal convictions recorded by the Gestapo counted as part of their criminal record. Jülich and a fellow Navajo, Gertrud Koch, codename "Mucki", fought a long campaign to get the Piraten rehabilitated as resisters. Despite being recognised as "righteous gentiles" by Yad Vashem in Israel in 1988, their Gestapo records were not annulled until 2005.

"Mucki" lost her father in a concentration camp. Now 87, she said, "The old Nazi judges used after the war upheld the criminalisation of what we had done and who we were."

During the campaign for recognition, Jülich made a successful recording of a romantic tramping song, "Es War In Shanghai", much loved by the Edelweiss Pirates but banned at Hitler Youth campfires, that tells of a midnight encounter in the Ohio Bar in Shanghai between Heini and Charly from Hamburg and Jim Parker, their comrade from 'Frisco.

Jülich always claimed, "It was not a political song, but it addresses the desire for foreign countries, fellowship and independence. The Nazis did not sing this song because it was not consistent with their ideology."

His 2003 pamphlet Kohldampf, Knast un Kamelle ("Hard Times, Jail and Carnival: An Edelweiss Pirate Looks Back on His Life") was equally romantic.

His wife, Karin, daughter Conny and son Marco were at his bedside when he died in hospital after a heartattack.
Andrew Rosthorn Jean Jülich, war hero: born Cologne 18 April 1929; married Karin (one son, one daughter); died Cologne 19 October 2011.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jean Jülich: One of the Edelweiss Pirates, who resisted the Nazis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jean Jülich, who has died in his native Cologne aged 82, was one of the last surviving Edelweiss Pirates, the working class German teenagers who ran wild in the ruins of the city during the last years of the Third Reich.