Forms of Resistance

Cultural Defiance

• Boys added British flair by wearing homburg hats, growing their hair long, and attaching Union Jack pins to their jackets. They liked to carry umbrellas whatever the weather and smoke pipes [2].
• Girls wore short skirts, applied lipstick and fingernail polish, and wore their hair long and down instead of applying braids or German-style rolls [2].
• They greeted each other with “Swing Heil” instead of “Heil Hitler”

Active Resistance

Swing Kid gangs fought Hitler Youth in the streets. Some Swing Kids became known for “tagging public walls with anti-Nazi slogans like ‘Down with Hitler!’ and ‘Medals for Murder!’. Throwing bricks through windows and sabotaging cars of Nazi officials… raiding military bases… derailing trains… even planning to blow up the Gestapo HQ in Cologne.” [3]

Social Integration

Most shockingly to Nazi authorities, they tended to welcome Jewish teenagers into their midst [4].  This was particularly dangerous as “many half-Jews were sought out and persecuted before others if they were known as Swing Kids.” [2]

Nazi Response

The regime’s reaction was severe:

• Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, instructed that “all the ringleaders … and all teachers with enemy views who are encouraging the swing youth are to be assigned to a concentration camp.” [1]
• 383 people were arrested between October 1940 and December 1942 in Hamburg alone, of which 90 percent were younger than 21 years old [1].
• Swing Kids “had to endure discriminating interrogations, torture and detention” and “landed in youth concentration camps.” [5] 

Other Resistance Groups

The Edelweiss Pirates were more politically active, as they “hid deserters, assaulted Nazis and even killed the chief of the Cologne Gestapo.” [6] Their slogan was “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth.” [7]

Allied Forces and Swing Dancing

Spreading Democracy Through Dance

Time reported that American troops stationed in France in 1945 jitterbugged, and by 1946, jitterbug had become a craze in England. American GIs effectively served as cultural ambassadors, spreading swing dancing throughout Europe.

American GIs brought over with them new and exciting dance styles, and dancing itself was a way to escape the pressures of life under the constant threats of bombing and death [8]. 

Military Morale

In 1942, Herbert Morrison announced that dancing would not be prohibited due to the war, recognizing that “Dancing was necessary to maintain morale for both civilian and military populations.” [8]

Jive initially “was based on Eastern swing taken to England by American Troops in World War II and evolved before becoming the now standardized form of today.”

USO and Military Dancing

The USO sponsored dances for servicemen, including square dances at university campuses. These dances served multiple purposes:

• Boosting troop morale
• Creating connections between soldiers and local communities
• Maintaining a sense of normalcy and American culture abroad

War Bond Drives

Some schools used dances as fundraising opportunities, with President William McKinley High School in Honolulu using their Centennial Dance as a war bond-selling opportunity, with students purchasing $68,635.65 in war bonds.

The Propaganda War

Nazi Contradictions

Interestingly, the Nazis attempted to recreate a more Germanic form of jazz music—for entertainment, to boost the morale of young German troops, and to undermine Allied morale by broadcasting pro-German propaganda jazz numbers by the Nazi-sponsored “Charlie & His Orchestra” across the Channel [9]. 

Some youth “flocked to the cinemas to catch anti-American propaganda reels that showed Americans dancing the Lindy Hop so they could learn to imitate the movements.” [9] The Nazi propaganda backfired by actually spreading swing culture.

Cultural Impact on Occupied Territories

World War II facilitated the spread of jitterbug across the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. In preparation for D-Day, there were nearly 1.6 million American troops stationed throughout Britain in May 1944.

“Dancing was not a popular pastime in Britain before the war, and many ballrooms had been closed for lack of business.” The presence of American troops revolutionized British social culture.

Long-term Effects

“Epilogue text reveals that a second generation of Swing Kids lived to see the Nazis defeated.” [10] The cultural resistance of the Swing Kids, while not primarily political in nature, represented a form of opposition to totalitarian control that helped preserve individuality and freedom of expression.

Dance halls played a huge part in keeping up morale during the war, with “Every town and village had a hall where dancing could take place.” The Lindy Hop, “introduced to the UK by the American soldiers stationed here during World War Two… quickly became a firm favourite in the dance halls of Britain.”

Conclusion

While the Swing Kids didn’t directly sabotage German military operations in a traditional sense, their cultural resistance:

1. Diverted Nazi resources to surveillance and suppression
2. Maintained spaces of freedom and individual expression under totalitarianism
3. Created networks that sometimes aided more active resistance
4. Demonstrated that not all German youth accepted Nazi ideology

For the Allies, swing dancing served as:

1. A powerful morale booster for troops and civilians
2. A form of cultural diplomacy that spread American values
3. A fundraising tool for the war effort
4. A way to build connections between American forces and local populations

The story of swing during WWII demonstrates how culture and art can serve as forms of resistance and tools of soft power during wartime, with effects that lasted long after the conflict ended.

References

[1]  Swing Kids
[2] How Jazz-Loving Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resisted Conformity in Nazi Germany | Open Culture
[3] Swing (dance) – Wikipedia
[4] Oxford University Press Open Culture
[5] The British Newspaper Archive Wikipedia
[6] Holocaust Encyclopedia IMDb 
[7] Swing Kids (1993) | Drama, Music
[8] Dance crazes of the Second World War
[9] dancing, morale, and the war effort in Britain during World …
[10] Did they have swing dancing in World War II? – Quora