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The Pirates Who Looted The Reich's Pride

The Pirates Who Looted The Reich's Pride

Illuminating History's Strangest Corners | Issue #9 | November 2025

November 17, 2025

November 10, 1944: A Public Execution Without Trial

On a cold autumn morning in Cologne, thirteen bodies swung from a makeshift gallows erected beneath a railway overpass on Schönsteinstrasse. No trial. No formal charges. Just ropes and bodies left hanging for days as a warning to anyone who might consider resistance.

Among the dead was Bartholomäus Schink. He was sixteen years old.

His crime, according to the Gestapo: membership in the Ehrenfeld Group—named for the working-class Cologne neighborhood where they operated—a cell of the loosely organized youth resistance movement known as the Edelweiss Pirates.[^1] They'd beaten up Hitler Youth patrols, sheltered Wehrmacht deserters (soldiers who'd fled the German army, facing execution if caught) and escaped forced laborers, distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, and—in their most serious action—participated in the killing of a Gestapo chief.

The Nazis called them terrorists and criminals. After the war, West Germany would largely agree.

While the White Rose—the Munich student resistance group led by Hans and Sophie Scholl—became martyred symbols of German conscience, lauded with monuments, films, and schools bearing their names, the Edelweiss Pirates were written out of history. Too working-class. Too violent. Too uncomfortable. Some wouldn't be officially recognized as resistance fighters until 2005—sixty years after liberation, long after most were dead.

This is the story of the resistance Germany tried to forget.

Wilhelm Kratz, one of those executed without a trial on November 10th, 1944. His name written atop an edelweiss flower mural. Elke Wetzig (User:Elya), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Kids Who Wouldn't Join

The Edelweiss Pirates weren't an organization with manifestos and leadership structures. They were a loose network of working-class youth groups that emerged in industrial cities across western Germany—Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf, Dortmund—in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

They started as something almost innocent: teenagers who refused to join the Hitler Youth.

Hitler Youth membership became compulsory in 1936, and by 1939, refusal could have serious consequences for both the child and their family. The organization was designed to indoctrinate children into Nazi ideology and prepare boys for military service. Activities were regimented, militaristic, obsessively organized. Individuality was crushed. Girls and boys were strictly separated. The songs were martial. The uniforms were mandatory.

For some working-class kids, especially those who'd grown up in the Weimar Republic's more liberal youth movements, this was suffocating.

The Edelweiss Pirates offered an alternative. They took their name from the edelweiss flower pin they wore on their jackets—a symbol of Alpine freedom and a deliberate contrast to Hitler Youth insignia. Different groups used different names: the Kittelbach Pirates in Düsseldorf, the Navajos in Cologne, the Roving Dudes in Essen. But they shared a culture: hiking in the countryside away from adult supervision, singing forbidden songs (especially folk songs from the banned Wandervogel movement—the pre-WWI German youth hiking clubs that emphasized freedom, nature, and independence), mixing boys and girls romantically and socially, and cultivating a deliberately scruffy appearance—long hair, checked shirts, short lederhosen instead of uniforms.[^2]

It was cultural rebellion first. They mocked Hitler Youth members with improvised songs:

"Hitler's power may lay us low,
And keep us locked in chains,
But we will smash the chains one day,
We'll be free again."

They'd ambush Hitler Youth patrols after dark, outnumbering and beating them in street brawls. They'd steal Hitler Youth drums and banners and burn them. They painted anti-Nazi graffiti. It was resistance as hooliganism—which is exactly why it was never taken seriously by historians.

The Escalation: From Rebellion to Resistance

As the war dragged on and Nazi control tightened, some Edelweiss Pirate groups escalated from cultural rebellion to serious resistance.

By 1942-1943, older Pirates (many now young adults who'd aged out of the initial teenage groups) were involved in more dangerous activities:

Sheltering deserters and escaped prisoners: wehrmacht deserters, forced laborers from Eastern Europe, escaped concentration camp prisoners—anyone fleeing Nazi authority could potentially find help from Pirate networks
Sabotage: Some groups stole weapons and explosives from military supplies
Leaflet distribution: Spreading Allied propaganda and anti-Nazi materials
Direct action: In Cologne, the Ehrenfeld Group (which included both Pirates and adult communist resisters) killed Gestapo officer Heinrich Köster and carried out bombings of Nazi facilities

The line between youthful rebellion and organized resistance had blurred. The Gestapo noticed.

In 1944, as Germany faced collapse on both fronts, Nazi authorities cracked down brutally on anyone suspected of "undermining the war effort." The Edelweiss Pirates, previously dismissed as juvenile delinquents, suddenly became targets for execution.

In Cologne alone, the Gestapo arrested dozens of suspected Pirates in late 1944. On November 10, thirteen were hanged publicly without trial—a mix of teenagers and young adults, some with documented resistance activities, others guilty only of association.

Bartholomäus Schink, the sixteen-year-old, had helped shelter prisoners and deserters. His body hung beneath the railway overpass for days. The message was clear: even children would not be spared.

The Respectable Resistance vs. The Street Kids

Why were the Edelweiss Pirates written out of German historical memory while other resistance groups became celebrated martyrs? Post-war Germany made a choice about which resisters to honor—and that choice revealed everything about class, politics, and comfortable narratives.

The White Rose is Germany's most celebrated resistance group. Between June 1942 and February 1943, Munich University students Hans and Sophie Scholl, along with Professor Kurt Huber, produced and distributed six anti-Nazi leaflets calling for passive resistance. They were caught, tried, and executed in February 1943.

Their story is tragic and genuinely heroic. It's also comfortable. University students resisting through ideas rather than violence, motivated by Christian faith, martyred in one dramatic moment—this is resistance Germany could celebrate without ambiguity. They were educated, articulate, middle-class. They represented "the good Germans."

The July 20, 1944 plotters—Wehrmacht officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler—received similar treatment. They were aristocrats, military officers, and government officials. "Respectable" Germans from the establishment.

The Edelweiss Pirates were working-class teenagers who beat up Hitler Youth in street brawls, stole to survive, and had ties to communist networks. They used violence against a violent regime. Many survived the war and remained difficult, unrepentant, demanding recognition.

Post-war German authorities found them deeply uncomfortable. Heroes? Delinquents? Rather than wrestle with how to label them, they chose erasure.

The Post-War Betrayal

When the war ended, the Pirates expected recognition. Instead, many found themselves still labeled as criminals.

West German courts in the 1950s-1960s often upheld wartime convictions, ruling that while their anti-Nazi activities might have been understandable, their "criminal acts"—theft, violence, sabotage—remained crimes. This legal hair-splitting denied them the pensions and honors given to other resistance fighters. While White Rose members got streets and schools named after them, Pirates got silence. Some carried Nazi-era criminal convictions for decades.

The class dimension was stark: middle-class resisters got monuments, working-class resisters got suspicion.

The Cold War made things worse. Many Pirates had worked with communist organizers. In Cold War West Germany, being anti-Nazi wasn't enough if you might also be pro-communist.

Jean Jülich, a Cologne Pirate who survived, spent years lobbying for recognition. A small memorial was erected in 1981. Official recognition finally came in 2005—sixty years after the war ended. By then, most were dead.

Barthel Schink's Long Road Home

Bartholomäus "Barthel" Schink's story epitomizes the injustice.

He was born in 1927 in Cologne to a working-class family. By his early teens, he was involved with the Navajos (Cologne's Edelweiss Pirate group), participating in hikes, singing forbidden songs, and harassing Hitler Youth. As the war progressed, he became involved in more serious resistance—helping shelter escaped prisoners and deserters.

He was arrested in October 1944, at age sixteen. On November 10, he was hanged without trial.

After the war, his family sought recognition of his death as a resistance martyr. They were largely ignored for decades. His execution was classified as a "police action" against criminals, not the murder of a resistance fighter.

It wasn't until the 1980s that serious historical research began rehabilitating the Pirates' reputation. Barthel Schink finally received a memorial plaque in Cologne in 1984—nearly forty years after his death. The city officially apologized in 2005.

His story became a symbol of how Germany had failed its working-class resisters, honoring the university students and officers while forgetting the street kids who'd fought with fists and stolen weapons because they had nothing else.

Here lived Bartel Schink commemorative plaque. Asio otus, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Politics of Memory: Clean Martyrs and Dirty Survivors

The contrast between the White Rose and the Edelweiss Pirates reveals how historical memory gets constructed. Post-war Germany needed the White Rose: educated idealists who resisted through pamphlets, motivated by Christian conscience, caught and martyred in one tragic moment. Their story offered moral redemption—proof that "good Germans" existed—without threatening anyone's politics or forcing uncomfortable questions about class, violence, or survival.

The Edelweiss Pirates offered no such comfort. They were working-class kids who fought with fists and stolen weapons, who sometimes stole to survive, who had ties to communist networks, who used violence against a violent regime. Many survived the war and remained difficult, unrepentant, demanding recognition from a society that found them embarrassing. Their resistance was morally complex in ways that made commemoration awkward.

The White Rose could be celebrated because they were safely dead and ideologically acceptable. The Pirates had to be forgotten because they lived and remained politically uncomfortable.

This selective memory extends far beyond Germany. The French Resistance is celebrated for its intellectual partisans and heroic saboteurs, while the heavily communist rural Maquis guerrillas who conducted much of the actual fighting—burning, ambushing, executing—are relegated to footnotes.[^7] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is rightly honored for its desperate heroism, yet the political complexity gets smoothed over: many of its leaders were communists and socialists who would face persecution in post-war Poland if they survived.[^8]

Greek communist partisans of ELAS formed the largest and most effective resistance to Nazi occupation in Greece, tying down Axis divisions that might have been deployed elsewhere. Yet because they lost the subsequent Greek Civil War to British-backed royalists, their anti-Nazi contributions were systematically erased from official histories.[^9] Tito's Yugoslav partisans conducted perhaps the most successful resistance campaign in occupied Europe, liberating their country largely without Allied ground forces—but Western Cold War histories minimized their achievements for decades because Tito was a communist.[^10]

Even the Dutch resistance—often portrayed in comfortable narratives as brave citizens hiding Jews in attics—included women like Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Menger, and Hannie Schaft, who used their sexuality as a weapon. They would flirt with Nazi officers in bars, lure them to isolated locations, and shoot them. These women were often erased from official commemorations as too violent, too sexual, too morally ambiguous—too uncomfortably real.[^11]

The pattern becomes unmistakable: resistance led by educated elites, motivated by acceptable ideologies, using "clean" methods gets monuments and school curricula. Working-class resistance, communist resistance, violent resistance—often more widespread and materially effective—gets dismissed as thuggery, minimized as criminal, or simply forgotten.

Memorial for the Cologne victims on Schönsteinstraße photographer: Christoph Rückert aka Dstern - thank you!, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

The Long Shadow: What We Choose to Remember

Today, if you visit Germany, you'll find the White Rose everywhere. Their story is taught in schools. Munich's university has a memorial. Films and books celebrate them. They are Germany's acceptable face of resistance.

The Edelweiss Pirates have a few scattered memorials, mostly erected in the last twenty years after decades of lobbying. There's a memorial in Cologne where Barthel Schink was hanged. A documentary here, a scholarly book there. But they remain marginal in German historical consciousness.

This matters because historical memory shapes how we think about resistance in the present.

When we only honor intellectual, non-violent, "respectable" resistance, we implicitly suggest that this is the only legitimate form of opposition to tyranny. We sanitize resistance, make it safe and digestible. We ignore the reality that most people who resist dictatorship aren't philosophy students—they're ordinary people using whatever tools they have, which often means violence, criminality, and moral ambiguity.

The Edelweiss Pirates remind us that resistance often comes from unexpected places: from working-class teenagers who just wanted to hike and sing without jackboots following them, who escalated to violence because the alternative was submission, who survived the war only to find themselves still dismissed as criminals.

They deserved better. They deserve to be remembered—not sanitized, not made comfortable, but remembered as they were: difficult, violent, brave, working-class kids who said no when saying no could get you hanged.

Barthel Schink was sixteen when they killed him. He should have grown up to be a grandfather by now, telling stories about the time he and his friends beat up Hitler Youth in the streets of Cologne. Instead, he became a footnote, an uncomfortable memory Germany tried to forget.

This is the darkness we illuminate at Obscurarium: not just the atrocities committed, but the injustices of memory—how we choose which victims to honor and which resisters to forget, and what those choices reveal about class, power, and who gets to be remembered as a hero.

Notes & Sources

[^1]: The Ehrenfeld Group took its name from Ehrenfeld, a working-class neighborhood in western Cologne. The group included both Edelweiss Pirates (younger members) and adult anti-Nazi resisters, many with communist backgrounds. Details of the November 10, 1944 executions from: Reinhold Billstein, "Working-Class Youth and the Hitler Youth: Edelweiss Pirates," in Disorderly Youth: Middle-Class Anti-Fascism in the Weimar Republic (Campus Verlag, 1989).

[^2]: The Wandervogel ("Wandering Bird") movement began in 1896 as a German youth hiking organization emphasizing freedom, nature, folk culture, and independence from adult authority. By the 1920s it had hundreds of thousands of members. The Nazis banned it in 1933, seeing it as ideologically incompatible with Hitler Youth discipline and militarism. Many Edelweiss Pirates came from families with Wandervogel traditions. See: Michael Klönne, Jugend im Dritten Reich: Die Hitler-Jugend und ihre Gegner (Pahl-Rugenstein, 1982).

[^2]: Bartholomäus Schink biographical information: Alexander Goeb, Er war sechzehn, als man ihn hängte ("He Was Sixteen When They Hanged Him") (Fischer, 1981); Cologne city archives documentation available at NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln: https://www.ns-dok.de/

[^3]: Edelweiss Pirates songs and cultural practices documented in: Michael Klönne, Jugend im Dritten Reich: Die Hitler-Jugend und ihre Gegner (Pahl-Rugenstein, 1982).

[^4]: Ehrenfeld Group activities: Gesterkamp, "The Ehrenfeld Group: Resistance in Working-Class Cologne," in German Resistance to Hitler (Harvard University Press, 1994).

[^5]: Post-war legal treatment of Edelweiss Pirates: Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (Yale University Press, 1987), 154-174.

[^6]: Comparison of White Rose and Edelweiss Pirates in historical memory: Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (Penguin, 2009); Timothy S. Brown, "Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and 'Nazi Rock' in England and Germany," Journal of Social History 38, no. 1 (2004). White Rose memorial and educational materials: https://www.weisse-rose-stiftung.de/en/

[^7]: On the French Maquis and communist resistance: Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2015). The Maquis were rural guerrilla groups, many communist-led, who conducted sabotage and assassinations. Post-war Gaullist narratives emphasized "respectable" resistance.

[^8]: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April-May 1943) was led by the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), whose leadership included communists, socialists, and Zionists. The complexity of political divisions and the fate of communist survivors in post-war Poland is explored in: Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

[^9]: The Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) was the military arm of the communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM), forming the largest resistance organization in occupied Greece with over 50,000 fighters by 1944. After liberation, Britain backed royalist forces against ELAS in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), leading to systematic erasure of ELAS's anti-Nazi contributions from official histories. See: Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (Yale University Press, 1993).

[^10]: Yugoslav Partisans under Josip Broz Tito conducted the most successful resistance campaign in Nazi-occupied Europe, tying down significant Axis forces. Western Cold War histories often minimized their effectiveness due to Tito's communism. See: Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford University Press, 2001).

[^11]: Dutch resistance women including Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Menger, and Hannie Schaft used seduction tactics to lure Nazi officers and collaborators to isolated locations where they were executed. Their violent methods and sexual agency made them uncomfortable figures for post-war commemoration. See: Sophie Poldermans, Seducing and Killing Nazis: Hannie, Truus and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of WWII (Querido, 2018; English translation 2019).

[^7]: Official recognition timeline: "Cologne Honors Nazi Resistance Group," Deutsche Welle, December 1, 2005: https://www.dw.com/en/cologne-honors-nazi-resistance-group/a-1803853; Cologne City Council Resolution 2331/2005. Memorial information: https://www.ns-dok.de/