October 25, 1944: The Edelweiss Pirates

October 25, 1944: Nazi Germany decides they've had enough of a resistance group called Der Edelweißpiraten -- the Edelweiss Pirates.

At the age of 17, a German boy who had stayed in school was conscripted into the Hitlerjugend -- the Hitler Youth. But children were allowed to leave school at age 14, and many of those who did formed resistance groups. The Edelweiss Pirates were formed in western Germany, and named themselves after a white flower native to the Alps.

A song titled "Edelweiss" is featured in the musical The Sound of Music, whose climax takes place after the German-Austrian Anschluss of March 1938. Within the play, it is treated as an Austrian folk song and a symbol of Austrian pride. However, the song was written specifically for the musical, and did not exist during World War II or its buildup.

As Canadian historian James Fell tells it, with language worthy of the Nazis, history's greatest villains:

In addition to all the allegiance-to-Hitler stuff, being in the Hitler Youth sucked. It was highly regimented fascist paramilitary bullshit and totally the death of fun. Hitler Youth was boys only; girls were made to be part of the League of German Girls. Edelweiss Pirates were all about freedom of expression and growing long hair and mixing genders and fucking up those Nazi punks.

They numbered in the thousands, and in addition to just enjoying being teens and playing that "degenerate" jazz and blues music and exploring their sexuality, they'd hunt down Hitler Youth patrols and beat the shit out of them on a regular basis. The pirate slogan was "Eternal War on the Hitler Youth."

The Pirates' actions included gathering up Allied propaganda dropped by airplanes and push it through people's mailboxes, helping army deserters disappear, adding sugar to the gas tanks of Nazi vehicles, pulling down Nazi flags, and even derailing munitions trains.

On October 25, 1944, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, and perhaps the truest of the true believers among Hitler's high command, ordered a crackdown. The following month, 13 people, many of them Edelweiss Pirates, were publicly hanged in Cologne.

The Nazi regime kept up the pressure on the Edelweiss Pirates, imprisoning many and even sending some to concentration camps, but they kept on fighting until V-E Day. History tended to view the Pirates as pranksters at best, and as criminals at worst, instead of a true resistance group. But as The War has faded further into time, their story has been revived, and they are remembered as kids who decided that the grownups had let them down, and that, if they needed heroes, they had to become those heroes themselves.

Gertrud "Mucki" Koch, in 2009

In 2004, Niko von Glasow directed the film Edelweiss Pirates. It's not clear how many people belonged to the group, or what percentage of them survived The War. The last known surviving Edelweiss Pirate was Gertrud "Mucki" Koch, who lived until 2016, at the age of 92.

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October 25, 1944 was a Wednesday. Jon Anderson, lead singer of British rock band Yes, and political consultant James Carville were born. This was also the day that the last naval battle between battleships was fought. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball season had ended 16 days earlier, when the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series by beating the St. Louis Browns in 6 games. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season started 3 days later. So there were no scores on this historic day.