Hitler said: ​“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.” 

In no oth­er work has Hitler’s plan for the cap­ture of the hearts and minds of young peo­ple been as clear­ly described as in this large size book. There have been oth­ers with sim­i­lar titles, but they were pas­sive com­pared to Bartoletti’s treat­ment. Here, adults who were active in the Hitler Youth orga­ni­za­tions tes­ti­fy about their and their par­ents’ feel­ings regard­ing their join­ing. Most par­ents were against it, but the chil­dren were swept up with excite­ment and dis­obeyed, join­ing secret­ly at times. The nor­mal home life of Ger­man chil­dren was all about sub­mis­sion to their par­ents’ will. Then along came the charis­mat­ic Hitler, promis­ing sal­va­tion and glo­ry to a dev­as­tat­ed Ger­many, and ele­vat­ing chil­dren to myth­ic sta­tus, while pro­vid­ing them with a wal­lop­ing good time as well. Although many may have had Nazis ten­den­cies from the begin­ning, oth­ers were slow­ly brain­washed. Not until the train­ing was well advanced would the young peo­ple real­ize the trap they were falling into, and by then the penal­ties for drop­ping out were too oner­ous to be borne. Some did drop out nonethe­less and some nev­er joined, suf­fer­ing severe penal­ties. By 1939, it is esti­mat­ed that more than sev­en mil­lion boys and girls belonged to the Hitler Youth. In this book they recall their expe­ri­ences and pro­vide pho­tographs. The ample sup­ply of rarely-seen, good-qual­i­ty pho­tographs is anoth­er strong fea­ture of this hand­some­ly designed book. There is an inter­est­ing epi­logue about the present life of the chil­dren fea­tured in this book (maybe the author will include Pope Bene­dict in the next edi­tion), a time­line, author’s notes, notes about the pho­tographs, quo­ta­tion sources, a bib­li­og­ra­phy, and index. For ages 12 – 16.