NAZI CHILDREN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 152, 29 June 1945, Page 3

NAZI CHILDREN

MAY BE REDEEMED

OBSERVER IN BAVARIA i

BAYREUTH, GERMANY.

I talked recently with a group of Bavarian children, 12 to 15 years old, who had been mobolised from the villages around Bayreuth and marched toward the Russian front.

They were given Luftwaffe uniforms and. knapsacks but no weapons or food, annd none of the soldiers they met seemed to know what to do with them. They slept in the woods at night and marched by day, and the boys deserted whenever there was an opportunity. Finally, when the leader had only forty boys left of the original 200, he decided to march them home again. "When we set out," a 15-year-old boy told me, "we were told we were going to Czechoslovakia to be saved from the Americans, but we don't believe the Americans are bad people any more. That's propaganda. We heard too many good stories about the Americans from returned soldiers. The Americans are good people. They won't hurt us." When the party reached home, the Americans had occupied the district, so the boys just went to their homes and stayed there until they were rounded up for investigation. Although the fact that we have found that hardly any confessed Nazis here has made us sceptical, we could not shake the children's story, and we gained the impression that the younger members of the Nazi youth movement are disillusioned "with propaganda and are more ready to follow new leaders than are the older Germans.

Seemingly Receptive Field These are children maturing during Hitler's declining years,, not those who were swept up and intoxicated by his pre-war rise to power, thousands of whom have died on battlefields or were imprisoned. The kid brothers of the members of the pre-war Hitler jugend are the new disillusioned generation, to whom the war has brought only sorrow. They present a wide-open and seemingly receptive field for the inculcation of democratic ideals.

I tried every possible reportorial device to gain one admission from the children that they wanted to fight for the Fuehrer. They just laughed at me, and not one claimed he wanted to be a soldier. Bavaria is not nearly so Nazified as its beer hall putsches would suggest, according to Allied psychological workers here. Although Bavaria has long been a Nazi playground, what little I have seen of Bavarian children suggests that a civilised manner of life will return easily if control of this area falls on American shoulders and boys like these are guided toward right thinking. Bavarians and Prussians have, by tradition, widely divergent ideals. Whether the present lip-service of the Bavarian youth is trustworthy, only time can show. However, since the people are susceptible to strong leadership, a constructive Allied government can hope for considerable success. I felt more encouraged after visiting : Bavaria than I did elsewhere in Germany, although I came here expecting the worst.

The worst I have seen here was in one suburban district where, during a round-up of arms, innumerable kids turned in weapons of some sort, These included toy guns, pistols, air guns and swords, and some of the children obviously hated to part with them. The parents of some of the children delighted in dressing them up in military uniforms. Bogy That May Materialise

What of the children who have not escaped Hitler's clutches? Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, are possibly now being trained to continue resistance as "werewolf cubs" and political saboteurs, the nucleus of some future secret Nazi general staff. This is a bogy that may easily materialise, in these days of expert underground organisers. But those who saw the enthusiasm with which young Bavarian children publicly burned their uniforms in the market place of Kronach were impressed with the youngsters' delight in escaping Nazi regimentation. I saw one boy tear his uniform in contempt when he came in to our troops.

"I had no part in electing this stupid Nazi regime," he told me. "Hitler is crazy." Perhaps these boys are reversions to the world trend away from war which was particularly marked among youth before men like Hitler and Mussolini rose to send another generation into the battle lines. The trend was especially noticeable among young Frenchmen and Englishmen and Americans who were obliged to don uniforms nobody wanted.

The action of these young Bavarians is the first ray of hope we have seen in the darkness of Europe. Auckland Star and N.A.N.A.