Artur Axmann

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Image:Arthur Axmann.jpeg Artur Axmann (February 18 1913 – October 24, 1996) was a Nazi official in the Hitler Youth.

Axmann was born in Hagen on February 18. He studied law and in 1928, founded the first Hitler Youth group in Westphalia. In 1932, he was called into the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP to carry out a reorganization of Nazi youth cells and in 1933, became Chief of the Social Office of the Reich Youth Leadership. Axmann gained a place for the Hitler Youth in the direction of state vocational training and succeeded in raising the status of Hitler Youth agricultural work. He was on active service on the western front until May 1940. In August of the same year he succeeded Baldur von Schirach as Reich Youth Leader ("Reichsjugendführer") of the Nazi Party. In 1941, he was severely wounded on the eastern front, losing an arm. On 4 January 1944, he received the German Order, the highest decoration the Nazi party could bestow. During the last weeks of the war Axmann commanded units of Hitlerjugend also a part of the Volksturm, consisting mostly of children and adolescents, fighting within the so called Endkampf um Berlin in the battle of Seelower Höhen (Seelow Heights). Many of these young people died without any military training or equipment. During Hitler's last days, Axmann was among those present in the Führerbunker. On May 1, 1945 he escaped from the bunker together with Martin Bormann, but separated from Bormann. He avoided capture by Soviet troops and disappeared. He was presumed dead, but was living under the alias of "Erich Siewert".

He was arrested in December 1945 when a Nazi underground movement which he had been organizing was uncovered. A Nuremberg de-Nazification court sentenced him in May 1949 to a prison sentence of three years and three months as a 'major offender'.

After his release, Axmann worked as a sales representative in Gelsenkirchen and Berlin. On 19 August 1958, a West Berlin de-Nazification court fined the former Hitler Youth leader 35,000 marks (approximately 3,000 pounds), about half the value of his property in Berlin. The court found him guilty of indoctrinating German youth with National Socialism right until the end of the Third Reich, but concluded that he had been a Nazi from inner conviction rather than base motives. During his trial Axmann told the court that he had heard the shot with which Hitler committed suicide, and had later also seen the body of Martin Bormann lying on a bridge in Berlin.