Richard Plants reminiscences also substantiate that the Wandervoegel groups served as a training ground for Nazis. He recalls his friend in the Rovers, Ferdi, who explained and demonstrated the mysteries of sex to me and my friends. Plant was later shocked, he says, upon returning to Germany from abroad to see Ferdi wearing a brown shirt with a red, white and black swastika armband (ibid.:4).
E.Y. Hartshorne, in German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory records the recollections of a former Wandervoegel member who confirms that the organization was the source of important elements of Nazi culture. Our knowledge of the influence of the Community of the Elite on the Wandervoegel may provide us insight into the cryptic comment at the end of the testimony:
We little suspected then what power we had in our hands. We played with the fire that had set a world in flames, and it made our hearts hot. Mysticism and everything mystical had dominion over us. It was in our ranks that the word Fuehrer originated, with its meaning of blind obedience and devotion. The word Bund arose with us too, with its mysterious undertone of conspiracy. And I shall never forget how in those early days we pronounced the word Gemeinschaft [community] with a trembling throaty note of excitement, as though it hid a deep secret (Hartshorne:12).
Indeed, not only did the grown-up former members of the Wandervoegel become one of Hitlers main sources of supporters in his rise to power, but the movement itself became the core of a Nazi institution: the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth). So rampant had homosexuality become in the movement by this time that The Rheinische Zeitung, a prominent German newspaper, warned, Parents, protect your sons from physical preparations in the Hitler Youth, a sarcastic reference to problems of homosexuality in the organization (Burleigh and Wipperman:188). Sadly, the boys themselves had by this time been completely indoctrinated by their homosexual masters. Waite writes,