Hitler Youth cycling tours tried to infiltrate the Boy Scout movement in the UK, newly released MI5 documents say.
According to recently declassified intelligence files from the United Kingdom’s counter-intelligence and security agency, alarm spread throughout the country during a 1937 Hitler Youth cyclist tour in Britain. Local police reported concerns that the “spyclists” were touring the country to plan for a military invasion.
The fears reportedly began after the now defunct Daily Herald ran a story under the headline “Nazis must be spyclists.” The article gave details of advices given to the Nazi Cyclists Association, part of the German National Union for Physical Culture:
Impress on your memory the roads and paths, villages and towns, outstanding church towers and other landmarks so that your will not forget them.Make a note of the names of places, rivers, seas and mountains. Perhaps you may be able to utilise these sometime for the benefit of the Fatherland.
Should you come to a bridge which interests you, examine the construction and the materials used. Learn to measure and estimate the width of streams. Wade through fords so that you will be able to find them in the dark.
The Hitler Youth group was a serious threat to the UK. It sought to export its xenophobic and racist ideology first into young Germans through indoctrination, and later into Germany’s neighbors. MI5 documents released by the National Archives show that leaders of the group attempted to forge ties with the British Boy Scot movement, partly on hopes of spreading their anti-Semitic and racist ideologies.
A letter sent by police Superintendent T. Dawson of Spalding to his superiors titled “party of young Germans en route for London,” fueled fears.
“I respectfully beg to inform you that a party of German youths arrived at Spalding on Friday the 30th of July 1937,” Dawson wrote. “They were entertained by the Spalding Rotary Club and camped for the night in Fulney Park, leaving the following morning and traveling south.”
When Nazi officials and Hitler Youth chief Hartmann Lauterbacher visited a British army physical training school, people became all the more alarmed. Then they heard that the head of the Boy Scout movement Lord Baden-Powell met with German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. Fears continued to intensify.
Following the meeting, Baden-Powell described Ribbentrop as “earnest” and “charming.” Baden-Powell wrote,
I had a long talk with the ambassador, who was very insistent that the true peace between the two nations will depend on the youth being brought up on friendly terms together in forgetfulness of past differences.He sees in the Scout movement a very powerful agency for helping to bring this about if we can get into closer touch with the Jugend (Youth) movement in Germany.
To help this he suggested that if possible we should send one or two men to meet their leaders in Germany and talk matters over and, especially, he would like me to go and see Hitler after I am back from Africa.
I told him that I was fully in favour of anything that would bring about a better understanding between our nations, and hoped to have further talks with him when I return from Africa.
While there are no reports that Baden-Powell ever met with Hitler, him even suggesting a meeting is frightening.
Luckily, British officials wised up. In an October 1944 intelligence assessment, MI5 said that the Hitler Youth could not be compared to the Boy Scouts.
“It is a compulsory Nazi formation, which has consciously sought to breed hate, treachery and cruelty into the mind and soul of every German child…it is, in the true sense of the word, ‘education for death’.”
