The movement had arisen in the late nineteenth Century, a revolt by mostly middle dass youths, as yet mostly male, against what they considered the stuffy bourgeois world of their parents. The youth movement was not associated with any one political or religious Orientation. The most important group was that of the Wandervogel which was nationalistic, generally did not admit Jews, and welcomed the outbreak of war in 1914 as a liberation from existing values, and an opportunity for heroism. But there were counterparts to the Wandervogel among other very different ideological groups, Catholic, Jewish, socialist, and after 1919 also Communist. The Nazis emulated the romanticism, the return to nature, and the hiking and campfires of the youth movement, but changed the organizational structure of the youth movement to centralized control. For the most part, the movements were highly decentralized, consisting of small groups, offen only a handful of young people led by a charismatic leader, and loosely associated with the larger Organization. After 1933, the Nazis absorbed much of the youth movement into the Hitler Youth, and the separate association for girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), retaining the romanticism of the movement but organizing it from the top and centralizing it.
The Jewish youth movements were left untouched because there was, of course, no place for them in the Nazi scheme. There were several Jewish youth movements along political and religious lines that fore-shadowed the political parties in Israel. Some of these movements also became established in other, particularly Eastern European countries. These movements were also closely associated with sports organizations such as Maccabi, which existed in Jewish communities throughout the world and for the first time in 1930 held Maccabi Games in Tel Aviv. Zionism was unthinkable without the romanticism of the youth movements and without the kibbutz as a communal alternative to the modern bourgeois society.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 27