The clothes were the whole point. Short leather trousers and braces for the boys, dark skirts and checked blouses for the girls, white knee socks and hiking boots for everyone, and now and then a red neckerchief or a small badge stamped BJ, for Bündische Jugend. Every element was borrowed from the socialist and communist youth clubs the Nazis had shut down, and every element announced, at a glance on a Leipzig pavement, that the wearer was not in the Hitler Youth. A law of December 1936 had declared all German youth to be organised in the HJ. The young people who declined called themselves — or were called by the police who hunted them — Meuten. Packs.
They were not a resistance organisation in any tidy sense. Gestapo reports counted roughly fifteen hundred young people in the Leipzig Meuten between 1937 and 1939, spread across at least twenty loosely named groups that mapped onto the city's working-class districts: Hundestart in Kleinzschocher with about forty members, Lille in Reudnitz with about the same, Reeperbahn in Lindenau with as many as a hundred. Up to a third were girls, which sets the Meuten apart from most accounts of youthful defiance in the Third Reich. Nearly all came from working-class homes — apprentices, shop clerks, lads already at the lathe — and many had grown up in the children's sections of the labour movement before 1933. What they shared was less a programme than a refusal, plus an address book of people who felt the same way.
Meuten life happened in ordinary places, which is part of why it was so hard to police. They gathered at the cinema and the public swimming baths. They drank in neighbourhood pubs that had been Communist locals until the party was smashed — rooms where the politics had gone quiet but the regulars had not changed. On weekends they went out of the city with tents and cooking pots, and on the trail, away from the block wardens, the talk turned to politics. There were leaflets. There were also fights: Meuten members and Hitler Youth patrols went at each other in the streets often enough that the HJ leadership complained to Berlin that its uniformed boys had become reluctant to show themselves in certain Leipzig districts. Similar groups surfaced in Dresden and other Saxon towns, though almost nothing about them survives on paper.
The charge the state reached for was Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat — preparation for high treason. It was an extraordinary thing to level at teenagers, and it worked precisely because the Weimar parties had been outlawed, so any continuity with them, even a hand-me-down neckerchief, could be construed as an attempt to revive them. Two exemplary trials were held in Leipzig in October 1938, and the convictions carried prison terms of one to five years. Around ninety young people faced high-treason proceedings in all, and by 1940 roughly a hundred had been convicted for nothing more than having belonged to a Meute. Some went to penitentiaries, some to youth prisons and reformatories, some to Buchenwald. Leipzig's youth welfare office ran a camp-like institution of its own where members were held for months and "re-educated." By 1939 the Gestapo considered the Meuten dissolved.
The paperwork of the persecution is, awkwardly, most of what survives. For decades after the war neither German state had much use for the story either: a movement of working-class kids who took orders from nobody fitted the official antifascist narrative of the East no better than it fitted the politics of the West, and the history stayed buried a second time. The Meuten are now named in the Memorial to the German Resistance in Berlin, and Leipzig's school museum runs workshops on them for pupils the age they once were. It is worth resisting the urge to polish them into martyrs. They were adolescents who liked hiking, arguing, dressing to be recognised, and hitting back — and the state answered with treason charges before most of them had finished an apprenticeship.
Leipzig lies at 51.31°N, 12.32°E on the flat North German Plain, and the Meuten districts — Kleinzschocher, Lindenau, Reudnitz — ring the city centre in a band of tenement blocks two to four kilometres out. From 3,000 to 5,000 feet the layout reads clearly: the dense Gründerzeit grid of the western quarters, the dark green wedge of the Auwald floodplain forest cutting northwest to southeast through the city, and the Battle of the Nations monument standing alone on the southeastern edge. Leipzig/Halle (EDDP) is about 15 km northwest, with parallel runways and heavy overnight freight movements; Leipzig-Altenburg (EDAC) sits roughly 40 km south; Dresden (EDDC) is about 100 km east-southeast. The Leipzig basin traps low stratus for long stretches of winter — a clear morning in late spring gives the best raking light across the tenement facades.