Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow by Susan Bartoletti

This picture history is a fascinating view of the 12-20 year olds who thought Hitler was more than just their leader but a new God come to save food starved Germany in 1933 with a plan to put food on the table and give them something to do with their time and bodies. Hitler wanted them to be physically fit and solid golden Germans, (no Jewish, Polish, Slavic blood or forbidden Gypsy background in his new Germany.) So what if you got C's in school, if you were physically fit, handsome boys and girls, your parents would be proud. And if they weren't proud, why turn them in to the Gestapo. Betray teachers, priests and other clergy, parents, best friends who tried to march to a different drummer, heard a different song. Betray they did, and some who quietly fought as resisters in the "White Rose" like founders Hans and Sophie Scholl literally lost their heads! Could this happen again... are youth of any culture too vain to see when someone is pulling their string? It haunts the survivors, now in their seventies and eighties, those who renounce their past and those who still try to justify what some of them did in the name of ethnic purity and cleansing. Take a look at it for a few minutes, listen to the superior book on cd, and you can place yourself in either side, neither came out victorious. As the narrator of Romeo and Juliet in closing tells us, "All are punished!!" ****