The Feldafing Boys: Uncovering My Father's Stolen Childhood at an Elite Nazi School

by Helene Munson PhD

Overview

A shocking personal memoir and new perspective on World War II, following Helene Munson’s journey in her father’s footsteps through the years when he was one of Hitler’s child soldiers

When Helene Munson finally reads her father, Hans Dunker’s, wartime journal, she discovers secrets he kept buried for seven decades. This is no ordinary historical document but a personal account of devastating trauma.

During World War II, the Nazis trained some three hundred thousand German children to fight for Hitler. Hans was just one of those boy soldiers. Sent to the elite Feldafing school at nine years old, he found himself in the grip of a system that substituted dummy grenades for Frisbees. By age seventeen, Hans had shot down Allied pilots with antiaircraft artillery. In the desperate, final stage of Hitler’s war, he was sent on a suicide mission to Závada on the Sudetenland front, where he witnessed the death of his schoolmates—and where Helene begins to retrace her father’s footsteps after his death.

As Helene translates Hans’s journal and walks his path of suffering and redemption, she uncovers the lost history of an entire generation brainwashed by the Third Reich’s school system and funneled into the Hitler Youth.

A startling new account of this dark era, The Feldafing Boys grapples with inherited trauma, the burden of guilt, and the blurred line between “perpetrator” and “victim.” It is also a poignant tale of forgiveness, as Helene comes to see her late father as not just a soldier but as one boy in a sea of three hundred thousand forced onto the wrong side of history—and left to answer for it.

Previously published in hardcover as Hitler’s Boy Soldiers

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781615198603
Publisher:	The Experiment
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Helene Munson grew up in Brazil, Liberia, and Germany, spending most of her adult life in New York and Berlin. She writes short stories in English and German that have been published in magazines and anthologies. Inspired by her family history, her master’s degree was partly about the impact of armed conflicts on children. She lives outside New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Závada Revisited 1

1 The Wrong Time to Die 13

2 Traveling to Another Country 25

3 The Vanished Boarding School 37

4 Not a Napola 51

5 Castle Birdsong 65

6 Schooled by Barbarians 81

7 The Flag Is More Than Death 93

8 Franz and the Flak 107

9 Glasses and Mineral Water 125

10 Barrack Blues 135

11 Dresden and Departures 151

12 Arriving in Sudetenland 161

13 The Battle for Zawada 181

14 Saved by a Grenade 201

15 German skis on the Run 211

16 A Long Way Home 231

Epilogue: The Back-to-Front File 247

Afterword: The Glass Cabinet 259

Appendix 1 List of Locations 271

Appendix 2 List of Abbreviations and Glossary 275

Notes 279

Bibliography 285

Image Credits 291

Acknowledgments 293

Index 295

About the Author 310

Editorial Reviews

"This extraordinary book tells the previously untold story of what happened to Germany’s children during the Third Reich and WWII as seen from the unique perspective of a German family and through their collected documents."

Roger Rosenblatt

"In his private diary, seventeen-year-old Hans Dunker described daily life as a student at an elite Nazi high school who is suddenly thrust into Hitler’s bloody battle: ‘Then comes a beautiful, bright Sunday with the sun shining on the horror and madness of human self-destruction.’ Only after seventy years did his daughter, Helene Munson, muster the courage to open it. Thankfully for her, she finds that he committed no atrocities. Thankfully for us, she has now shared this of-the-moment diary as she investigates the little-known story of Hitler’s Boy Soldiers."

Peter Hellman

"An exceptionally well-written and moving book. We all might pause to say a prayer for the ‘six Feldafing boys’ and the millions of other young men and women whose lives have been brutally taken in the horror of war."

Dr. William M. Fowler

"Selection in the History Book Club and Military Book Club

"A fascinating contribution to an angle of Nazi Germany that is rarely discussed."

James Hawes