The origins and development of systematic German youth policy were direct results of the fears and anxieties shared by government officials, teachers, clergy, and other social reformers about the growing strength and widening influence of the Social Democratic party. At one level, youth savers regarded socialism as a clear and serious menace to the unity of the nation and to the stability of the social and political order. At another level, they viewed socialism as a manifest symptom of a host of debilitating and pernicious diseases associated with an advancing modern economy and polity: materialism, hedonism, urbanization, mass popular culture, democracy, and secularization. Thus, as we have seen, major youth savers charged the Socialists with fostering pleasure seeking, demanding arrogance, and irreligiosity among the young. In whatever avatar the Socialists appeared, whether as actual social revolutionaries or as symbols of disorder, youth savers found them deplorable. The Socialists challenged both their authority and their most cherished beliefs and values, whether their intense loyalty to the Imperial State, their idealism, their religiosity, their notions of social and political harmony or their commitments to personal responsibility, individualism, and social inequality. Hence anti-Socialism became the keystone, holding together the disparate building blocks that constituted the youth salvation campaign.

Almost all youth programs contained a strong dose of anti-Socialism prescribed to weaken the viselike grip in which the Socialists ostensibly held young workers. Civic education in the continuation schools was to teach young workers that their future welfare depended on Germany's strength, which in turn hinged on class cooperation rather than conflict.