Soldiers of the Volkssturm man a trench system in the late months of the war, armed mainly with World War l-vintage rifles. The price paid by the Volkssturm for their last-ditch defence of the Reich is unclear, but the number of those killed or captured would potentially reach 175,000.

The HJ were just some of the unfortunates caught up in the final collapse of the Third Reich. For those who became combatants in the Volkssturm, they stood at the young end of a scale that incorporated thousands of individuals who had no place facing the combined might of the Allied armies.

On 25 July 1944, having just escaped assassination in the 20 July bomb plot and with Allied forces massing on Germany's western and eastern borders, Hitler issued a 'Decree for Total War'. He announced on 25 September that all Germans aged 16—60 who were not Jews ...

After the 1944 July Plot Hitler and the regime relied most heavily on Martin Bormann and the organs of the Nazi Party at home. In the field, they increasingly favored the ideologically reliable alternative to the Wehrmacht of the Waffen-SS and turned to the more radical solution of a levée en masse in form of the Volkssturm. Nothing availed. As defeat loomed on all fronts and the enemy hosts closed on him, Hitler’s perverse sense of destruction overwhelmed all else. He ordered several of Europe’s great cities leveled by fire and bomb. Warsaw was in fact systematically razed. Paris was wired for destruction but was spared by a disobedient general, who surrendered it to the Force Française de l’Intérieur (FFI) and the Western Allies. In the end, Hitler displayed the same moral indifference to Germans that he showed to millions of non-German victims. As early as January ...

Alfons Heck

In this starkly candid account of one boy's indoctrination into the Hitler Youth, we see a side of Nazism that has been little recorded. This autobiographical account is a rare glimpse at World War II from a German boy's viewpoint.

Review

From the Publisher

The book,and its sequel, "The Burden of Hitler's Legay," is a unique inside view into the methods of youth indoctrination. The author is ...

U.S. soldiers execute a German guerrilla in the closing days of World War II.

Captured “Werewolves” like these posed little danger during the postwar occupation of Germany.

Army doctrine also followed Western traditions in taking a dim view of guerrillas who violated the laws of war and hid their true identity by shedding their arms and uniforms. When a civilian population spurned the hand of reconciliation and supported illegal combatants, an army was free to employ more severe measures. Among the counterinsurgency methods employed by the United States prior to World War II were the taking of hostages; the destruction of food and property; the arrest, trial, and possible execution of guerrillas and their civilian allies; population resettlement; and a host of other restrictive steps. The net result of the Army’s thinking about small wars was a loose body of broadly defined concepts that blended aggressive military action ...

SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski

Prussian staff officers in the mold of von Moltke-vian military outlook looked at irregular warfare with contempt but not the generation of German officer corps who faced a different kind of threat to Germany at the end of WWI. Hans-Adolf Prützmann was the generation of German officers that were involved with the Freikorps and the Streifkorps in the East (especially against Polish irredentism in Silesia).

When the German military and political leaders drew up their plans for the invasion of Russia, they made a number of errors in relation to the control and administration of the rear areas of the armies. These mistakes had a very positive and direct effect on the rise and growth of the Soviet Partisan Movement.

The errors of the military planners were largely ones of omission. From the first they predicated all their preparations on a winning campaign of ...

‘A thirteen year old boy manned a machine gun against advancing Allied tanks on the Rhineland frontier, while his mates passed the ammunition. An execution squad composed of 14-16 year olds shot Polish civilian hostages. A monument was erected to a boy still living, commemorating the fact that he denounced his father “loyally to the Führer“: (the father was executed for treason). Herbert Norkus, the Hitler Youth martyr, is the Horst Wessel of most of Germany's young today. Seven years of Nazi indoctrination, at a most susceptible age, in the Hitler Youth has done its work.’

The Nazi youth organization in which membership was effectively compulsory for all German boys ages 10–18. Boys age 10–13 joined the Deutsches Jungvolk (“German Young People”); those 14–18 served in the Hitlerjungend (“Hitler Youth”). Poorly disguised as athletic and sports clubs akin to the quasi-military Boy Scouts organization of ...

The Volkssturm was a militia summoned in virtue of a decree of 25 September 1944 from all non-serving males aged sixteen to sixty. The relevant lists were compiled by the local Party organisation, and the officers were appointed (largely on grounds of political reliability) by the gauleiters and their subordinate kreisleiters. The size of the Volkssturm ultimately reached 1.5 million.

It is characteristic of the chaotic state of Germany at that time that nobody can establish the precise occasion of the founding of the Volkssturm. In September 1944 Guderian had to yield up most of the one hundred battalions of fortress infantry with which he had intended to hold the prepared positions behind the Eastern Front. He writes that he then fell back on a proposal by General Adolf Heusinger's Operations Branch of the OKH, to the effect that men should be withdrawn from hitherto reserved civilian occupations ...

By Gerhard Rempel

In his study of human behavior on the "Eastern Front", Omer Bartov has delineated the "barbarization of warfare", a characterization that can be applied with equal force to certain aspects of other fronts and especially to the inhuman exploitation of children in the final months of war. After the crucial defeat of Stalingrad, bewildered HJ leaders and determined SS officers conspired to generate a fantastic children's crusade which sought to shore up crumbling defenses and in the nature of things offered thousands of teenagers as a final sacrifice to the god of war. That the HJ-SS alliance should have concluded this way is no surprise. For years the SS had circumvented formal restrictions about the induction of underage youth and millions of HJ members already found themselves in ill-fitting SS uniforms doing men's jobs at home and in actual combat. Millions of emaciated boys were ...

By Gerhard Rempel

During the month of June, while the Body Guard recovered from the exhaustive Battle of Kharkov, SS Colonel Fritz Witt, chief of its 1st Armored Infantry Regiment, received appointment as commander of the HJD. Typical of an aggressive new breed of young SS officers, Witt brought with him a select number of officers, sergeants and technical specialists. The rest of the officers were transferred from army and SS divisions or activated from reserve status as the original plan provided. More than half of them must have been former HJ leaders. A shortage of company commanders, platoon and squad leaders, was gradually filled when "training assistants" arrived from the SS NCO schools. Many NCOs were barely a year older or even the same age as the young soldiers they commanded. In July and August the first 10,000 boys arrived to commence basic training in Beverloo, Belgium, while ...