Review
From the book jacket: 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...
Beyond the Book
About the author: Nicholas
Stargardt is the son of a German-Jewish father and Australian mother.
Born in Melbourne, he has lived in Australia, Japan, England and
Germany. He studied at King's College, Cambridge, and is a fellow of
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he teaches modern European history.
Witnesses of War is his second book; his first,
The German Idea
of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866-1914 was
published in 1994. He has written widely on the history of modern
Germany, political and social thought and the Holocaust. He has two sons
and is married to the historian Lyndal Roper.
