In early April 1945, near the town of Mühlhausen in central Germany, tanks of the U. S. 6th Armored Division pushed through a village. When the shooting stopped, a boy climbed out of a defensive hole.
He was perhaps twelve years old, wearing a school uniform, a small black field cap, and the insignia of the Hitler Youth. The Americans marched him back toward the village, hands over his head. On the way, he saw his mother. He ran to her and buried his face in her apron, crying.
One American soldier shouted to the guard, “Let him go. He is just a little kid. ”
That spring, Germany handed thousands of boys like him anti-tank weapons and sent them to stop the American army. German accounts repeat again and again that the Americans who captured many of them ordered them to go home to their mothers.
So why did this mother do what she did next? And what happened to the boys who were not sent home? By autumn 1944, Germany was running out of men. On September 25, Hitler signed a decree creating the Volkssturm, a people’s militia of every man capable of bearing arms from sixteen to sixty who was not already in uniform.
Boys born in 1928, sixteen years old, were called up and trained through the Hitler Youth. Some fifteen-year-olds volunteered. Many were already wearing uniforms. Since 1943, German schoolboys had served as anti-aircraft helpers, manning flak guns while holding their classes right at the gun sites.
Most were between fifteen and seventeen. By 1945, boys like these were receiving the Panzerfaust, a simple tube with an anti-tank warhead, light enough for a schoolboy to carry. The official U. S.
Army history of that spring records repeated encounters with them. At Aschaffenburg, the history notes, “The German ranks were crowded with Hitler Youth, boys hardly old enough to shave. ” At Heilbronn, under heavy shellfire, a platoon of Hitler Youth ran screaming toward the American lines to surrender while their officers fired on them to stop them. A military cameraman’s commentary, written on April 4, described two captured boys of fourteen and fifteen: “After running out of ammunition, they were very arrogant and still believed that Hitler would make Germany win the war.
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So what did the Americans do with a fifteen-year-old who had just been shooting at them? In mid-April, the 69th Infantry Division reached the town of Colditz in Saxony. Private First Class Robert Meikle encountered a group that, in his words, looked “like a scout troop with flags and banners. ” He wrote, “We knew they were Hitler Youth boys.
They were very scared when we approached them. They had no weapons. We made sure they were local boys and told them to go home. ”
In another town, during the last days of fighting, Hitler Youth boys held out with machine guns and Panzerfausts around the opera house.
When they finally surrendered, their uniform trousers turned out to be far too large for them. The Americans cut them loose, laughing, and sent the boys off with one instruction: “Go to your mothers. ”
Months earlier, near Metz, Americans captured a fifteen-year-old Hitler Youth serving as a machine gunner. He was furious, cursing them and acting very stiff.
They gave him a bar of chocolate. After that, one account says, “He became completely tame. ”
That phrase keeps recurring. Hans Holzheimer, a German pastor who was himself called up to a Hitler Youth training camp in 1945, later collected boys’ accounts.
He said simply: “The accounts repeatedly remember that the Americans sent Hitler Youth boys back to their mothers. ”
But in Colditz itself, a Hitler Youth shot an American sergeant in the head and was shot in turn. One group captured on the lower Rhine was taken to a prison camp at Namur in Belgium. In early May, before the war even ended, they were released and sent home.
After the surrender, the army set up discharge centers. At one of them, in Ahlen, Germany, an army photographer captured two American soldiers examining a fifteen-year-old Hitler Youth boy for release. When the first releases began that May, women and Hitler Youth boys were among the first to leave. Then that first wave stopped.
Not every boy was a frightened child in a ditch. Some believed the creed. Alfons Heck was sixteen in March 1945, a senior Hitler Youth leader. He was a loyal believer.
He had been raised to believe that a glorious death was the best end a German boy could have. When Patton’s Third Army reached his hometown of Wittlich in the Moselle valley, Heck was captured. The Americans sat him in the mayor’s office waiting room and left him there for hours. He expected the worst.
Around ten at night, an American soldier came in. He tossed Heck a blanket. Then he handed him a bottle of wine, a can of meat, and three cigarettes. Heck later wrote, “I wondered if this would be my last meal.
It was not. In the morning, the Americans discovered he spoke English. He had learned it in school. A lieutenant offered him a whole cigarette and made him the unit’s interpreter.
By the end of the day, Heck was given a carton of whole cigarettes and told to report at exactly seven in the morning the next day. The boy raised to fight the Americans to the end spent his first day of defeat translating for them. Years later, Alfons Heck moved to the United States. He wrote about what it was like to be a boy then, and spent years speaking in schools and colleges alongside Helen Waterford, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
They spoke together to more than 200 audiences. But “go back to your mother” was never the whole story. On April 15, the German commander in the Ruhr, Field Marshal Walther Model, ordered all the young boys and older men in his army discharged and allowed to return home. That order, as the army history notes, thousands discovered, lacked American approval.
The boys were gathered up as prisoners like everyone else. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were held that spring in open fields along the Rhine fenced with barbed wire. Among them were boys of thirteen and fourteen. Many slept in the open for weeks.
One sixteen-year-old anti-aircraft helper, emptied into the Remagen camp, remembered it this way: “At sixteen, I was still really a big child. ”
Then the army did something unusual. It gathered many of its youngest prisoners in one place. Near Compiègne, at a camp called Attichy, the Americans built what their soldiers called the “Kinderbox,” the children’s cage.
In summer 1945, the camp held about 7,000 prisoners of war between twelve and seventeen. One of them was Julius Meyer from Bavaria. He was conscripted in December 1944, placed in an anti-aircraft crew, and captured near Wiesbaden in March before firing a single shot. The army weekly magazine, Yank, sent a correspondent.
He wrote, “At fourteen, Julius Meyer was only two inches taller than the standard German rifle. ”
In the children’s cage, Julius underwent no military discipline. When an American passed by, he tipped his cap and said good morning instead of giving the military salute. He went to school day after day.
The camp had a library of 600 books. German prisoners who were teachers and clergymen taught the classes. The man who organized the school, Private First Class Francis Tortolo, had taught German at Brown University before the war. In August, the boys and their teachers were given about 200 statements to mark true or false.
“Hitler was a great idealist. ” 2,254 marked true. 4,009 marked false. “Adolf Hitler was a mad criminal.
” 2,960 marked true. 2,981 marked false. Nearly a tie, with about a thousand undecided. “I must not marry a Jewish girl because my children would be inferior.
” 514 marked true. 6,058 marked false. The Yank correspondent warned that the boys might have been giving answers they thought the Americans wanted to hear. Even so, one in three prisoners in the children’s cage still described Hitler as the great idealist months after his death.
Now back to that village near Mühlhausen and the boy crying into his mother’s apron. The American soldier shouted, “Let him go. ” The guard hesitated. His mother did not.
She straightened his little black military cap. She put his hands back over his head. She let him go. And she returned him to the prisoner column heading for the American camp.
The 6th Armored Division history summed it up in one sentence. The boy was safe, because he would no longer be subject to conscription. At home, he could have been called up again the next day. Behind American barbed wire, the war was over for him.
On March 7, 1945, the Americans seized the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. In a railroad tunnel on the far bank was a sixteen-year-old anti-aircraft helper named Heinz Schwarz. His village was a short distance downriver. “We were all still children,” he recalled.
When the first Americans crossed, he decided he had to get out of the back of the tunnel and run home to his mother as fast as he could. And he did. Among the first Americans across that bridge was Sergeant Joseph De Lio of the 9th Armored Division. Fifteen years later, at a ceremony on March 7, 1960, the boy who had been in the tunnel met the American sergeant.
By then Schwarz was a member of his state parliament. Later he reached the national parliament in Bonn. That day, as the historian Stephen Ambrose writes, the two exchanged stories, the boy who ran home to his mother and the sergeant who crossed the bridge. Many German boys behind American wire that summer still believed in Hitler.
In U. S. prisoner camps in the United States, older German prisoners refused to believe Germany had surrendered at all.
What finally changed their minds was a notice posted on the camp bulletin board.