At first, it might seem counterintuitive to imagine that the children of Nazi leaders would be involved in helping people understand the truth behind the Holocaust. After all, these children are from families that directly aided and benefited from the Nazi Party and its atrocities.
Such children were protected from many of the horrors of war in the sense that they had a great deal of wealth and privilege in Germany at the time. However, no child, no matter who he or she was at the time, was completely protected from the harsh realities of war.
Throughout World War II, children were considered an important ideological battleground. In Germany, the Nazis envisioned themselves as the architects of a new and unique future that would be guided by the racist principles of fascism. In order to realize their aims, they had to be certain that children were fully indoctrinated into their belief systems.
Children from both military and civilian families were brought into Hitler Youth brigades or similar organizations for girls from as early as five years old. They would come to see the Nazi Party as an important caregiver for them, separate from and in many ways above their own families.
One of the purposes of the Hitler Youth was to ensure that young people, no matter their backgrounds, would be both willing and capable of spying on their own families. If any person in a family demonstrated a “defeatist” or “anti-German” attitude, then that person was exposed to the authorities, no matter what.
As modern people who are well outside of the world of Nazi Germany, we often wonder how anyone could have gone along with such horrors as time has revealed. However, children of the Nazi leaders have often gone through life with these same worries on their minds. They bear the names of some of the worst and most infamous criminals in the history of the world, people they knew personally as their most cherished family members.
Many children died in the Holocaust, and many saw ordinary lives destroyed as they were affected by the realities of war, such as the bombing campaigns across both the UK and Germany. Now mature, the children of leading Nazis have been grappling with the legacy of their families for many years. It is, perhaps, they who can now help us fill in gaps of understanding and realize how Nazism came to pass through something like
Hitlers Children DVD.