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Germany’s children were crucial to the Nazis' utopian visions—the first generation that could be shaped from infancy. Even during the war the regime sought to provide as normal an experience as possible, shielding youth from the harder realities of war, providing special hostels, extra rations, and “protection” from such “antisocial” influences as swing music. From the regime’s beginning, however, children were engaged in the work of the Reich. German youths assisted in the ethnic cleansing of German-occupied Poland and Bohemia, in the process witnessing extremes of Nazi racial violence. Boys and girls were eventually assigned to anti-aircraft gun crews. By the end of the war other youngsters were being conscripted into the last-ditch home guard, the Volkssturm, to fight tanks with bazookas. “At the age of 11,” reminisced one, “I knew how to handle pistols and machine guns, how to throw a grenade. I had seen German soldiers hanged, children shot, women raped. I had seen everything. I was a man.”
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