Witnesses of War: children's lives under the Nazis, by Nicholas Stargardt

A harrowing book about children's suffering under the Nazis will enrich all who read it, concludes Matthew J Reisz

'In all wars," writes Nicholas Stargardt in his Introduction, "children are victims. The Second World War differed only in the unprecedented extent to which this was true... Some of this suffering has become familiar in the telling, while other areas remain relatively unknown." His superb study of "children's lives under the Nazis" is largely restricted to Germany and the occupied parts of Poland, but within those geographical limits its range is awesome.

Consideration of children's specific experiences often requires a good deal of background information about the general progress of the war. Psychological issues are given as much attention as hunger and physical cruelty. And the final sections move on from the horrors of Nazi rule to the equally vicious crimes, notably mass rapes, committed by the Red Army as it advanced westwards to victory, and then to the privations and emotional reckoning of the post-war years.

So this is a hugely, almost crazily, ambitious book. To make the subject slightly more manageable, Stargardt makes extensive use of letters, diaries and drawings to tell gripping individual stories: of children stolen from their parents or cowering in bomb shelters; children displaced, deported and defeated ; children in camps and ghettos, asylums and reformatories. Much of it is very painful to read, some almost unbearable, although it is also shot through with flashes of extraordinary resilience. While it makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Nazi era, it will prove equally compelling for anyone with a more general interest in children's history or the impact of war on civilians.

Part of "the fatal work of Nazism", suggests Stargardt in a striking phrase, was "the complete nationalisation of empathy". Many ordinary Germans simply "failed to notice" the ghastly things the regime was doing to "racially inferior" groups. Since the war, on the other hand, we have all been so aware of Nazi evil that we seldom spare a thought even for the children "incinerated with their mothers in the firestorms" caused by RAF bombing, never mind the afflictions of those brought up in Nazi families. It is one of the great merits of this book that it explores in detail the experience of both rulers and ruled while never eliding the crucial moral distinctions between them.

This enables Stargradt to do several different and very important things. He expands our sympathies by letting us see how ordinary German children were often innocent victims who suffered terribly (while this was in most cases, of course, ultimately the fault of their parents' generation, it certainly wasn't their own). He creates a vivid panorama of all the different ways a major war impacts on children's lives. And he is able to address a number of crucial issues which can only be looked at when gentile and Jewish lives are not separated but seen as linked elements of the overall "Nazi social order".

He starts on the home front, where Hitler was determined to maintain the food supply and keep things as normal as possible, although the pressure of propaganda was intense. Nazi values "could have been designed for adolescents," notes Stargardt, "with their dichotomy between good and evil, their appeal to feeling and their demand for moral commitment". A woman called Katrin Thiele who re-reads her wartime diary decades later is horrified to discover that "she had possessed no inner barrier to absorbing Nazi propaganda" and had often "dressed up Goebbels's slogans and epigrams as her own private reflections". Her parents had grown up before the Nazi era, which made it comparatively easy for them to re-adapt to the requirements of the post-war world. For many of Katrin's age group, who had "imbibed Nazi values and sayings alongside exhortations to wash carefully, look after their clothes and be polite", this meant a grim struggle to undo an essential element of their identity.

Perhaps the most appalling chapter of this book concerns the "medical murder" of disabled children. Even in the abstract the policy sounds horrific, but Stargardt quotes the ghastly bland letters sent by a clinic's director to anxious parents, the chilling euphemisms in the case notes ("no prospect of further development") which amounted to a death sentence, the evidence of the children's desperate attachments to junior nursing personnel. One bold cleric preached a sermon against "the secret killing of asylum patients", pointing out that anyone could become a target for "mercy killing" ("No soldier badly injured in battle, no worker who had given his health to the war effort, no old person who needed care would be safe"). But the authorities continued to cover up murder by supplying parents with faked death certificates. The "expertise" acquired in the euthanasia programme was later applied to killing Jews on a much larger scale, but even on its own it is enough to restore one's sense of the primal evil of Nazism. Stargardt has a true historian's commitment to complexity and context, but this never detracts from his - or the reader's - sense of moral outrage.

It is one of the darkest ironies of the Nazism that the regime eventually turned and savaged its own. Propaganda might present "the pure-bred, well-educated and upright German child as the racial future of the nation". Yet in the closing phases of the war teenagers were called upon "to sacrifice themselves on the 'altar of the fatherland'," with girls sent "to flak batteries and boys to fight Soviet tanks". By the end of 1944, there were legal sanctions against parents who prevented their sons from enlisting. During the final battle for Berlin, some would fight during the day, go home at night and then return to the front with lunches packed by their mothers.

Defeat naturally proved deeply traumatic for the German people. Those expelled from Czech territory in late 1944 or early 1945, for example, often felt that it was then that "their world went wrong". Children in particular were unaware of any "prior story" which might explain why they were being gratuitously persecuted. Many remained sceptical about "the extent of Jewish suffering", yet "their tales from the internment and prisoner-of-war camps" often incorporated, consciously or unconsciously, "images made so public by the Allies at the end of the war of Jews in the death camps". It is in places like this that Stargardt's acute psychological insight and determination to examine the hidden relations between Jewish and gentile suffering prove so illuminating.

Witnesses of War describes a world in which children had to grow up fast and often take responsibility for younger siblings and parents through smuggling, black market trading and even prostitution. Some joined partisan groups or anti-Nazi gangs. And yet, whatever the circumstances, they also continued to play. A famous paediatrician once saw three boys playing horses and drivers in the Warsaw ghetto, ignoring a dead or dying child in their midst until his body got caught up in the reins.

Even more remarkable and affecting is the way the atrocities around them got incorporated into their games: "During occupation, children feared and hated their enemies, but also profoundly envied them. Polish boys had acted the 'Gestapo', and children in the Vilna ghetto and the Birkenau camps had played at being the SS searching for contraband, or carrying out round-ups and selections." (Only the ultimate horrors of the gas chambers and the mass rapes by the Red Army seem to have proved too unbearable to be incorporated into play.)

These are heartrending scenes, although perhaps one might view them slightly differently from Stargardt. Such games, he notes, tend not to be described in later autobiographies because they implicitly "recognised their enemies as the image of victorious strength and their parents as impotent failures", truths which nobody wanted to acknowledge after the war. "As they assimilated the real and terrifying power of their enemies and masters into their games," he writes, "children were also enacting their own impotence in all its starkly contrasting emotions, from shame and guilt to rage and envy."

I would be inclined to view this rather more positively: children's games gave them an opportunity (largely denied to adults) to admit to, "own" and "work through" some of their most painful feelings, which may have helped them survive both physically and psychologically. Yet this is pretty thin comfort in a book full of scenes no child should ever have to witness. There are moments when it feels almost masochistic to be reading it, but it is still a tremendous achievement, guaranteed to stimulate, move and enrich anyone who opens its pages.

Buy any book reviewed on this site at Independent Books Direct - postage and packing are free in the UK