Essen: schoolchildren below the smokestacks, 1937
Boys and girls with leather satchels walk home arm in arm down a broad road and along a field path, the chimneys of the works smoking behind them.
Two girls with satchels smile back over their shoulders before a crowd of schoolchildren sets off down a tree-lined road; a row of boys in shorts and knee socks links arms across the street, one waving his cap, until only two friends are left, arms round each other's shoulders. On a field path boys with satchels stop and look round, and four of them stand talking before a field above which a tall chimney and a smoking plant fill the horizon.
Essen was the city of Krupp, whose works under Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach were again making guns and armour plate. The Hitler Youth law of December 1936 claimed these boys for the Jungvolk alongside school and family; within a few years many of them would be in uniform.
