The Hitler Youth conspiracy was a case investigated by the Soviet secret police during the Great Purge in the late 1930s.
In the 1950s, following the death of Joseph Stalin, a new examination of the files revealed many of the accusations to have been baseless and a number of the victims were rehabilitated.
In his "Secret Speech", Nikita Khrushchev said that between 1936 and 1937, the number of arrests for counter-revolutionary crimes grew ten times.
[citation needed] The term "counter-revolutionary fascist groups" came into use within the Soviet secret police in 1938, as they carried out these purges.
[3] As early as 1930, the Soviet secret police, the Cheka (later the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs or NKVD), investigated teenage Germans suspected of being members of the Hitler Youth, but these investigations preceded the Great Purge and those arrested were not given the harsh sentences of later years.
[6] International communists living in the Soviet Union were hard hit, especially Germans, who were there in large numbers, fleeing Nazism.
While German parents were rounded up and accused of espionage, this charge was not plausible for foreign children who had not been outside the Soviet Union in years.
[citation needed] The commissar of the NKVD gave an order to find and arrest a group of young people who were alleged to have formed a branch of the Hitler Youth and were planning acts of sabotage and assassination.
[citation needed] Some 70 teenagers and adults were arrested[4] between January and March 1938, primarily the children of German and Austrian foreign workers and exiles, but also a few Russians.
[citation needed][note 2] Schmidtsdorf was arrested on February 5, 1938, with fellow troupe members Kurt Ahrendt and Karl Oefelein, all charged with founding a branch of the Hitler Youth.
[13] Of those arrested, 6 were released, 20 were sentenced from five to ten years, 40 were executed, two were returned to Germany and the Gestapo under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; and one died in prison.