Hitler's Baby Division

only extracted a sizeable proportion of its elite troops from this source but
began to think about more specific ways of using the HJ.
Organization, Indoctrination and Training
Creating teenage combat units was not unique, since it had been foolishly
tried in the early days of World War One, when talented and enthusiastic
young volunteers were thrown into battle without adequate training and due
consideration for future officer candidate needs, at Langemarck in Flanders.
Some party leaders and certainly old army veterans remembered this
blunder, but the fanaticism prevailing in the SS and the RJF made those who
made decisions in these matters oblivious to the suggestive precedent which
had been played out in the bloody fields of Flanders. So it was not by chance
that the Hitler Youth Division remained closely associated with the Führer's
SS Body Guard, beginning in Berlin's Lichterfelde Barracks shortly after the
"Night of the Long Knives" and ending in the Battle of Caen, the Stalingrad of
the Hitler Youth, the so-called Battle of the Bulge, another sign of
desperation fraught with atrocity, and finally the last ditch efforts to defend
an indefensible Vienna, the portentous scene of Adolf Hitler's painful
struggle for manhood.
Hitler’s Body Guard and the Hitler Youth Division
With peculiarly independent relationships to Himmler and the rest of
the Waffen SS, the Body Guard was an elite within an elite. As a personal
security unit dedicated exclusively to the person of the Fuhrer, the
Leibstandarte gave birth to a unique and exclusive combat division which was
moved from front to front to rescue difficult military situations or to
snatch glory from the jaws of death by benefitting from victories won by
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