This is one many posters that Ludwig Hohlwein designed to promote the Nazi regime after he joined the party in 1933. The Hitler Youth had been established that year to train German male youth in Nazi principles and ideology. By 1935, when Hohlwein designed this poster advertising an international meeting of the organization, almost 60 percent of German “Aryan” boys were members. The following year, membership in the Hitler Youth became mandatory. The conventional realism of this image showing a Hitler Youth member greeting one of the organization’s leaders, shadowed by a giant German eagle, reflects the Nazi’s disdain for the kind of avant-garde art with which Hohlwein had originally made his name. Metten & Co. of Berlin, which printed this poster, also printed the Wehrpass (military pass) and the Soldbuch (pay book) for the German armed forces after conscription was reintroduced in 1935. Hohlwein’s artist’s stamp, seen in the lower-right corner of the poster, has been reduced to lines; his name does not appear in it as usual (and as it generally does on his other Nazi posters).
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