Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis

Children lay at the heart of the Nazi war. The Nazis murdered Jewish, gypsy and disabled children, so that the pure-bred German child would inherit the new colonial empire being conquered in the East. Yet in the final weeks of the war, the regime would devour its own, calling on the very teenagers it had so lauded to sacrifice themselves on the “altar of the fatherland.”Although the Nazi regime separated children on the basis of race and national identity, the experience of children does not fall into tidy categories. They were also active participants, going out to smuggle food, ply the black market, and care for sick family members. As they absorbed the brutal realities of German occupation, Polish boys played at being Gestapo interrogators, and Jewish children at being ghetto guards or the SS. As they imagined themselves in the roles of their enemies, children expressed their hopes, fears and envy in their play.Drawing on a wide range of new sources, from welfare and medical files to private diaries, letters and drawings, Nicholas Stargardt evokes the individual voices of children under Nazi rule. In re-creating their wartime experiences, he has produced a challenging new historical interpretation of the Second World War.