Reich Labour Service: drill and sport in the Alps, 1937

Below jagged limestone peaks, young men of the labour service exercise, throw poles and medicine balls, run through the pines, march singing and swim.

On gravel squares and meadows before long wooden huts, hundreds of young men in dark shorts, stripped to the waist, warm up in loose order, lock arms in a heaving scrum, run in file through tall pines by a shining lake, bend and swing long pale poles in unison and hurl them into the air, march singing in a column beneath a snow-streaked massif, throw medicine balls in rows and splash waist-deep in a mountain lake.

From June 1935 every young German man owed six months to the Reich Labour Service before joining the army. Konstantin Hierl, the Reich Labour Leader, meant the camps to be a school of the nation, where the student and the farmhand would dig, drill and sing side by side.