YOUTH organisers at the weekend’s Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin have pledged a “huge demo against conscription and war,” as well as further school walkouts on March 5.

More than 55,000 pupils across Germany took part in the first wave of school strikes on December 5, when the German parliament was voting to introduce compulsory registration with the military and medicals for all men turning 18 to meet plans to increase the army from 180,000 to 260,000 soldiers.

Schoolboy Sam of the Gottingen school strike committee said there were not enough classrooms to accommodate the children at his school, but the government had announced a €500 billion (£430bn) special fund to prepare the country for war.

Strike committees were established across the whole city — and soon schools in Gottingen were receiving requests for help in organising strike committees from schools in other districts. Though he’d been called in to speak to the headteacher over his anti-war activism, Sam said: “If you ask me whether it has been worth the personal consequences, the answer is yes.”

Hannes Werner of the International Youth Association said it had been organising sporting events like football matches against war. “Lots of young people can’t afford leisure activities any more, so you get a lot of interest,” he explained.

Marco Blum, of communist youth league SDAJ, said the group had organised school referendums on conscription, with schools voting four to one against it, while David Christner of Die Linke’s youth wing said militarisation was a class question.

“Who is supposed to ‘serve’?” he asked. “And is it this social order we’re supposed to fight to shore up? In that case we definitely have to resist!”