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 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 Hitler's last days, Axmann was among those present in the Führerbunker, escaping capture by Soviet troops on May 1, 1945.

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'. Axmann subsequently 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. He was found not guilty of having committed any crimes during the Nazi era.

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