Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth

The very first words of this book are, "This is not a book about Adolf Hitler. This book is about the children and teenagers who followed Hitler"...

And yet this is not entirely true. Certainly, attention is paid to the Hitler Youth, and also the young men and women in the resistance, but--not enough. Not in enough depth. Clearly, when you're writing a nonfiction text for young adults, you can't assume that they know very much about the historical context. But at the same time, very much of this book consisted of things I already knew and things that didn't directly pertain to the supposed subjects.

This is a short and well-produced book: lots of pictures, meticulous bibliographical references, big type and lots of white space. The end result of this, though, is that the text itself is quite short; it tries to squeeze in a basic history of the Holocaust and World War II in Europe, a basic history of government education and youth groups, and the biographies and personal experiences of people who were teenagers during this time period, supplemented with extensive interview quotes.

So, don't get me wrong, it is a good book. It's very informative. But I really wish that it might have gone into a little more depth; I really wanted this book to explore what it means to be a teenager who really believes in Hitler's ideology, or one who doesn't; how ideology is formed, how it develops, what morality can be ascribed to one of these zealous, uniformed youths. The book is maddeningly flat in tone, nonjudgemental, and I wish for...something more. Which is as much as I can say without going all postmodernist on you, so I'll leave it at that.