Munson, Helene Die Feldafing-Jungs

Hitlers Kindersoldaten

When Helene Munson reads the war diary of her father Hans Dunker (the young rower on the left in the photo) after his death, she discovers secrets he kept hidden for seven decades, revealing a devastating trauma that would overshadow his entire life. During the Second World War, the Nazis recruited around 300,000 German child soldiers. Hans was just one of them. When he was sent to the elite Reich School of the NSDAP in Feldafing at the age of nine, he found himself in a system that wanted to turn boys like him into master race members, only to use them as cannon fodder in the final weeks of the war. In the desperate final phase of the war, he was sent to the Eastern Front in the Sudetenland, where he witnessed the death of his schoolmates and was wounded himself. The daughter begins her story with a trip to the Czech village of Závada, the site of the fighting. In her research, she uncovers the lost history of an entire generation that was brutally brainwashed in the Third Reich's school system. She grapples with the blurred line between perpetrator and victim and interviews contemporary witnesses. In the process, she must come to terms with her own feelings about this dark era. It is a moving story of forgiveness in which Helene Munson learns to understand her father, whom she often found difficult.