"The Definitive Cinematic Portrayal of the Hitler Youth"

The year is 1931, and young Heini Volker has a problem. His unemployed father demands he joins Berlin's young communists. But his heart belongs to the Hitler Youth. How Heini resolves this quandary is the story of Hitlerjunge Quex, a movie that became central to the moral instruction of young Germans throughout the National-Socialist years. Produced in 1933, just months after Hitler's ascension to power, Hitlerjunge Quex drew from the real-life story of Herbert Norkus, a Hitler Youth killed by communist street-fighters in 1932. An expressly propagandistic vehicle, the film pulls few punches in its depiction of Depression-era misery and the escalating violence of the Weimar Republic's last years. Indeed, its bracing realism owes a strong debt to Germany's left-wing proletarian theater movement - an impression underscored by the several prominent leftist (or formerly so) actors featured here. Also striking are the movie's many quotations - a camera angle here, a mise-en-scéne there - from other Weimar-era classics, from Caligari to Fritz Lang's M and Bertolt Brecht's Kuhle Wampe. The fascinating result is a film that, more than any other National-Socialist era production, combines hard-scrabble realism with National Socialist myth-making, its singular portrait of German working-class misery refracted through the transformative lens of National Socialist ideology. An immediate box office success, the film became a Nazi propaganda staple for years afterwards, by 1945, an estimated 20 million viewers had paid some degree of witness to Heini's life and martyrdom.