|
|
| Hitler’s youth – a
story of courage and tragedy |
An account of the largely forgotten tales of World War II’s
children is tragically poignant, says Illtyd Harrington
Witness of War by Nicholas Stargardt
Jonathan Cape, £20
|
Execution by S Kwiatkowski, 13, of Warsaw
Jews pretend to be policemen in Lodz ghetto
Ceremony for Hitler Youth auxiliaries, 1943
A girl from Warsaw, Poland, trying to draw her home after
the war
|
EVERY day some 2,000 petitions arrived in Hitler’s office
– good Germans humbly seeking his benevolent interventions
to solve their problems.
One, which arrived early in July 1939 was from a Protestant farm
labourer and his wife asking for their severely disabled child to
be killed.
Hitler acted not out of compassion but to achieve racial purity,
for five-month-old Gerhard Herbert K died on July 25 after a visit
from one of the Fuhrer’s entourage.
His death was of great historical significance. In August 1939,
days before World War II broke out, the Reich Committee for the
Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses
was formed.
With rapid German efficiency, 5,000 in this category joined Gerhard
Herbert K in a pilot scheme. A trial killing machine was in place.
The slaughter of hundreds of thousands of children and babies followed
during the war. Meanwhile one picturesque “children’s
hospital” in the German Alps even had its busy crematorium
in the basement. Other little ones were starved to death.
This appalling illustration, perhaps more than any other in this
important book, demonstrates the compulsive lunacy and evil which
Hitler and his criminal gang were embracing enthusiastically.
The war created 13 million orphans. This is not another book about
the Holocaust, but one which looks through the eyes, diaries, drawings
and games of children.
Jewish children in the war-torn ghettos imitated the ghettos’
own policemen beating up other Jews. There were drawings of concentration
camps and continuous smoke from the crematoria.
Statistics trip off the tongue too easily, such as 1.1 million Jewish
children died in the Final Solution. Polish children were sold to
German farmers as labourers and often worked to death. Only two
German Catholic bishops defied Hitler and condemned the killing
clinics in the Fatherland.
The Fuhrer, after his agreements with the Roman Catholic Church
in 1933, had by March 1939 stifled the Catholic Church’s Youth
Movement. Anyone aged between 14 and 18 had to join the Hitler Youth.
The indoctrination was highly successful, for by February 1943 15-year-olds
were being flung into active and bloody combat.
On April 18, 1945, Hitler marked his last public birthday by inspecting
a line of child solders, one as young as 12.
Their fanaticism was such that a group of boys temporarily threw
back a unit of hardened Russian troops in a sector of Berlin 10
days before the war ended.
Children’s resilience and bravery come through. Polish kids
became masters of the black market as well as couriers for the resistance.
One boy carried an empty Zyklon B gas tin to resistance fighters
as proof of the mass exterminations being carried out.
Others were passed into service as housekeepers and nannies for
German families “in the most difficult circumstances”.
Even in the last year of the Third Reich, teenage gangs defied the
Gestapo with their nonconformity in dress and attitude. Others took
refuge in religion, particularly in Germany.
Hitler’s decline did not stop many adolescents demonstrating
blind faith in him.
On April 30, 1945, he took his life but to many youths he was The
Good Nazi. Not even the slow and reluctant horror stories coming
back from the east disturbed them too much.
Gone were the days when the SS in Russia sent back acceptable plunder.
Around 10,000 pairs of children’s socks and 2,000 pairs of
gloves arrived just in time for Christmas. Germans get very sentimental
on Christmas Eve. Churchill in a memorable phrase said: “The
Red Army tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht.”
As the front moved from the River Oder to Berlin, 361,367 Russians
and Poles were killed; 458,000 Wehrmacht and 27,000 Hitler Youth.
Amidst such carnage, children managed to survive in the most hellish
setting harrowing to read but most appropriate when we commemorate
Victory over Japan Day on August 15. |
|
|
