Gliding club on the heath near Trebbin, 1937

A dozen boys, most of them bare-chested, put their shoulders to the wing and struts of a training glider and push it up a bare sandy slope, the swastika on its rudder sharp against the sky. One boy sits strapped into the open seat, two teams run down the slope to stretch the rubber rope, and the glider is flung from the hill and sails low over the plain. Three young men study the dial of a cup anemometer, one in round glasses; at midday the pupils sit in the grass with enamel bowls.

Because the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany an air force, gliding became the nursery of German pilots, and many first flew on training gliders like this one. In April 1937 the new National Socialist Flying Corps under Friedrich Christiansen took over all gliding, the Hitler Youth supplied the boys, and camps like this fed them to the Luftwaffe that Hermann Göring had been building openly since 1935.