Youth in the Shadow of the Reich: A Descent into Madness and Atrocity

A young boys descent into the dark heart of Germany under Nazi rule, where the lines between soldier and monster are blurred

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The Fall of Innocence Even before he was forced to join the Hitler Youth (HJ), Albert Schmidt had been aware that their Wehrsport or military athletics was intended to prepare them to be soldiers when they were older, with the best selected to join the SS. However it was a shock when at short notice he was told to pack and that they were off to Reichsgau Warthegau, so recently liberated from Poland by the heroic Werhmacht. It was a cold and bleak landscape compared with home but most of the boys felt honoured that they had been assigned to assist SS units in creating Lebensraum, or living space, for the ethnic Germans who were being brought back within the Reich. It was to be the Hitler Youth's job to ensure that that the indolent Polish farmers who were being evicted took nothing which might be of value to the settlers soon to arrive from other parts of eastern Europe. Although the front line had now moved far to the east the Hitler Youth were enthusiastically set to practise digging foxholes and shallow trenches around their camp. At first they pretended to defend their part of the camp against the SS soldiers as they came and went, but they were soon told to desist in no uncertain terms in case they got shot themselves by a nervous soldier. So instead Albert and his colleagues practised crawling unseen towards the village and seeing how close to the local sluttish peasant girls they could get and then to whisper to each other in which part of their anatomy they would like to shoot them. …and then things took a turn

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