‘In the Service of Peace’: British–German Youth Hostelling during National Socialism and the Allied Occupation

Hiking in Germany was the title of a propaganda brochure published in 1934 by the Reichsbahnzentrale, an agency established by the German State Railway to advertise rail tourism. The pamphlet was written in English and specifically intended to encourage international tourists to visit youth hostels in the German Reich. The Nazis advertised the roughly 2,000 hostels in their country with the words: ‘Learn to understand German youth and the German people, and join with us in proclaiming the will to peace of a whole nation’.¹ Their aim was not just to enable foreign visitors to enjoy low-cost hiking holidays, but also to show them the alleged benefits of National Socialism.

Young Britons above all were drawn in by this messaging. Riding the wave of a new culture of tourism, Germany became an attractive travel destination in the 1930s. By promising to promote international understanding, the National Socialist regime was addressing a section of British civil society that did not primarily belong to the political right wing. Disarmament and reconciliation initiatives were in vogue in Britain at the time. There was also pronounced anti-war sentiment, shared by different political camps, which contributed to the adoption of a policy of appeasement towards Germany, focused on dialogue. The Nazi regime was able to exploit this strategically: for many years the Third Reich produced highly successful youth hostel propaganda with the aim of influencing public opinion abroad.

Youth Hostels as Forerunners of a ‘Fascist Internationalism’?

It is only recently that historians have begun to intensively study National Socialism’s global connections. The term ‘fascist internationalism’ has been used to describe the Nazi regime’s involvement in transnational networks and politics.² So far, research has largely focused on cooperation between right-wing parties and groups across Europe; for example, the Hitler Youth’s close ties with fascist Italy.³ Much less attention has been paid to the Hitler Youth’s relationship with democratic states and organizations.⁴ With a focus on youth hostels, my work examines these transnational networks and shows that the Hitler Youth managed to establish long-term partnerships in Britain before the outbreak of war in 1939.

During my two-month GHIL scholarship, I was able to study in more detail both the youth hostellers themselves and the UK organizations that arranged their travel. Alongside the two major bodies—the Youth Hostels Association England and Wales (YHA) and the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA)—I focused above all on three travel agencies that promoted youth hostel trips to Germany, each for very different reasons: the Workers’ Travel Association (WTA), a trade union-affiliated organization; Toc H, a Christian social and reconciliation movement; and the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC), which specialized in alternative tourism. The WTA in particular is now viewed as part of a progressive social reform movement;⁵ however, my work shows that its pacifist outlook made it particularly susceptible to Nazi propaganda.

Between National Community and International Understanding

Youth hostels were not a Nazi innovation. First proposed in 1909 by Richard Schirrmann, a primary schoolteacher in Altena, Westphalia, they spread throughout Germany in the interwar period. This expansion was driven by the various reform movements of the Weimar period, including the German youth movement, Lebensreform, and the New Education movement (Reformpädagogik). All three emphasized the role of young people as a force of renewal and saw hiking as a means of promoting good health and reconnecting with the nation’s past. At the same time, however, youth hostels also developed into sites of transnational rapprochement. More and more Britons toured Germany in the 1920s in order to build bridges with their former wartime foes. As early as 1929, Schirrmann spoke of an interplay between Volksgemeinschaft and Völkerverständigung—between the national community and international understanding.⁶

The Nazis eagerly adopted this narrative. In spring 1933, the Hitler Youth took over the Deutsches Jugendherbergwerk (the German Youth Hostel Association) and harnessed it for the purposes of state education. Youth hostels were now used for hiking tours, courses, work camps, and paramilitary sports, with Jews and political opponents excluded. Externally, however, youth hostels served other ends. As ‘bridges of understanding’, they were intended to offer foreign visitors the opportunity to ‘get to know’ the new Germany ‘with their own eyes’, as one of the Hitler Youth’s press officers, Reinhold Schlonski, put it in April 1937.⁷ The plan worked: in the years up to 1938, foreign guests spent between 100,000 and 200,000 nights annually in German youth hostels, and in 1936 over 25 per cent of these overnight stays were accounted for by British tourists.⁸ Most of these young Britons did not travel to Germany because they approved of the Nazis’ politics, even if in some cases they showed few qualms about the regime. On the contrary, many of them did so in the illusive belief that they were contributing to peace and reconciliation in Europe, away from the day-to-day business of politics.

Advertising for the Regime

In the UK, such hopes were nourished above all by the YHA and the SYHA. Youth hostelling was a way of contributing ‘to a better understanding between the young people of different nations’, according to the International Youth Hostel Guide 1939; an advertisement inside the handbook highlighted Nazi Germany as a ‘hikers’ paradise’.⁹ The YHA’s magazine The Rucksack, which contained many adverts for German hostel trips, likewise claimed that international youth hostelling was securing ‘the peace of the world’.¹⁰ Officials and guidebooks willingly engaged with the Hitler Youth. Mutual German–British agreements and voucher systems made trips cheaper in the 1930s, so that a new form of social tourism (Sozialtourismus) developed around German youth hostels.

This played directly into the hands of the Hitler Youth and its peace propaganda. The organization trained its own travel guides for foreign tour groups, and also promoted visits from abroad in its magazines. British youth hostellers returned from the Reich full of enthusiasm and shared their experiences with the broader public: ‘In every youth hostel we heard this plea for understanding, and, in all truth, after visiting Germany one feels we need less passionate articles and a greater understanding’, one young British woman wrote in 1936 in the CTC Gazette—one of the most influential cycling magazines in the UK.¹¹ ‘The scenery was magnificent, and so was the hospitality everywhere’, another participant rhapsodized; his group had even met a representative of the Hitler Youth.¹² The travellers’ attitude differed from the classic appeasement policy in that they believed they were securing a peace that no longer seemed achievable through political means. Moreover, the ‘ambassadors of good will’¹³ often concealed the realities of life in the Reich. Instead of pointing out violence, repression, and antisemitism, they presented a Germany of potential friends with whom personal relationships could be formed, leaving political differences to one side. This allowed the Nazis to cultivate a glamorous external image that found resonance not only in British books and magazines, but also at international exhibitions and congresses.

The Dark Side of Reconciliation

As early as 2002, Madeleine Herren wrote of the ‘dark side of globalization’ and pointed out that the National Socialist regime relied far more heavily on international organizations than had previously been assumed.¹⁴ The example of youth hostels sheds further light on this ‘dark side’. My research examines the International Youth Hostel Federation, which was founded in Amsterdam in 1932 and increasingly came under Nazi influence during the 1930s. I am not only interested in what made the organization so susceptible to the Nazis, but also in the legacy of ‘fascist internationalism’ after 1945. Youth hostelling became part of the Western Allies’ re-education policies and thus contributed to the establishment of a new, democratic Europe. But how did this supposedly new hostel internationalism differ from its earlier, less democratic iteration?

Historians have described post-war international youth hostel work primarily as part of a European democratization movement.¹⁵ By contrast, my work shows that actors and organizational structures changed only gradually after the war. For German officials in particular, international youth hostelling offered an opportunity for rehabilitation and a way of writing themselves into the Western Allies’ democratization narrative. Studying youth hostels allows me to explore the shifts in meaning that terms like ‘internationalism’, ‘intercultural understanding’, and ‘peace work’ underwent after 1945. I argue that international exchange should not automatically be viewed as progressive; rather, it is important to pinpoint the exact contexts and ideas on which it was and is based.

Translated by Jozef van der Voort (GHIL).

Feature image: The YHA’s north-east Lancashire regional group using a repurposed lorry for a peace demonstration in 1938. One of the five posters attached to the lorry carries an advert for the ‘1,800 youth hostels’ in Germany. Source: The Rucksack (Autumn 1938), 98. Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham, YHA/NP/14/1/RUC.

1. Reichsbahnzentrale für den Deutschen Reiseverkehr, Hiking in Germany (Berlin, 1934), 10. [↩]
2. See Madeleine Herren, ‘Fascist Internationalism’, in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2016), 191–212; Sandrine Kott and Kiran Klaus Patel (eds.), Nazism across Borders: The Social Policies of the Third Reich and their Global Appeal (Oxford, 2018); Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (eds.), Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (New York, 2017). [↩]
3. Alessio Ponzio, Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Madison, WI, 2015). [↩]
4. The only essay on German–British youth hostelling links is Michael Cunningham and Simon Constantine, ‘Internationalism, Peace, and Reconciliation: Anglo-German Connections in the Youth Hostels Movement, 1930–1950’, in Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research, 45/2 (2020), 169–97. [↩]
5. Christine Collette, ‘“Friendly Spirit, Comradeship, and Good-Natured Fun”: Adventures in Socialist Internationalism’, in International Review of Social History, 48/2 (2003), 225–44; Susan Barton, Working-Class Organisations and Popular Tourism, 1840–1970 (Manchester, 2005); Susan Barton, ‘Tourism Alone and in Groups’, in Eric G. E. Zuelow and Kevin J. James (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Tourism History (New York, 2025), 247–69. For a more critical perspective, see Francis Williams, Journey into Adventure: The Story of the Workers Travel Association (London, 1960). [↩]
6. Richard Schirrmann to M. C. Del Manzo, 7 June 1929, Archiv der deutschen Jugendbewegung, A-201/416. [↩]
7. Reinhold Schlonski, ‘Deutsche Jugendherbergen: Brücken zur Verständigung’, Reichsjugendpressedienst, 86 (17 Apr. 1937), Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 5-VI/19463, fol. 74. [↩]
8. Michael Buddrus mentions a total of 828,717 tourist nights between 1935 and 1938, whereas calculations based on the Statistische Jahrbücher suggest a figure of 726,915. See Michael Buddrus, Totale Erziehung für den totalen Krieg: Hitlerjugend und nationalsozialistische Jugendpolitik (Munich, 2003), 749; Statistisches Reichsamt (ed.), Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich (Berlin, 1935–40); ‘Von den deutschen Jugendherbergen’, in Deutsche Hotel Nachrichten, 87 (30 Oct. 1937), Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 5-VI/19463, fol. 34. The Nazi regime used the numbers of foreign visitors to youth hostels for propaganda purposes, so official figures should be treated with caution. [↩]
9. D. G. Moir: The International Youth Hostel Guide 1939 (Edinburgh, 1938/9), 4 and 30, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham, HI Box 34. [↩]
10. ‘International Conference and Youth Rally Scotland, 1939’, The Rucksack, Feb. 1939, 22, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham, YHA/NP/14/1/RUC. [↩]
11. Phyllis M. Pitts, ‘Following Father Rhine’, CTC Gazette, 8 (Aug. 1936), 321–3, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick Library, MSS.328/C/4/CYT/49. [↩]
12. ‘The Tyke’, ‘A Jolly Week in Germany’, CTC Gazette, 7 (July 1936), 233–4, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick Library, MSS.328/C/4/CYT/49. [↩]
13. See J. W. Bowen, ‘We Travel Ahead’, in WTA Travel Log, 5 (Mar. 1938), 150, Kent History and Library Centre Maidstone, U2543/Z3/3. [↩]
14. Madeleine Herren, ‘“Outwardly . . . an Innocuous Conference Authority”: National Socialism and the Logistics of International Information Management’, German History, 20/1 (2002), 67–92, at. 70. See also Kiran Klaus Patel and Sven Reichardt, ‘The Dark Side of Transnationalism: Social Engineering and Nazism, 1930s–40s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 51/1 (2016), 3–21. [↩]
15. See especially Richard Ivan Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors: How Travel Integrated Europe (Chicago, 2017); Richard Ivan Jobs, ‘Youth Mobility and the Making of Europe, 1945–60’, in Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2015), 144–66. [↩]

Vincent Kleinbub

Vincent Kleinbub is a PhD student at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam. He previously studied in Leipzig und… Read more

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