Original subtitles

ARTILLERY FIRE

EXPLOSION

Berlin, April 1945: the last days of the Third Reich.

Some of the Fuhrer's last defenders were adolescents,

not yet 15 years old.

Their only goal was to protect their leader, Adolf Hitler.

Up against the Soviets, they had no chance of winning.

But only a few years earlier,

they had sworn to give their lives for Hitler.

They would stand by their promise and see it through to the end.

Who were these boy-soldiers?

How did the regime win their absolute loyalty?

Some of these boys are still alive today.

They know what it meant to grow up during the Nazi era.

How did these boys get caught up in the darkness of Nazism?

They were the future of the regime, its showcase...

and its cannon fodder.

The Hitler Youth was founded in the 1920s

as the youth wing of the Nazi Party.

After Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany,

the Hitler Youth displaced every other organisation for boys.

Its members were given military and ideological training.

By the start of the Second World War, they were ready and willing to serve.

In 1943, the Hitler Youth were ordered

to help man anti-aircraft guns.

They combed the sky with searchlights,

looking for Allied bombers.

It meant no school, so the boys were delighted.

Handling real weapons, courting danger:

the boys felt they were finally fighting as soldiers, as men,

for the Fuhrer and for the Reich.

Among them were the future writer Gunter Grass

and Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

Between air raids,

these young soldiers could almost be normal boys again.

But the Allied air supremacy was overwhelming.

Exhausted by lack of sleep,

deafened because their ears were unprotected,

they were in fact cannon fodder.

ROAR OF ENGINES

SIGHS

The raids went on day and night.

Beneath the rain of bombs, it was a waking nightmare.

The boys of the Hitler Youth helped collect the dead

and rescue the living.

Goebbels responded to impending defeat with a call for "total war".

The propaganda worked.

In the autumn of 1943,

16,000 Hitler Youth of the class of 1926

joined a new armoured division of the Waffen-SS.

Founded by the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler,

the 12th SS Panzer Division was called Hitlerjugend:

Hitler Youth.

They were 16 or 17 years old, teenagers too young to smoke or drink

but officially old enough for the front line.

The regime was counting on their daring

and their lack of awareness in the face of danger.

Goebbels proclaimed:

"The enemy must know that even for our children,

"there is no other choice than to fight to the last."

The boys of the 12th SS Panzer Division trained in Belgium,

then headed for Normandy.

In May 1944, Normandy was a quiet area.

The Germans expected the D-Day invasion to come further north,

in the Pas-de-Calais region.

On the 6th of June, the Allies launched the invasion.

And they landed in Normandy.

The Hitler Youth Division took the news calmly.

The day after D-Day,

the Hitler Youth division was sent to a major Allied objective:

the city of Caen.

The British 3rd Infantry Division was supposed to take it

in the first 24 hours.

For the warriors of the Hitler Youth, it was truly a baptism of fire.

Their ferocity drew out those 24 hours into six weeks of hell.

The Hitler Youth division

stopped the combined British and Canadian offensive

at the gates of the city.

It also took many prisoners.

German cameras filmed the last moments of these doomed men.

Hitler Youth under the command of SS general Kurt Meyer

executed dozens of them.

At Ardenne Abbey, west of Caen, 20 Canadians were shot in cold blood.

Another 45 were executed in the courtyard of the Chateau d'Audrieu.

Altogether, the Hitler Youth Division murdered over 150 prisoners of war

around Caen.

The sons of the Third Reich had become war criminals.

War crimes. Massacres.

The years of indoctrination had paid off.

The Allies quickly identified the 12th SS Hitlerjugend,

which they nicknamed "the Baby Division".

Their recklessness and ruthlessness made them a dangerous enemy.

The boys within its ranks were merciless.

Nor did they hesitate to sacrifice their own lives.

They were lauded by the regime.

Nazi propaganda remained as rosy as ever.

But the reality was very different.

The D-Day landings succeeded.

The Wehrmacht lost the Battle of Normandy.

The Allies captured 200,000 German troops,

including thousands of boys.

Not so long ago they had raised their right arms in the Hitler salute.

Now it was simply, "hands up."

But defeat in Normandy did not make the remaining Hitler Youth

any less willing to fight on other fronts.

Convinced that they were Germany's last defence against the Red hordes,

young volunteers flocked to join up.

Not that they had any real choice.

In fact, the arrival of these boys did nothing for morale at the front.

The troops were skeptical about their value.

The belief in "final victory" gave way to reality.

The boy soldiers could do nothing to stop the Allies.

Whether in the Battle of the Bulge or on the Eastern Front,

the Hitler Youth went into battle.

They had no choice.

Surrender was forbidden. Firing squads awaited deserters.

On the 20th of March, 1945,

Hitler appeared in public for the last time.

He congratulated the Hitler Youth he had sent to the slaughter.

The previous year, he had told them:

"The knowledge of the necessity of our struggle

"fills the whole German people...

"but you as young National Socialist fighters

"must surpass our entire people in steadfastness,

"tenacious persistence, and indomitable hardness."

Among these last fighters was the twelve-year-old Alfred Czech

and Wilhelm Hubner, who had just turned 16 but looked much younger.

Hitler's left hand was visibly trembling

from what looks like Parkinson's disease.

At 56, he seemed like an old man.

But he was more fanatical than ever.

Even in April 1945, the month before Germany's surrender,

the war machine was still running.

Boy soldiers were still being sent into battle.

Posters urged civilians to fight the oncoming tanks.

Even children, over the age of ten, were called on.

On the 16th of April, the heaviest artillery barrage of the war began.

The Red Army fired 1,236,000 shells.

100,000 tonnes of steel rained down on Berlin.

Nine days later, Soviet troops entered the city.

The Hitler Youth facing them knew that any moment might be their last.

Many of the youngsters snapped.

Some hadn't wanted to miss out on the war.

Now, they couldn't escape it.

With only light weapons,

the Hitler Youth harried the tanks of 18 Soviet armies.

The Red Army troops had to flush them out like rats.

While the boys were being crushed,

Hitler sheltered in his bunker, seven metres below the ground.

On the surface, every square metre saw an ambush, a shootout,

or hand-to-hand fighting.

A battalion of Hitler Youth

holding the Pichelsdorf Bridge on the River Havel

was shelled for five successive days.

It was a massacre.

Almost all of its 600 boys died there.

On the 30th of April, the Soviets captured the Reichstag,

the German parliament.

The same day, Hitler committed suicide with a bullet to the head.

The Hitler Youth, who had thought of themselves as the Fuhrer's children,

were suddenly orphaned.

Salomon Perel was a young German Jew who hid his identity.

Taken for an ethnic German from the East,

he had been integrated into the Hitler Youth for three years.

In May 1945, Field-Marshal Keitel

signed a document of unconditional surrender

in Berlin.

The Hitler Youth who had been lured by the prospect of power and glory

had reaped nothing but the horror of war and defeat.

As the Western Allies and the Soviets

established zones of occupation in Germany,

millions of displaced persons

sought to return to their own countries.

Among them was the wounded 16-year-old Hans Muncheberg.

He hid the fact that he had been a soldier

and was taken in by villagers.

Not all of the former Hitler Youth

saw the fall of the Reich as liberation.

Thousands of them had to be detained in huge prisoner-of-war camps.

The Allies had on their hands a generation of Germans born,

educated, and fanaticised under Hitler.

Some still believed in National Socialism.

The victors had to think of the future.

Now it was their turn

to win over this lost, partially sacrificed, generation.

So began a long period of re-education,

both in the classroom and in the POW camps.

German prisoners attend special classes

to fit them for leadership in their own country.

The Gestapo, they learn, is out,

along with other fascist institutions,

in the reconstruction of Germany.

The children of Hitler were taught... democracy.

To denazify the wider population, the victors used the cinema.

It had been a principal medium for Nazi indoctrination.

Now it was used to confront the German people with Nazi crimes.

Anticipating this reaction,

the Allies had insisted that local residents should visit the camps

as soon as they were liberated

to see for themselves what they were like.

As Germany picked up the pieces,

the Hitler Youth who had been prisoners of war returned home,

sometimes after long years of imprisonment.

Alfons Rujner was freed

after 3½ years of captivity in the Soviet Union.

After spending several years in Belgian mines,

Wilhelm Kupper found his family.

Salomon Perel is one of the few survivors of his family.

The young Jew, educated as a Nazi for four years,

nearly forgot his very identity.

In the new Germany under construction,

many understood that the regime had stolen their youth.

But even after all these years, a question still haunts them.

In their twilight years,

some of the former Hitler Youth feel that they have a mission.

Their survival must have a meaning. They want to tell their story.