Book description
Witnesses of War is the first work to show how children
experienced the Second World War under the Nazis. Children were often
the victims in this most terrible of European conflicts, falling prey
to bombing, mechanised warfare, starvation policies, mass flight and
genocide. But children also became active participants, going out to
smuggle food, ply the black market, and care for sick parents and
siblings. As they absorbed the brutal new realities of German
occupation, Polish boys played at being Gestapo interrogators, and
Jewish children at being ghetto guards or the SS. Within days of
Germany's own surrender, German children were playing at being Russian
soldiers. As they imagined themselves in the roles of their
all-powerful enemies, children expressed their hopes and fears, as
well as their humiliation and envy.
This is the first account of the Second World War which brings
together the opposing perspectives and contrasting experiences of
those drawn into the new colonial empire of the Third Reich. German
and Jewish, Polish and Czech, Sinti and disabled children were all to
be separated along racial lines, between those fit to rule and those
destined to serve; ultimately between those who were to live and those
who were to die.
Because the Nazis measured their success in terms of Germany's
racial future, children lay at the heart of their war. Drawing on a
wide range of new sources, from welfare and medical files to private
diaries, letters and pictures, Nicholas Stargardt evokes the
individual voices of children under Nazi rule. By bringing their
experiences of the war together for the first time, he offers a fresh
and challenging interpretation of the Nazi social order as a whole.
Nicholas Stargardt, the son of a German-Jewish father and Australian
mother, was born in Melbourne and brought up in Australia, Japan and
Britain. He teaches modern European history at Magdalen College, Oxford.
