Hitler Youth Conspiracy

The so-called Hitler Youth conspiracy was a case investigated by the Soviet secret police, during the Great Purge in the late 1930s. Essentially a theory in search of evidence, it nonetheless resulted in the arrest of numerous German teenagers and some in their twenties and beyond, who were accused of having been fascist, anti-communist members of the Hitler Youth and of working against the Soviet Union. Teenagers from the Karl Liebknecht School, from Children's Home No. 6, and adults from factories and elsewhere were arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Many were executed or died in custody. Some were the children of leading communists. Within years, the investigation was found to have been faulty and a number of the investigators were also arrested, with sentences ranging from imprisonment to execution. In the 1950s, following the death of Joseph Stalin, a new examination of the files revealed many of the accusations to have been baseless and a number of the victims were rehabilitated.

Beginning with the earliest history of the Soviet Union, with the Red Terror and subsequent political repression of suspected opponents of the October Revolution, there were purges and mass repressions within the Soviet Union, as well as purges of the Communist Party, both within the Soviet Union and abroad. Waves of persecutions occurred, in which the number of those charged with being counter-revolutionary or fascist increased substantially. In his "Secret Speech", Nikita Khrushchev said that between 1936 and 1937, the number of arrests for counter-revolutionary crimes grew ten times.

At the February–March 1937 plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), there was a renewed call to purge the party of Trotskyite elements, unleashing a wave of mass terror in the summer of 1937. The term "counter-revolutionary fascist groups" came into use within the Soviet secret police in 1938 as they carried out the purges. German members of the Executive Committee of the Communist International reported at April 28, 1938 meeting that there had been 842 arrests.

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