The book takes a look behind the National Socialist propaganda backdrop and develops a different image of the Hitler Youth on the basis of instruction sheets, archive documents and descriptions by contemporary witnesses: violence and vandalism, corruption and theft, sexuality, individualism and stubbornness. It was therefore a precarious, chaotic and often overwhelmed mass organization that was not only steered and controlled "from above", but functioned differently on site and whose young members sometimes even escaped the control of the state.