A shocking personal memoir and new perspective on World War II, following Helene Munson’s journey in her father’s footsteps through the years when he was one of Hitler’s child soldiers
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 This is no ordinary historical document but a personal account of devastating trauma.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 for Hitler. Hans was just one of those boy soldiers. Sent to the elite Feldafing school 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,
The Feldafing Boys
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 boy in a sea of three hundred thousand forced onto the wrong side of history—and left to answer for it.
Previously published in hardcover as
Hitler’s Boy Soldiers