When Helene Munson finally reads her father, Hans Dunker's, wartime journal, she discovers secrets he kept buried for seven decades. This is no ordinary historical document but a personal account of devastating trauma.

During World War II, the Nazis trained some three hundred thousand German children to fight--and die--for Hitler. Hans was just one of those boy soldiers. Sent to an elite school for the gifted at nine years old, he found himself in the grip of a system that substituted dummy grenades for Frisbees. By age seventeen, Hans had shot down Allied pilots with antiaircraft artillery. In the desperate, final stage of Hitler's war, he was sent on a suicide mission to Závada on the Sudetenland front, where he witnessed the death of his schoolmates--and where Helene begins to retrace her father's footsteps after his death.

As Helene translates Hans's journal and walks his path of suffering and redemption, she uncovers the lost history of an entire generation brainwashed by the Third Reich's school system and funneled into the Hitler Youth.

A startling new account of this dark era, Hitler's Boy Soldiers grapples with inherited trauma, the burden of guilt, and the blurred line between "perpetrator" and "victim." It is also a poignant tale of forgiveness, as Helene comes to see her late father as not just a soldier but as one child in a sea of three hundred thousand forced onto the wrong side of history--and left to answer for it.

Author: Helene Munson
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Experiment
Published: 05/24/2022
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781615198597

About the Author
Munson, Helene: - Helene Munson grew up in Brazil, Liberia, and Germany, spending most of her adult life in New York and Berlin. She writes short stories in English and German, which have been published in magazines and anthologies. Inspired by her family history, her masters degree was partly about the impact of armed conflicts on children. She lives outside New York City.