Almost a Childhood: Growing Up Among the Nazis

Serving as a powerful indictment of the toll that war takes on children—whichever side they find themselves on—this is a remarkable account of a childhood spent in World War II Austria. Relating the story of a five-year-old boy who has a high ranking Nazi for a father, this reconstruction depicts the author’s horror of having his chin pinched by leading Nazi party member Hermann Göring, playing doctors and nurses with propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ daughters, and on one occasion being taken to a grand reception to meet Adolf Hitler himself. Following the author as he comes to terms with his unusual family, this recollection reveals his kindly, liberal grandparents whose estate provided refuge for all sorts of unlikely visitors, his cold-hearted mother—a once-famous opera singer reduced to running an inn—and his older brother, who struts around in his Hitler Youth uniform, convinced of imminent Nazi victory. Spotlighting the family’s hasty postwar attempts to disguise all Nazi flags in the house and change swastikas into shoe-cleaning rags, this striking narrative proves that the legacy of war is not so easily discarded.