Primarily active in Hamburg and Berlin, they were composed of 14- to 21-year-old Germans, mostly middle or upper-class students, but also including some in the working class.

[1] They admired the "American way of life", defining themselves in swing music and opposing Nazism, especially the Hitler Youth (German: Hitlerjugend).

[2] This proved to be unsuccessful, and instead of embracing the Hitler Youth pastimes, city girls and boys crowded the swing dance joints.

For example, boys added a little British flair to their clothes by wearing homburg hats, growing their hair long, and attaching a Union Jack pin to their jacket.

[5] A police report from 1940 described the Swing Youth as follows: The predominant form of dress consisted of long, often checked English sports jackets, shoes with thick light crepe soles, showy scarves, Anthony Eden hats, an umbrella on the arm whatever the weather, and, as an insignia, a dress-shirt button worn in the buttonhole, with a jewelled stone.

Their objectives were originally more self-indulgent in nature, being privileged with wealth and German heritage, they spent their money on expensive clothing and liquor.

They rebelled against all this with jazz and swing, which stood for a love of life, self-determination, non-conformism, freedom, independence, liberalism, and internationalism.

One "swing boy", in a 1940 letter written in slightly broken English to a friend who was going to Hamburg, stated: "Be a proper spokesmen for Kiel, won't you?

i.e, make sure you're really casual, singing or whistling English hits all the time, absolutely smashed and always surrounded by really amazing women".

[11] Hamburg, the most Anglophile of German cities, was regarded as the "capital" of the Swing Youth, and British jazz players like Jack Hylton and Nat Gonella were popular with the Swing Youth, through Willet wrote that they "... were sufficiently sophisticated to appreciate the superiority of the American artists as well as the stylish and sensuous qualities of their performances.

The Swing Kids were initially basically apolitical, similar to their zoot suiter counterparts in North America.

[13] A popular term that the swing subculture used to define itself was Lottern, roughly translated as something between "laziness" and "sleaziness", indicating contempt for the pressure to do "useful work" and the repressive sexual mores of the time.

Reports by Hitler Youth observers of swing parties and jitterbug went into careful detail about the overtly sexual nature of both.

[6] In particular, Peukert wrote that the lurid claims made by the police that Swing Youth dance sessions were followed up by group sex seems to have had no basis in reality.

At the turn of the year 1939/1940 the Flottbeck group organized dances which were attended by 5–6000 young people and which were marked by an uninhibited indulgence in swing.

The greed to participate in what appeared to them to be a stylish life in clubs, bars, cafes and house balls suppressed any positive attitude towards responding to the needs of the time.

Also, by police order, people under 18 were forbidden to go to dance bars, which encouraged the movement to seek its survival in clandestine measures.

No formal co-operation arose, though these contacts were later used by the Volksgerichtshof ("People's Court") to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda and sabotage of the armed forces.

The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration camps.

Directed by Thomas Carter (Holly Harold, assistant Mr. Carter) and starring Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Frank Whaley, and Kenneth Branagh (uncredited), the picture was not a commercial success but sustains a large underground following[17] and is described by film critic Janet Maslin as having a historical background.

[18] German filmmaker Margit Czenki's made-for-television movie Swingpfennig/Deutschmark (1994) featured the original Swingboys Günter Discher and Otto Bender.

Set in the St. Pauli of the early 1990s, the protagonists of the film – musicians around the band Die Goldenen Zitronen – uncover and stumble upon the history of the Swing Kids.