Hitler Youth at the end of the war: doomed with ersatz weapons
The youth and children's Nazi organization created by the Third Reich ended its days with the monster that spawned it. And together with him until the last minutes she resisted the victorious soldiers of the Red Army, spilling their blood. It is impossible not to admit the obvious: the boys from the Hitler Youth just became one of the most persistent and fanatical defenders who pushed them to the death of the Nazi regime. Goebbels propaganda about "advancing hordes drinking blood" also played a role - all in that spirit.
What they went into their last and meaningless battle with is a topic for a separate discussion.
To begin with, we’ll make it clear: we’re not talking about the 12th tank SS division "Hitler Youth", really formed entirely from the pupils of this sinister organization and shed a lot of blood on our Western allies in Normandy and the Ardennes. Fighting, bastards, really desperate, but only in history entered more in connection with the mention of not military operations, but military crimes committed by its soldiers (such as executions of prisoners of war, torture and mockery of them). The equipment and armament of the tank units of the Third Reich has been written and so is more than enough, so that we will have a few more words.
In the SS, even at the end of the war, young men still fought, who were brainwashed as much as possible in the Hitler Youth and managed to teach military affairs pretty well. But in Volkssturm and other units of the Nazi people's militia in 1944, on the personal orders of the Führer, teenagers of 16 years old got into. By 1945, it came down to the children. According to completely trustworthy memories, besides confirmed by photographs and documents, there were plenty in the ranks of this “rati” and 12-year-old boys, perfect children. First of all, they were thrown completely unprepared into the battle against the Red Army rapidly advancing on Berlin. Well, and armed accordingly.
The Mauser 98K carbines, not to mention the MP-40 submachine guns and even more so the StG-44, which was a pretty good assault rifle for those times, were Hitler’s cannon fodder: standard arms were desperately lacking in parts of the Wehrmacht and SS, and so the troops of the "third grade" it was definitely not supposed. First things first, trophies went into business, but again, again, far from the best quality. Among such samples came from not only the First World War, but even during the Franco-Prussian War. Of course, there was a disaster with ammunition for all this diversity. They tried, for example, to fit Greek cartridges to Italian rifles. With a predictable result ...
Following this, the Germans, who were always great hunting lovers, began to seize smooth-bore shotguns, passing them again “to the troops”. A double-barreled shotgun against a PPSh, SVT or even a Mosin rifle - this, of course, was still a ratio. In this regard, craftsmen were found in the Reich who thought of shooting 12-caliber high-explosive rifle grenades fired from hunting “trunks”. Under approximately the same ammunition (which had an extremely low efficiency), some of the usual army rocket launchers were altered.
By the way, about grenades ... In 1945, when it became very tight with metal in “great Germany”, they began to sculpt them (in the most literal sense of the word) from ordinary concrete. First, the concrete head was attached to the usual “beater” with a long handle, and then they adopted the Volkshandgranate-45 (a folk grenade, and what do you think!) Without a handle at all. Before the use of these "cobblestones", which were produced by hundreds of thousands of pieces, the Wehrmacht eventually came. But for the guys from the Hitler Youth who did not have enough power to throw such heavy shells, they eventually created a ... paper grenade! That is really completely made of cardboard and stuffed with metal shavings. This was the “swan” song of the Third Reich in the field of hand grenades.
With rifle weapons, developed and produced solely to put it in the hands of the boys who were ready to die for the Fuhrer, the situation was exactly the same. Volkssturmgewehr VG.1 and Volkssturmgewehr VG.2 rifles, “self-loading carbines” Volkssturm-Mehrladegewehr, Volkssturmgewehr Gustloff and HIW VSK, “submachine guns like the MP-3008, which is quite a bit of a kind , far from brilliant British STEN ... All of these samples, which were not just bad, but terrifying quality, and the language does not turn out to be called a weapon. Natural ersatz, worthless. They were designed for one, maximum two fights - as, however, those to whom they were issued.
Except that anti-tank weapons, mainly in the form of Panzerfaust, known to us as “Faustpatron”, stood out quite generously from the Hitler Youth’s hounds. The explanation here is very simple - the boys who didn’t understand what they were doing, had no combat experience or training, climbed with them under our “thirty-four” in situations where experienced soldiers would save for sure, and simply would not take risks, realizing that there was no chance. Unfortunately, sometimes the small and brisk "young Nazis" managed to achieve their goal, cutting off the lives of our soldiers half a step before the Victory ...
The Hitler Youth is the eternal shame of German Nazism, the last rate of which in the war were foolish children with bad weapons in their hands.
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