Podcast Episode Page: The Pirates Who Looted The Reich's Pride

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Bartholomäus Schink was sixteen when the Nazis hanged him without trial beneath a railway overpass in Cologne. His body was left swinging for days as a warning.

His crime? Membership in the Edelweiss Pirates—working-class teenagers who said no to the Hitler Youth and paid for it. But here's the twist: after the war ended, Germany still didn't want to call them heroes.

While university students who distributed pamphlets got monuments and films, these street kids got erased. For sixty years, they were dismissed as delinquents and criminals. The question is: why?

In this episode, we dig into the resistance Germany tried to forget and uncover what it reveals about class, memory, and who gets to decide which rebels become martyrs and which ones stay buried.

Spoiler: history loves a clean story. The truth is a hell of a lot messier.

The Public Execution (0:00-1:43)

Who Were The Edelweiss Pirates? (1:43-3:28)

The Counter-Culture (3:28-5:04)

From Mischief to Resistance (5:04-6:58)

The Ehrenfeld Group (6:58-7:32)

The Injustice of Memory (7:32-9:37)

Sixty Years of Denial (9:37-10:27)

The Global Pattern (10:27-12:08)

The Messy Truth About Resistance (12:08-13:28)

The Question for Today (13:28-end)

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to Obscurarium, where we illuminate history's most obscure corners. Today we are—

Speaker 2 (0:05) —walking into a corner that was, well, deliberately kept dark for over 60 years.

Speaker 1 (0:11) Yeah, let's drop right into the scene. I want you to picture this. It's November 10, 1944. Cologne, Germany.

Speaker 2 (0:18) Specifically the Ehrenfeld district, and it's a gray, freezing autumn morning.

Speaker 1 (0:24) The city is already half rubble from years of Allied bombing, but on this one street, Schönsteinstrasse, beneath a railway overpass, a crowd has gathered.

Speaker 2 (0:33) Or rather, they've been forced to gather. Exactly. This isn't a choice. No. It's a public execution. The Gestapo has set up a makeshift gallows right there in the street.

Speaker 1 (0:41) No trial, no judge, no defense attorneys, nothing. Just a rope and a platform. Thirteen people were hanged that morning, and just to make the message absolutely clear, the Nazis left their bodies hanging there for days as a warning.

Speaker 2 (0:51) It's just brutal.

Speaker 1 (0:55) But if you look at the list of the victims, one name really stands out—not because of who he was, but because of his age. Bartholomäus Schink. His friends called him Barthel.

Speaker 2 (1:04) Barthel was only 16 years old, which just—yeah, it stops you cold.

Speaker 1 (1:07) You have to ask, what does a 16-year-old boy do to warrant a public execution without trial in the middle of a street?

Speaker 2 (1:16) He wasn't a soldier. He wasn't some Allied spy dropped in by parachute with a radio.

Speaker 1 (1:21) No. Records show his crime was his membership in a group called the Edelweiss Pirates.

Speaker 2 (1:27) And that's the story we're getting into. This is the mission of our deep dive.

Speaker 1 (1:31) Today, we're going to unpack the story of the Edelweiss Pirates, because it's a story about resistance, sure, but it's also a story about memory.

Speaker 2 (1:37) It's about how Germany, for decades, tried very, very hard to forget these kids ever existed.

Speaker 1 (1:43) It's really a case study in how we curate history, isn't it? We like our heroes to be, well, clean.

Speaker 2 (1:49) Clean, moral, photogenic. The Edelweiss Pirates were none of those things. They just didn't fit the narrative.

Speaker 1 (1:55) So they were erased for a long, long time. Okay, so let's figure out who they actually were. When I hear the word "pirates," I'm thinking of something organized, you know, a secret society or a paramilitary unit with ranks and salutes.

Speaker 2 (2:07) Yeah, and that's the logical assumption. But the truth is, well, chaotic is the right word.

Speaker 1 (2:12) So not an organization.

Speaker 2 (2:15) Not in the way we think of one. There was no headquarters, no manifesto, no membership cards. The Edelweiss Pirates were a loose, kind of organic network, and they popped up in specific places, right? Yes. In the working-class industrial cities—places like Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund.

Unknown Speaker (2:34) Basically anywhere there were smoke and factories.

Speaker 2 (2:38) Exactly. And to understand why they existed, you have to look at the pressure cooker of 1936.

Speaker 1 (2:47) Okay, what happened then? That's the year membership in the Hitler Youth became compulsory. So if you're a teenager in Nazi Germany, your entire existence is officially owned by the state.

Speaker 2 (2:52) Completely. It was militaristic, hyper-organized, and frankly, incredibly boring. You marched, you drilled, you were told what to think, and it was all segregated by gender, strictly.

Speaker 1 (3:03) Boys trained to be soldiers, girls trained to be mothers. There's just no room for individuality.

Speaker 2 (3:07) So if you're a working-class kid who grew up scrapping on the streets, that level of control must have been suffocating.

Speaker 1 (3:14) It was intolerable. So the resistance, you see, it didn't start as some grand political statement. It wasn't about overthrowing the government, not at first. It was cultural. It was a cultural rebellion. They just refused to join. They wanted their weekends back.

Speaker 2 (3:28) I was looking at the descriptions of their style. It's fascinating. It's almost like a 1940s counterculture.

Speaker 1 (3:33) It really was. Records show they grew their hair long specifically to annoy the storm troopers, who all had buzz cuts.

Speaker 2 (3:41) And the clothes were different—checked shirts, short lederhosen, instead of the stiff uniforms.

Speaker 1 (3:46) And the pin—that's the key symbol. They wore an edelweiss flower on their collars or caps.

Speaker 2 (3:52) The edelweiss, that's an Alpine flower, right?

Speaker 1 (3:55) It represents nature, freedom, the wild. It was the total opposite of the rigid, mechanized Nazi aesthetic.

Speaker 2 (4:02) And they had these great local names. In Cologne, they were the Navajos.

Speaker 1 (4:06) In Düsseldorf, the Kittelbach Pirates. In Essen, my favorite—the Roving Dudes.

Speaker 2 (4:11) The Roving Dudes. It sounds less like a resistance army and more like street gangs from a movie.

Speaker 1 (4:16) In many ways, they were street gangs, but their gang activity was pretty wholesome at first. They were channeling the old Wandervogel movement—the hiking clubs the Nazis banned.

Speaker 2 (4:28) The very same. The Nazis couldn't control them, so they were outlawed. So the Pirates would grab guitars, hike out into the countryside, set up camp, and crucially, they were mixing genders. That was a huge taboo—boys and girls hanging out together, unsupervised. In the eyes of the Nazis, that was just moral decay.

Speaker 1 (4:46) But for them, it was a political act—treating each other as equals.

Speaker 2 (4:51) Absolutely. And they sang forbidden folk songs, Russian songs, French songs, cowboy songs—anything that wasn't a Nazi march.

Speaker 1 (4:57) It's amazing to think about singing a song as an act of treason. But we shouldn't paint this as just, you know, kumbaya in the woods.

Speaker 2 (5:04) No, no. This is where the story gets gritty. They didn't just avoid the Hitler Youth—they actively hunted them, right? This is hooliganism as resistance. History tells us they would ambush Hitler Youth patrols. If they caught a patrol in a dark alley or a subway tunnel, they'd beat them up—steal their banners, smash their drums.

Speaker 1 (5:34) It's a street war.

Speaker 2 (5:36) It absolutely was. They were painting anti-Nazi graffiti on walls, mocking local leaders. This wasn't intellectuals debating policy in a café. These were kids throwing punches because they hated being told what to do.

Speaker 1 (5:41) And for the early years of the war, the authorities just sort of treated them as delinquents—annoying, but not a real threat.

Speaker 2 (5:46) But then you see the tone change. Looking at the timeline, 1942, 1943, 1944—as the war turns against Germany...

Unknown Speaker (5:48) Exactly.

Speaker 2 (5:53) The cities are being carpet-bombed. The state becomes more desperate and more brutal, and the Pirates evolve. They go from mischief to actual sabotage, and the stakes get incredibly high.

Speaker 1 (6:01) We see reports of them sheltering Wehrmacht deserters now. Hiding a soldier who ran away—that's a capital offense right there.

Speaker 2 (6:08) It's an instant death penalty if you're caught. And they were also hiding forced laborers from Eastern Europe and even escaped concentration camp prisoners.

Unknown Speaker (6:16) And they started raiding military depots.

Speaker 2 (6:18) They needed supplies, so they stole food, but they also started stealing weapons, dynamite. They were passing out Allied propaganda leaflets dropped by planes.

Speaker 1 (6:27) This brings us back to Barthel Schink's group—the Ehrenfeld Group in Cologne. This feels like the most radical edge of the movement.

Speaker 2 (6:34) It was. The Ehrenfeld Group wasn't just teenagers anymore. They had linked up with adult resistance fighters, escaped prisoners, communists, and they were living underground—literally—in the bombed-out ruins of Cologne. You have to imagine the city at this point. It's a moonscape of craters and shattered buildings, and these kids are living in the debris, stockpiling weapons.

Speaker 1 (6:54) And they used them. I mean, this wasn't just for self-defense.

Speaker 2 (6:58) No. Members of this group were involved in killing a Gestapo officer—a man named Heinrich Köster—and bombing Nazi administration buildings, which is a massive escalation. Killing a Gestapo chief crosses the line from rebellious youth to terrorist in the eyes of the regime.

Speaker 1 (7:16) And that's what triggered the crackdown. In late '44, the Gestapo decided to wipe them out.

Speaker 2 (7:19) They rounded up anyone connected to the group, tortured them for names. And that leads us right back to that railway overpass. Thirteen hangings.

Speaker 1 (7:29) A 16-year-old boy executed as an enemy of the state.

Speaker 2 (7:32) Now here is where the logic of history usually kicks in. You assume: war ends, Nazis lose, Barthel Schink becomes a national hero, right?

Speaker 1 (7:42) There should be statues of him in Cologne today. But there aren't.

Speaker 2 (7:46) And this is the part of the deep dive that, for me, is just infuriating. We have to talk about the injustice of memory.

Speaker 1 (7:51) Because for decades, West Germany didn't just ignore the Edelweiss Pirates—it actively criminalized them. To understand why, we have to look at who did get remembered: the White Rose.

Speaker 2 (8:02) Yes. Hans and Sophie Scholl. They are the gold standard of German resistance. University students in Munich printed pamphlets calling for passive resistance and were executed for it.

Speaker 1 (8:12) And they're icons. Schools and streets named after them everywhere in Germany.

Speaker 2 (8:16) As they should be. Let's be clear—they were incredibly brave. No one is taking away from their bravery. But we have to analyze why the White Rose became the safe symbol. They were middle-class, they were Christian, they were educated.

Speaker 1 (8:29) Their resistance was intellectual—words, high ideals, non-violence.

Speaker 2 (8:34) They fit the mold of respectable Germany. Precisely.

Speaker 1 (8:38) They allowed post-war society to say, "Look—good, moral Germans opposed Hitler." It was a clean narrative. It was resistance you could put on a stamp. Unlike the Pirates—they were working class, they were uneducated. They didn't write essays. They beat people up.

Speaker 2 (8:53) They stole things. They had ties to communists. They were messy. They were uncomfortable heroes. And post-war West Germany was a very conservative place. The authorities looked at these kids and didn't see resistance fighters. They saw hoodlums.

Speaker 1 (9:06) They saw the breakdown of order.

Speaker 2 (9:09) And this is the part that blows my mind. In the 1950s and '60s, West German courts actually upheld the Nazi-era criminal convictions against the Pirates.

Speaker 1 (9:32) That's unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (9:34) It's shameful, but it happened. The logic was this kind of legalistic gymnastics. The courts argued, "Okay, maybe they hated Nazis, but they also stole explosives and assaulted police officers. Those are crimes, regardless of who is in charge."

Speaker 1 (9:37) So while the families of the White Rose were getting honors and pensions, the surviving Pirates were denied everything.

Unknown Speaker (9:40) They were legally branded as criminals.

Speaker 1 (9:42) Can you imagine? You fight the Gestapo, you risk everything, your friends are hanged, and then the new democracy tells you, "Sorry, you're just a thug with a record."

Speaker 2 (9:49) It destroyed lives. Barthel Schink's family fought for decades just to get his name cleared—just to have it acknowledged that he wasn't a criminal, but a resistance fighter. And it took forever. Official recognition of the Edelweiss Pirates as a resistance movement didn't happen until 2005.

Speaker 1 (10:09) Sixty years later.

Speaker 2 (10:11) Sixty years. Most of them were dead by then.

Speaker 1 (10:19) It really highlights a pattern, doesn't it? We love a martyr who dies quietly for a principle. We are much less comfortable with a survivor who had to do ugly things to stay alive.

Speaker 2 (10:27) That's the global takeaway here. This isn't just a German problem. If you look at the records, history has a habit of cleaning up resistance all over the world.

Speaker 1 (10:34) Like in the Netherlands, right? When we think of Dutch resistance, we think of hiding people in attics—The Diary of Anne Frank.

Speaker 2 (10:42) Which is passive, gentle resistance. But we rarely hear about Freddy Oversteegen or Hannie Schaft. They were teenagers, and what's fascinating is how they used their youth.

Speaker 1 (10:53) How so?

Speaker 2 (10:54) They would flirt with Nazi officers in bars, ask them to go for a walk in the woods, and then pull out a pistol and shoot them point-blank—or lure them into an ambush.

Speaker 1 (10:57) That is a very different image than the girl with a diary.

Speaker 2 (11:01) It is. And for a long time they were sidelined in the history books. Why? Because women using sexuality and violence to kill—that was seen as unladylike. It made people squirm. It didn't fit the innocent victim narrative.

Speaker 1 (11:09) And then there's the political angle. You mentioned the Pirates had communist ties. That was a death sentence for your legacy during the Cold War.

Speaker 2 (11:16) A huge factor. I mean, as soon as WWII ends, the Cold War begins. The West didn't want to celebrate anyone who was a communist, even if they fought the Nazis. Look at France.

Speaker 1 (11:37) Exactly. The official story focuses on de Gaulle, but the Maquis—the rural guerrillas blowing up bridges and ambushing convoys—were heavily communist.

Speaker 2 (11:39) Same in Greece and Yugoslavia. The partisans there were incredibly effective, but because they were Red, Western history books spent decades just minimizing them. We didn't want to admit that sometimes the bad guys of the Cold War were the good guys of WWII.

Speaker 1 (11:51) So history is curated. We filter out the messy parts.

Speaker 2 (11:55) We want resistance to be morally pure. We want it to be black and white. But fighting a totalitarian regime is ugly. It involves theft, violence, deception, making terrible choices. The Edelweiss Pirates remind us of that.

Speaker 1 (12:08) They didn't have the luxury of sitting in a library writing manifestos.

Speaker 2 (12:13) They were fighting for their lives on the street corner, and they were kids. That's the thing I keep coming back to. They just wanted to be free. They wanted to wear their hair long and sing their songs. The state said no, so they fought back.

Speaker 1 (12:23) It brings us back to Barthel Schink. If he hadn't been caught, he would have been part of the generation rebuilding Germany. He should have been a grandfather telling these stories.

Speaker 2 (12:31) Instead, he was a footnote—a footnote that his own country tried to erase.

Speaker 1 (12:36) But I think the tide is turning. I feel like we're finally starting to appreciate these messy heroes.

Speaker 2 (12:42) I think so too. The fact that they were difficult, the fact that they were hooligans—that doesn't make them less heroic. In a way, it makes them more real.

Speaker 1 (12:49) Because resistance isn't always pretty.

Speaker 2 (12:51) No, it's not. They were unrepentant, and they deserve to be remembered exactly that way—rough, brave, and totally unwilling to conform.

Speaker 1 (13:00) We need to keep the ugly photos in the album. They tell the truth.

Speaker 2 (13:03) So here's a thought to leave you with. We've talked about how history ignored these kids because they were labeled as delinquents. I want you to look around the world today. Who are the people currently being dismissed as troublemakers, thugs, or rioters?

Speaker 1 (13:19) And 50 years from now, will history look back and realize they were actually the ones fighting for something that mattered? It's a question worth asking. History is still being written.

Speaker 2 (13:28) Thank you for listening to Obscurarium. If you enjoyed this deep dive and want more of these, please subscribe to this podcast and find us at obscurarium.com for even more content, including our weekly newsletter. Until next time.

From the original newsletter article:

Books:

Films & Documentaries:

Archives:

Full source list available in the newsletter: obscurarium.com/edelweiss-pirates

This episode is based on our newsletter deep-dive: The Pirates Who Looted The Reich’s Pride

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