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Group of jazz and swing lovers in Nazi Germany

The Swing Youth (Swingjugend) were a youth counterculture of jazz and swing lovers in Germany formed in Hamburg in 1939. Primarily active in Hamburg and Berlin, they were composed of 14 to 21 year old Germans, mostly middle or upper class students, but also including some in the working class. They admired the "American way of life", defining themselves in swing music and opposing Nazism, especially the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend). They loosely structured themselves into “clubs” with names such as the Harlem Club, the OK Gang, and the Hot Club. This underground subculture, distinctly nonconformist with a focus on African American music, was active in the German youth scene. Despite being largely apolitical and unstructured, the Swing Youth were targeted and, in some cases, repressed by the Nazi government.

The name Swingjugend was a parody of the numerous youth groups that were organised by the Nazis, such as the Hitlerjugend. The youth also referred to themselves as Swings or Swingheinis ("Swingity"); members were called "Swing Boy", "Swing Girl" or "Old Hot Boy".

During the Nazi regime, all the youth (those aged 10 to 17) in Germany who were considered to be Aryan were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. The leaders of these organisations realised they had to offer some attraction in the area of social dancing to recruit members. Instead of adopting the popular swing dance (because it was viewed as degenerate and tied to the "damnable jazz"), they resorted to the new German community dances. The Swing Youth used their love of swing and jazz music to create their sub culture with one former Swing Kid Frederich Ritzel saying in a 1985 interview: "Everything for us was a world of great longing, Western life, democracy – everything was connected – and connected through jazz". The Swing Kids danced in private quarters, clubs, and rented halls. Girls wore short skirts, applied lipstick and fingernail polish, and wore their hair long and down instead of applying braids or German style rolls.</blockquote>

One of their German idols was Johannes Heesters, an actor specialised in operettas. The Swingboys admired his pale face and combed long black hair and tried to copy his attire. This group consisted mostly of teens and young adults from the upper class homes of Hamburg. Their objectives were originally more self indulgent in nature, being privileged with wealth and German heritage, they spent their money on expensive clothing and liquor. The British musicologist Ralph Willett wrote that the Swing Youth wanted to emulate "the cool, languid demeanour" of British and American film stars. When the restrictions on jazz became law, their pastime would become a political statement, setting them in clear opposition to the Nazi Party. German musicologist Guido Fackler described the Swingjugend embrace of American music and the "English style" in clothing as reflecting the fact that: The Swingjugend rejected the Nazi state, above all because of its ideology and uniformity, its militarism, the 'Führer principle' and the leveling Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). They experienced a massive restriction of their personal freedom. They rebelled against all this with jazz and swing, which stood for a love of life, self determination, non conformism, freedom, independence, liberalism, and internationalism. Reflecting their Anglophilia, the Swing Youth preferred to speak to each other in English rather than German as English was felt to be more "cool", a choice of language that vexed the authorities greatly. English together with French were languages widely taught in Gymnasium (high schools intended as preparation for university) since the early 20th century in the case of the former and since the 18th century in the case of the latter, so any German teenager who attended a Gymnasium could speak at least some French and English. As the Swing Youth were Anglophiles, they often tried to speak and write in the "English style". One "swing boy", in a 1940 letter written in slightly broken English to a friend who was going to Hamburg, stated: "Be a proper spokesmen for Kiel, won't you? i. e, make sure you're really casual, singing or whistling English hits all the time, absolutely smashed and always surrounded by really amazing women". German art policy was very similar to the Soviet Union at this time, with espousal of Heroic Realism, which was very similar to Socialist realism in that it saw art as an instrument of the party. The Swing Kids were initially basically apolitical, similar to their zoot suiter counterparts in North America. A closer parallel to the Swing Youth were the Zazou movement in France at the same time, for the Zazous also enjoyed American music, liked to dress in the "English style", and had a preference for speaking English over French as the former was felt to be more "cool". A popular term that the swing subculture used to define itself was Lottern, roughly translated as something between "laziness" and "sleaziness", indicating contempt for the pressure to do "useful work" and the repressive sexual mores of the time. Reports by Hitler Youth observers of swing parties and jitterbug went into careful detail about the overtly sexual nature of both. One report describes as "moral depravity" the fact that swing youth took pleasure in their sexuality. Swing Kids wore long hair and hats, carried umbrellas and met in cafés and clubs. They developed a jargon mostly made of anglicisms. The Swing Youth were intense Anglophiles who preferred to listen to "English music" (i. e. American swing and jazz music) and liked to dress in the "English style". A secret report from the Reich Ministry of Justice in January 1944 described the Swing Youth as follows:
1=The most striking example among these groups is the so called Swing Youth, on whom there have been reports from various parts of the Reich. They began in Hamburg. These groups are motivated by the desire to have a good time and have increasingly assumed a character bordering on the criminal antisocial. Even before the war boys and girls from Hamburg from the socially privileged classes joined groups, wearing strikingly casual clothing and became fans of English music [i. e. American music] and dance. At the turn of the year 1939/1940 the Flottbeck group organized dances which were attended by 5–6000 young people and which were marked by an uninhibited indulgence in swing. After the ban on public dances they organized dances at home, which were marked above all by sexual promiscuity The hunger for English dance music and for their own dance bands led to break ins in shops selling musical instruments. The greed to participate in what appeared to them to be a stylish life in clubs, bars, cafes and house balls suppressed any positive attitude towards responding to the needs of the time. They were unimpressed by the performance of our Wehrmacht; those killed in action were sometimes held to ridicule. An attitude of hostility to the war is clearly apparent. The members dress in clothes which imitate English fashions. Thus, they often wear pleated jackets in tartan designs and carry umbrellas. As a badge they wear a colored dress shirt button in their lapels. They regard Englishmen as the highest form of human development. A false conception of freedom leads them into opposition to the Hitler Youth.

The Swing Kids of Hamburg at some point had contacts with another resistance movement, when three members of the White Rose (Weiße Rose) developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal co operation arose, though these contacts were later used by the Volksgerichtshof ("People's Court") to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda and sabotage of the armed forces. The consequent trial, death sentences and executions were averted by the ending of the war.

When bigger gatherings were banned, the Swing Kids moved to more informal settings, and swing clubs and discotheques emerged in all the major cities of the Reich. Participants were mainly from the upper middle class, as swing culture required the participants to have access to the music, which was not played on German radio, so that extensive collections of phonograph recordings were essential. Similarly, to understand the lyrics of the predominantly American songs, it was necessary to have at least a rudimentary understanding of English, which was not taught in the Volksschule (working class high school). Relative wealth also fostered a distinctive style among the Swing Kids, which was in some ways comparable to the zoot suit style popular in the United States at the time. Boys usually wore long jackets, often checkered, shoes with crepe soles (for dancing), and flashy scarves. They almost always carried an umbrella, and added a dress shirt button with a semi precious stone. Girls generally wore their hair long and loose and added excessive makeup. Their dandyish dress style riled the Nazis by drawing heavily on Hispanic pachucos.

On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swingjugend were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration camps. The boys went to the Moringen concentration camp while the girls were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. and is described by film critic Janet Maslin as having a historical background. German filmmaker Margit Czenki's made for television movie Swingpfennig/Deutschmark (1994) featured the original Swingboys Günter Discher and Otto Bender. Set in the St. Pauli of the early 1990s, the protagonists of the film – musicians around the band Die Goldenen Zitronen – uncover and stumble upon the history of the Swing Kids. In the DC Comics Bombshells comic series, the character of Huntress is a guitar playing swing kid and secret resistance leader.