The Children Who Fought Hitler

Few people know that Ypres, centre of First World War remembrance, was once home to a thriving British community that played a heroic role in the Second World War. This expatriate outpost grew around the British ex-servicemen who cared for the war memorials and cemeteries of 'Flanders Fields'. Many married local women and their children grew up multi-lingual, but attended their own school and were intensely proud to be British. When Germany invaded in 1940 the community was threatened: some children managed to escape, others were not so lucky. But, armed with their linguistic skills and local knowledge, pupils of the British Memorial School were uniquely prepared to fight Hitler in occupied territory and from Britain. Still in their teens, some risked capture, torture and death in intelligence and resistance operations in the field. An exceptional patriotism spurred them on to feats of bravery in this new conflict. Whilst their peers at home were being evacuated to the English countryside, these children were directly exposed to danger in one of the major theatres of war. James Fox was a pupil at the British Memorial School in 1940 and he has made it his mission to trace his former school friends. The Children Who Fought Hitler is their story: a war story about people from an unusual community, told from a fresh and human perspective.

In late 1936, as Franco’s armies stormed toward Madrid, Stalin famously termed the defence of Spain “the common cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.” As a German emigrant to Winnipeg, Hans Ibing recognized the importance of the Spanish Civil War to the struggle against worldwide fascism in a way that most people in Canada did not—joining the International Brigades in their fight to defend the Spanish Republic was his “chance to fight Hitler.” Drawing on interviews, Ibing’s personal papers, and archival material, David Goutor recounts the powerful story of an ordinary man’s response to extraordinary times.

New York Times Bestseller The definitive story of the Ritchie Boys, as featured on CBS's 60 Minutes "An irresistible history of the WWII Jewish refugees who returned to Europe to fight the Nazis.” —Newsday They were young Jewish boys who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe and resettled in America. After the United States entered the war, they returned to fight for their adopted homeland and for the families they had left behind. Their stories tell the tale of one of the U.S. Army’s greatest secret weapons. Sons and Soldiers begins during the menacing rise of Hitler’s Nazi party, as Jewish families were trying desperately to get out of Europe. Bestselling author Bruce Henderson captures the heartbreaking stories of parents choosing to send their young sons away to uncertain futures in America, perhaps never to see them again. As these boys became young men, they were determined to join the fight in Europe. Henderson describes how they were recruited into the U.S. Army and how their unique mastery of the German language and psychology was put to use to interrogate German prisoners of war. These young men—known as the Ritchie Boys, after the Maryland camp where they trained—knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured. Yet they leapt at the opportunity to be sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions that saved American lives and helped win the war. A postwar army report found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys. Sons and Soldiers draws on original interviews and extensive archival research to vividly re-create the stories of six of these men, tracing their journeys from childhood through their escapes from Europe, their feats and sacrifices during the war, and finally their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten.

Robert F. Sibert Award-winner Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores the riveting and often chilling story of Germany's powerful Hitler Youth groups. In her first full-length nonfiction title since winning the Robert F. Sibert Award, Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores the riveting and often chilling story of Germany's powerful Hitler Youth groups."I begin with the young. We older ones are used up . . . But my magnificent youngsters! Look at these men and boys! What material! With them, I can create a new world." --Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg 1933 By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth. It would become the largest youth group in history. Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the loyalty, trust, and passion of so many of Germany's young people. Her research includes telling interviews with surviving Hitler Youth members.

Readers of all generations have grown up on The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier’s best-selling tale of children under wartime occupation, but few know the real life stories of the children and teenagers who went further and actually stood up to the Nazis. Here, for the first time, Monica Porter gathers together their stories from many corners of occupied Europe, showing how in a variety of audacious and inventive ways children as young as six resisted the Nazi menace, risking and sometimes even sacrificing their brief lives in the process: a heroism that until now has largely gone unsung. These courageous youngsters came from all classes and backgrounds. There were high school drop-outs and social misfits, brainy bookworms, the children of farmers and factory workers. Some lost their entire families to the war, yet fought on alone. Often more adept and fearless at resistance than adults, they exuded an air of guilessness and could slip more easily under the Nazi radar. But as nets tightened, many were captured, tortured or imprisoned, some paying the highest price – a life cut short by execution before they had even turned eighteen. These children were motivated by different ideals; patriotism, political conviction, their Christian beliefs, or revulsion at the brutality of the Third Reich. But what united them was their determination to strike back at an enemy which had deprived them of their freedom, their dignity - and their childhood.

At the outset of World War II, Denmark did not resist German occupation. Deeply ashamed of his nation's leaders, fifteen-year-old Knud Pedersen resolved with his brother and a handful of schoolmates to take action against the Nazis if the adults would not. Naming their secret club after the fiery British leader, the young patriots in the Churchill Club committed countless acts of sabotage, infuriating the Germans, who eventually had the boys tracked down and arrested. But their efforts were not in vain: the boys' exploits and eventual imprisonment helped spark a full-blown Danish resistance. Interweaving his own narrative with the recollections of Knud himself, here is Phillip Hoose's inspiring story of these young war heroes. This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum.

An unprecedented aspect of Nazi genocide in World War II was the cold and deliberate decision not to spare the children. Jewish children, first driven into the ghettos, were marked for total destruction as part of the "Final Solution" once it was put into effect, in 1942. Gentile children were starved, killed, or Germanized in order to reduce the Polish nation to a small complement of semi-literate slaves tending the Herrenvolk in their thousand-year Reich. This record also includes accounts of how they fought back by working for the underground, smuggling food into the ghettos, attending secret classes to continue their forbidden education. Included are stories of villains like Mengele who selected children for execution during Jewish religious holidays; Rudolph Hoess, Auschwitz's commandant who admitted his own discomfort when he witnessed the gassing of prisoners with the excuse: "I was a soldier and an officer"; a heroic Dr. Janusz Korczak who was in charge of an orphanage in the ghetto, but refused to leave his orphans, and at the head of a contingent of 192 children and 8 staff members, erect, his eyes looking into the distance, held the hands of two children as he led them to the railroad platform where trains took them to certain death. Based on vast research in the United States, Great Britain, and Poland, many interviews, theses and other papers, documents and official histories, memoirs, autobiographies, articles, periodicals and newspapers, Did the Children Cry? stands as a monument to millions of children who were bombed, wounded, deported, raped, starved, maimed, subjected to "medical" experimentation, and killed in German-occupied Poland.

The Fascinating Story of Eight Children of Third Reich Leaders and their Journey from Descendants of Heroes to Descendants of Criminals In 1940, the German sons and daughters of great Nazi dignitaries Himmler, Göring, Hess, Frank, Bormann, Höss, Speer, and Mengele were children of privilege at four, five, or ten years old, surrounded by affectionate, all-powerful parents. Although innocent and unaware of what was happening at the time, they eventually discovered the extent of their father's occupations: These men—their fathers who were capable of loving their children and receiving love in return—were leaders of the Third Reich, and would later be convicted as monstrous war criminals. For these children, the German defeat was an earth-shattering source of family rupture, the end of opulence, and the jarring discovery of Hitler's atrocities. How did the offspring of these leaders deal with the aftermath of the war and the skeletons that would haunt them forever? Some chose to disown their past. Others did not. Some condemned their fathers; others worshiped them unconditionally to the end. In this enlightening book, which has been translated into eleven languages, Tania Crasnianski examines the responsibility of eight descendants of Nazi notables, caught somewhere between stigmatization, worship, and amnesia. By tracing the unique experiences of these children, she probes at the relationship between them and their fathers and examines the idea of how responsibility for the fault is continually borne by the descendants.