Hitler's boy soldiers : how my father's generation was trained to kill and sent to die for Germany / Helene Munson.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : The Experiment, [2021]Description: 308 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781615198597
- 1615198598
- Dunker, Hans-Joachim, 1927-2005 -- Childhood and youth
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Children -- Germany -- Biography
- Reichsschule Feldafing (Feldafing, Germany) -- Alumni and alumnae -- Biography
- National socialism and education
- Child soldiers -- Germany -- Diaries
- Waffen-SS. SS-Freiwilligen-Panzer-Grenadier-Division "Horst Wessel", 18 -- Biography
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Czech Republic -- Závada (Opava District)
- Závada (Opava District : Czech Republic) -- History, Military
- Munson, Helene -- Family
- Diplomats -- Germany -- Biography
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | NonFiction | 940.5316 M969 | Available | 33111010842868 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
When Helene Munson finally reads her father, Hans Dunker's, wartime journal, she discovers secrets he kept buried for seven decades. This is no ordinary historical document but a personal account of devastating trauma.
During World War II, the Nazis trained some three hundred thousand German children to fight--and die--for Hitler. Hans was just one of those boy soldiers. Sent to an elite school for the gifted at nine years old, he found himself in the grip of a system that substituted dummy grenades for Frisbees. By age seventeen, Hans had shot down Allied pilots with antiaircraft artillery. In the desperate, final stage of Hitler's war, he was sent on a suicide mission to Závada on the Sudetenland front, where he witnessed the death of his schoolmates--and where Helene begins to retrace her father's footsteps after his death.
As Helene translates Hans's journal and walks his path of suffering and redemption, she uncovers the lost history of an entire generation brainwashed by the Third Reich's school system and funneled into the Hitler Youth.
A startling new account of this dark era, Hitler's Boy Soldiers grapples with inherited trauma, the burden of guilt, and the blurred line between "perpetrator" and "victim." It is also a poignant tale of forgiveness, as Helene comes to see her late father as not just a soldier but as one child in a sea of three hundred thousand forced onto the wrong side of history--and left to answer for it.
Revision of: Boy soldiers : a personal story of Nazi elite schooling and its legacy of trauma. Cheltenham : The History Press, [2021].
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction: Závada revisited -- The wrong time to die -- Traveling to another country -- The vanished boarding school -- Not a Napola -- Castle Birdsong -- Schooled by barbarians -- The flag is more than death -- Franz and the FLAK -- Glasses and mineral water -- Barrack blues -- Dresden and departures -- Arriving in Sudetenland -- The Battle for Zawada -- Saved by a grenade -- Germanskis on the run -- A long way home -- Epilogue 1: The back-to-front file -- Epilogue 2: The glass cabinet -- Appendix I: List of locations -- Appendix II: List of abbreviations and glossary.
"The true, untold story of how Germany's children fought in WWII, through the lens of the author's father and his rediscovered journal"-- Provided by publisher.