Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany by Alessio Ponzio (review)

By the turn of the twentieth century, youth emerged as a new social category widely recognized as having enormous political potential. With Shaping the New Man, Alessio Ponzio explores how the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB), its successor the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL), and the Hitler Youth transformed the values of youngsters to secure the future for their totalitarian regimes. Above all, Ponzio’s focus is on the training of Fascist and Nazi youth leaders. As both a comparative and transnational study, the work contrasts the Italian and German youth training regimes and charts how they cooperated and competed with each other from the 1920s through the end of the war.

Ponzio argues that “Fascist and National Socialist regimes were, first and foremost, vast educational enterprises” devoted to indoctrinating youth (8). While this rather overstates the case, he demonstrates convincingly that the Italians and Germans were committed to developing a loyal leadership cadre. Both relied on short courses and workshops to insure ONB, GIL, and Hitler Youth leaders understood how to educate and manage their commands. The Italians, however, benefited from a more centralized structure, the core of which was the Fascist Academy of Physical Education, created in 1928. Located in Rome’s Mussolini Forum, the Academy became the premier institution for youth leadership training. Through a two-year residential program, cadets graduated as either physical education teachers or committed to a career as administrators in the ONB or, after 1937, the GIL.

Ponzio also explores interactions between the Italians and Germans, offering fine descriptions of exchange programs that brought together Hitler Youth and ONB/GIL leaders. He emphasizes that the Germans learned techniques and adapted ideas from the Italians. Impressed by the gymnastic displays and military precision of Italian youth who visited Germany, the Nazis sought to create their own version of the Fascist Academy. Like its Italian counterpart, the Hitler Youth Academy, located in Braunschweig, sought to reflect its values for youth in both its architecture and its pedagogy. However, because it opened in 1939, the war interrupted the Nazis’ plans, and thus the Hitler Youth institute only offered courses to one cohort of students.

The short courses, workshops, and academies reveal the similarities and differences in how the Fascists and Nazis trained their youth. For example, the Fascists focused more on elementary education, and because Academy graduates entered the schools as physical education teachers, the schools in Italy, Ponzio argues, were less hostile to youth leaders and their organizations than in Germany. Whether as teachers or as administrators for the ONB/GIL, Academy graduates were to make their careers in shaping the “new men” for the Fascist regime. The Germans, however, intended their leaders who completed training in Braunschweig to remain in the Hitler Youth leadership for twelve years; thereafter they would enter in either the Nazi Party, the SS, or state administration. Italians and Germans both believed their youth groups would overcome class and social divisions, but the racial purity of youth leaders was the determining factor for admission to leadership roles in the Third Reich. In Italy, loyalty to the Fascist party and state outweighed racial considerations.

The German commitment to its racialist program in Europe eventually transformed the relationship between the youth organizations. Ponzio demonstrates that relations between the youth organizations mirrored those of the Nazi and Fascist states. As the war continued, the Italians, once seen as partners to be emulated, became racial inferiors to be dominated. Even as the war drastically reduced the ranks of youth leaders in both nations, the Germans believed the future of Europe rested with them. In a fascinating section on the European Youth Association (1942), Ponzio illustrates the Nazis’ intent to forge an alliance of unequal partners whose young members would accept the expected German hegemony of Europe.

Ponzio acknowledges that this is no social history; he is less concerned with the actual results or the...