Figure 1.-Here we see Joannes (Claus Dielief) with his arm around a friend he made at camp, a younger boy (Gunnar Möller). This illustrates the whole point of the film--Kamaradeschaft (comradeship).

The story concerns the spoiled boy Johannes, whose mother has raised him in luxury in Argentina and who is brought back to Germany after her death. Johannes comes from just the kind of family that the NAZIs reviled as bourgeois. Johannes is not of the "New Order". He doesn't understand the importance of "kamaradeschaft" (comradeship) and sacrifice. It seems he is initially resistant to joining the Hitler Youth (HJ),Johannes does not get along well with his father, who decides that he needs to be taught discipline and manliness. The father is somewhat pig-headed and embittered by his bad marriage to the boy's late mother. The solution to Johannes' teenage problems of character is to send him to a Nazi Political Educational Institution, Castle Oranienstein in Westerwald. There the boy is surrounded by 300 Hitler Jugend boys of the same age, and in this quasi-military enviornment he gradually matures into a decent young man, abandoning his childish episodes of temperament and caprice. The experience of being a Hitler Jugend with its code of masculinity, obedience, and group loyalty molds him into an honest and reliable national comrade, a dedicated Hitler Junge. At the end Johannes not only grows into an ideal Nazi loyalist but fosters a marriage between his disillusioned father and his aunt, his mother's sister.