Books with title Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow

A Newbery and Sibert Honor Book! A riveting and often chilling story of Germany's powerful Hitler Youth. A PB edition in an accessible new novel-sized reformat for Scholastic Focus!In this Newbery Honor and Sibert Honor award-winning book, Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores the riveting and often chilling story of Germany's powerful Hitler Youth groups.By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth. It would become the largest youth group in history. Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the loyalty, trust, and passion of so many of Germany's young people. Her research includes telling interviews with surviving Hitler Youth members."I begin with the young. We older ones are used up . . . But my magnificent youngsters! Look at these men and boys! What material! With them, I can create a new world." -- Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg 1933

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, thanks largely to the efforts of the Hitler Youth, whose organized propaganda marches throughout Germany helped the Nazi Party grow in strength. By 1939, it is estimated that more than seven million boys and girls belonged to the Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow is the riveting and often chilling tale of a generation of young people who devoted their energy and passion to the Hitler Youth organization and left an indelible mark on world history. Award-winning author Susan Campbell Bartoletti infuses the work with the voices of both former Hitler Youth members and young people who resisted the powerful Nazi movement. These voices stand alongside those of Jewish youths and others who were senselessly and brutally targeted by the Third Reich. What emerges is the story of average children and teenagers faced with extraordinary and unenviable choices. The paths taken by the Hitler Youth and their struggle to come to terms with their actions at the end of World War II are sure to spark debate among young readers.

"I begin with the young. We older ones are used up . . . But my magnificent youngsters! Look at these men and boys! What material! With them, I can create a new world." --Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg 1933 By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth. It would become the largest youth group in history. Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the loyalty, trust, and passion of so many of Germany's young people. Her research includes telling interviews with surviving Hitler Youth members.

Drawing on oral narratives and archival sources gathered in Berlin, this study explores how some 35 Berliners have woven personal memories, their city's divided past, and their nation's complex historical legacy into cohesive life narratives and collective identities. Redding argues that daily experience during the final years of World War II inadvertently prepared German youth for defeat and occupation. While postwar officials lamented youth's apparent apathy, young Berliners were in fact applying lessons in pragmatism and self-reliance learned as National Socialist society crumbled in 1944 and 1945. Although competing political forces strove to rapidly remobilize German youth, young Berliners took advantage of destabilized sociopolitical structures in their war-torn city to assert autonomy and pursue personal initiatives.Their retrospective narratives reveal creative efforts to claim for themselves the normal pleasures of modern youth in the midst of rubble. These accounts also demonstrate how Cold War ideologies and loyalties have informed memories of daily life in Allied occupied Berlin. In a broader sense, the study sheds new light on the collective experiences, memories, and self-perceptions of a generation of Germans who grew up in a world defined by World War II and Allied occupation, rebuilt their devastated society under Cold War parameters, and eventually negotiated the unification of the two successor states.

Drawing on oral narratives and archival sources gathered in Berlin, this study explores how some 35 Berliners have woven personal memories, their city's divided past, and their nation's complex historical legacy into cohesive life narratives and collective identities. Redding argues that daily experience during the final years of World War II inadvertently prepared German youth for defeat and occupation. While postwar officials lamented youth's apparent apathy, young Berliners were in fact applying lessons in pragmatism and self-reliance learned as National Socialist society crumbled in 1944 and 1945. Although competing political forces strove to rapidly remobilize German youth, young Berliners took advantage of destabilized sociopolitical structures in their war-torn city to assert autonomy and pursue personal initiatives.Their retrospective narratives reveal creative efforts to claim for themselves the normal pleasures of modern youth in the midst of rubble. These accounts also demonstrate how Cold War ideologies and loyalties have informed memories of daily life in Allied occupied Berlin. In a broader sense, the study sheds new light on the collective experiences, memories, and self-perceptions of a generation of Germans who grew up in a world defined by World War II and Allied occupation, rebuilt their devastated society under Cold War parameters, and eventually negotiated the unification of the two successor states.