通过作者父亲和他重新发现的日记的镜头，讲述了德国儿童在二战中如何作战的真实、不为人知的故事
当海琳·蒙森最终读到父亲汉斯·邓克的战时日记时，她发现了他隐藏了70年的秘密。这不是一般的历史文献，而是对毁灭性创伤的个人描述。
在第二次世界大战期间，纳粹训练了大约30万名德国儿童为希特勒战斗和牺牲。汉斯只是那些男孩士兵中的一员。九岁时，他被送进了一所精英学校，专门为天才而设。他发现自己陷入了一个用假手榴弹代替飞盘的系统。到17岁时，汉斯已经用高射炮击落了盟军飞行员。在希特勒战争的最后一个绝望阶段，他被派往苏台德前线的萨瓦达执行自杀任务，在那里他目睹了同学们的死亡，海琳在父亲去世后开始追寻父亲的足迹。
当海琳翻译汉斯的日记，走在他痛苦和救赎的道路上时，她揭示了被第三帝国学校系统洗脑并被灌输到希特勒青年中的整整一代人失去的历史。
希特勒的童子军面对的是一个令人震惊的黑暗时代，他们面对的是遗传的创伤、负罪感，以及“犯罪者”和“受害者”之间模糊的界限这也是一个关于宽恕的辛酸故事，因为海琳看到她已故的父亲不仅是一名士兵，而且是一个孩子，生活在一个三十万人的海洋中，被迫走到历史的错误一边，并为之负责。
Hitler’s Boy Soldiers: How My Father’s Generation Was Trained to Kill and Sent to Die for Germany
The true, untold story of how Germany’s children fought in WWII, through the lens of the author’s father and his rediscovered journal
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 This is no ordinary historical document but a personal account of devastating trauma.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.
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