German Youth Between Yesterday And Tomorrow 1 April 1947 30 April 1948

In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the Hitler Youth, founded in 1933 soon after the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany. Determining that by age ten children’s minds could be turned from play to politics, the regime inducted nearly all German juveniles between the ages of ten and eighteen into its state-run organization. The result was a potent tool for bending young minds and hearts to the will of Adolf Hitler. Baldur von Schirach headed a strict chain of command whose goal was to shift the adolescents’ sense of obedience from home and school to the racially defined Volk and the Third Reich. Luring boys and girls into Hitler Youth ranks by offering them status, uniforms, and weekend hikes, the Nazis turned campgrounds into premilitary training sites, air guns into machine guns, sing-alongs into marching drills, instruction into indoctrination, and children into Nazis. A few resisted for personal or political reasons, but the overwhelming majority enlisted. Drawing on original reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Michael H. Kater traces the history of the Hitler Youth, examining the means, degree, and impact of conversion, and the subsequent fate of young recruits. Millions of Hitler Youth joined the armed forces; thousands gleefully participated in the subjugation of foreign peoples and the obliteration of “racial aliens.” Although young, they committed crimes against humanity for which they cannot escape judgment. Their story stands as a harsh reminder of the moral bankruptcy of regimes that make children complicit in crimes of the state.

“One of the best books, certainly the best nonfiction book, that I've read recently.” —Nancy Pearl on NPR’s Morning Edition “An extraordinary achievement.” —New York Times Book Review An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her personal history. The year 1947 marks a turning point in the twentieth century. Peace with Germany becomes a tool to fortify the West against the threats of the Cold War. The CIA is created, Israel is about to be born, Simone de Beauvoir experiences the love of her life, an ill George Orwell is writing his last book, and Christian Dior creates the hyper-feminine New Look as women are forced out of jobs and back into the home. In the midst of it all, a ten-year-old Hungarian-Jewish boy resides in a refugee camp for children of parents murdered by the Nazis. This year he has to make the decision of a lifetime, one that will determine his own fate and that of his daughter yet to be born, Elisabeth

In the wake of World War II, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, 20 million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by university professors and social scientists, these surveys defined much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany, Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticized vetting program impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from the war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by illustrating the positive elements of the denazification campaign and recounting a more comprehensive history, one of mid-level Allied planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history.