FROM THE PUBLISHER

Already hailed as "magnificent . . . some of the best historical writing about the aftermath of the war I have ever read . . . stunning" (The Guardian), Witnesses of War breaks new ground in its exploration of the lives and the fate of children of all nationalities under the Nazi regime.
Children were at the center of Nazi ideology; now we have their history of those years. Their stories open a world we have never seen before. War came home to children as a set of events without precedent, spectacular and terrifying by turns. As the Nazis overran Europe, children were saved or damned according to their race. Precious few remained unscathed during the war, and most suffered a moment that overturned their lives. For some, it was the evacuation to become junior colonists in the East; for others, it was the onset of heavy bombing, the separation of families or learning to keep their parents alive by smuggling food, creating black markets and devising their own escape networks. Some herded women waiting to be shot. Girls manned flak batteries; boys confronted Soviet tanks.
Drawing on an untouched wealth of original material - school assignments; juvenile diaries; letters from evacuation camps, reformatories and asylums; letters to fathers at the front lines; even accounts of children's games -- Nicholas Stargardt breaks stereotypes of victimhood and trauma to give us the gripping individual stories of the generation Hitler made.

FROM THE CRITICS

Ruth Kluger - The Washington Post

Reading about these years, one can only marvel that Europe recovered so thoroughly. The war children who survived to see a more prosperous world did not become a social burden (as many seem to have feared at the time) but became productive and responsible citizens. Their wounds were real enough, but they coped -- and cope -- with them privately, and with dignity. If there is any hopeful message to be gotten from this harrowing book, it is the wonder of human resilience.

Publishers Weekly

Handicapped German children taken from their families before WWII, girls of all nations raped by marauding soldiers, Jewish children shoved into ghettos: as Stargardt shows in this well-researched and horrific history, the lives of children were ravaged by Hitler's goals and the war he produced. Like Lynn Nicholas in her recent and also excellent Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web, Stargardt, a historian at Oxford, tells his story through the children's eyes using diaries and oral histories as well as other documentary sources. To be a child during the war, he notes, could be both easier and harder than it was to be an adult. Children often proved more resilient in overcoming physical and mental injuries. At the same time, they lacked the ability to directly express the pain that was haunting their dreams. Perhaps most unusual is Stargardt's illumination of how the Nazi regime affected German children, from those (who today would be called at-risk children) sent away to be "re-educated" to the idealized Hitler Youth sent to die in battle; it's a sharp and taut account of misery. 16 pages of b&w photos, 6 maps. Agent, Clare Alexander. (Jan. 20) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The true victims of any war are children. Using archival sources and a vast bibliography, Stargardt (history, Magdelen Coll., Oxford) chronicles life under Nazi rule, which left over 13 million abandoned and orphaned children after the war. Stargardt divides this work into chapters following the rise, escalation, and defeat of Nazism, concentrating on how children (Jews, patients at mental hospitals, inmates in juvenile homes, "regular" Germans, and conquered nationalities) coped with this existence. He details the survival tactics used by children, including playing games, drawing, keeping diaries, and trading on the black market. He also convincingly disputes the idea that the German public was unaware of the abuses going on around them. This work extends Dorothy Macardle's Children of Europe: A Study of the Children of Liberated Countries by examining how these child survivors are coping with their memories in later life. Although other works discuss this issue, particularly Dan Bar-On's Legacy of Silence and Gerald Posner's Hitler's Children, Stargardt is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of this topic. Owing to the subject, the content of this book is frequently disturbing to read. Therefore specialists on this topic may be best prepared for it. The book is recommended for academic and large public libraries.-Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An absorbing study of Nazi-era childhood, drawing on diaries, interviews and other primary sources. The Third Reich was founded on the premise that the German "race" could and would be purged of putatively unhealthy elements-the mentally and physically disabled, the antinomian, the "mongrel." From the start, as Stargardt (History/Oxford Univ.) notes, the regime executed children defined as unfit, though it took pains to disguise its program of medical murder. Meanwhile, the Jewish children who remained in Germany-Stargardt observes that more than 80 percent had emigrated by 1939-lived in a liminal world; one recalls that the children on his own block would not play with him, but all he had to do was go to a neighborhood where he was unknown and he "was able to enjoy the anonymity of the streets and join other Berlin children in their games." Some children mounted rebellions in the face of totalitarianism; Stargardt recounts a swing festival inexplicably staged in Hamburg in 1940, in which 500 adolescents clad in English fashions spoke English and French, to the horror of the Gestapo. In general, of course, life for children was as horrible as it was for adults. There is no room for false sentimentality in Stargardt's pages; he resists the notion that suffering is necessarily ennobling, particularly when the suffering has been experienced by the children of the aggressors, who become "the objects rather than the subjects of history." And his account is full of moral nuance, as he explores the world of a teenage kapo in the Terezin concentration camp, of a child assigned to guard women awaiting execution and other children who carefully noted where they buried their Hitler Youth badges whenthe Allies arrived. Fascinating and often unsettling; an illuminating companion to firsthand accounts such as Irmgard Hunt's On Hitler's Mountain and The Diary of Anne Frank.