Hitler's Boy Soldiers: How My Father's Generation Was Trained to Kill and Sent to Die for Germany

by Helene Munson Narrated by Caitlin Cavannaugh

Overview

Helene Munson resurrects her father's WWII journals and embarks on a meticulous investigation, exposing how the Nazis trained 300,000 impressionable children as soldiers. In 1937, Munson's father, Hans, was enrolled in an elite German school whose students were destined to take leadership roles in the Reich. At fifteen, he was drafted as an antiaircraft gunner-along with the rest of the Hitler Youth-and assigned to an SS unit. As the war was being lost, Hans and his schoolmates were ordered to the front lines. Few returned. A personal lens into a nation's shameful past, Hitler's Boy Soldiers documents the history of the largest army of child soldiers in recent memory. Munson explores the lifelong effects on brainwashed children coerced to join a party they didn't understand. Both a modern narrative and an important historical contribution, Hitler's Boy Soldiers grapples with inherited trauma, the nature of being victim or perpetrator, and the burden of guilt.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Selection in the History Book Club and Military Book Club

“A fascinating contribution to an angle of Nazi Germany that is rarely discussed.”—James Hawes, author of The Shortest History of Germany

“This extraordinary book tells the previously untold story of what happened to Germany’s children during the Third Reich and WWII as seen from the unique perspective of a German family and through their collected documents.”—Roger Rosenblatt, author of Children of War, essayist for PBS Newshour and Time Magazine

“In his private diary, seventeen-year-old Hans Dunker described daily life as a student at an elite Nazi high school who is suddenly thrust into Hitler’s bloody battle: ‘Then comes a beautiful, bright Sunday with the sun shining on the horror and madness of human self-destruction.’ Only after seventy years did his daughter, Helene Munson, muster the courage to open it. Thankfully for her, she finds that he committed no atrocities. Thankfully for us, she has now shared this of-the-moment diary as she investigates the little-known story of Hitler’s Boy Soldiers.”—Peter Hellman, author of In Vino Duplicitas and Auschwitz Explained to My Child
 
“An exceptionally well-written and moving book. We all might pause to say a prayer for the ‘six Feldafing boys’ and the millions of other young men and women whose lives have been brutally taken in the horror of war.”—Dr. William M. Fowler, professor of history, Northeastern University, and author

“Hitler’s Boy Soldiers by Helene Munson reveals that the Nazis trained 300,000 children as soldiers, including the author’s father, who was drafted at age 15 and sent to the front lines in the late stages of the war.” – Publishers Weekly

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176108354
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	751,599

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