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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2017.1310010                               why jews were taught differently and why they had to go to different schools than the Christians.

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https://www.britannica.com/topic/education/Nazi-Germany                                                                                                                               talks about what Hitler did to mess up schools in Nazi Germany and what the allies did after the war to fix the things and what they did to make sure german children had normal lives.

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After Adolf Hitler's accession to power in 1933, the Nazis set out to reconstruct German society. To do that, the totalitarian government attempted to exert complete control over the populace. Every institution was infused with National Socialist ideology and infiltrated by Nazi personnel in chief positions. Schools were no exception. Even before coming to power, Hitler in (1925-27; "My Struggle") had hinted at his plans for broad educational exploitation. The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda exercised control over virtually every form of expression-radio, theatre, cinema, the fine arts, the press, churches, and schools. The control of the schools began in March 1933 with the issuing of the first educational decree, which held that "German culture must be treated thoroughly."

The Nazi government attempted to control the minds of the young and thus, among other means, intruded Nazi beliefs into the school curriculum. A major part of biology became "race science," and health education and physical training did not escape the racial stress. Geography became geopolitics, the study of the fatherland being fundamental. Physical training was made compulsory for all, as was youth labour service. Much of the fundamental curriculum was not disturbed, however.

Changes after World War II

Immediately after World War II, the occupying powers (Britain, France, and the United States in the western zones and the Soviet Union in the east) instituted education programs designed to clean out Nazi influence and to reflect their respective educational values. These efforts were soon absorbed into independent German educational reconstruction. The Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) of May 1949 granted autonomy in educational matters to the Land (state) governments. Although efforts to strengthen the federal government's presence waxed and waned, Land governments remained independent and divided along political lines on educational reforms.

The two main political issues dividing the states had always been confessional schooling and the tripartite division of secondary schooling, with conservative states like Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg on one side and socially progressive states like Hessen and West Berlin on the other. After a 20-year period of reform discussion on these issues, marked by influential state or national proposals, the balance shifted in the mid-1970s to the conservatives-albeit with a great deal of internal liberalization. That is, confessional schools and confessional instruction in schools remained, but the latter was increasingly in ecumenical or ethical versions. This change, like others, was supported by the presence of a large number of non-German children representing various cultural beliefs and behaviours. On the issue of dividing secondary schools, in spite of continued strong intellectual and political support from some quarters, the movement toward comprehensive schools had, at least for the time being, died out. Even where comprehensive schools ( Gesamtschulen) existed, they usually incorporated separate secondary paths. Nevertheless, the effective extension of common schooling through an "orientation stage" between elementary and secondary schooling, the attempt to develop each level so that it better served more youth-even if differentially-and the functional integration of school branches through curriculum reform and transfer possibilities all pointed to a comprehensiveness within the system.

Education was compulsory from age 6 to 18. In general, pupils spent four years in the elementary school ( Grundschule), six years in one of the lower secondary branches, and two years in one of the upper secondary branches. The first two years of the lower secondary school constituted the "orientation stage." Long governed by entrance examination, the choice of secondary school was now made by the parents. However, performance at the orientation stage-especially in the subjects of German, mathematics, and foreign language (English)-influenced decisions.

In the late 20th century about 25 percent of secondary-school-age children entered the Gymnasium, which, with different academic emphases, remained the successor to its Classical ancestor. Roughly 40 percent attended the nonselective Hauptschule ("main school"), which offered basic subjects to grade 9 or 10 and was followed by apprenticeship with part-time vocational school or by full-time vocational school. Approximately 25 percent attended the Realschule (formerly Mittelschule), which offered academic and prevocational options. It led to vocational school or technical school, which in turn led to commercial, technical, or administrative occupations. The vocational-technical sector was always given careful government and industry attention, and the network included a wide range of methods and content alternatives, with levels up to a university equivalent. All these institutions encompassed general education, theory of the trade or industrial field, and work practice. The schools could be reentered from work and could provide an alternative path to the university.

One of the means of coordinating differences among Land systems was through the Conference of the Cultural Ministers of the states, and one of the important resolutions of this body, in 1973, was for reform of the upper secondary stage. Attention was given to equalizing opportunities at this stage. This affected the Gymnasium by shifting much of the traditional load to the upper level. Although the first stage was still academically demanding, the foreign-language requirement was much more flexible, and many students left for work at the end of the 10th school year. The upper level was required to reach the Abitur, qualifying the student for university entrance. Although the range of subjects was extended, courses were diversified, and final achievement was indicated by a cumulative point system. The upper level of the Gymnasium was characterized by breadth of knowledge at a high intellectual standard, including cultural essentials as well as an academic concentration, and thus still captured the German educational ideal.

Whether due to periodic change, German tradition, or inadequate understanding of the reform process, the educational system had irresistibly returned to basic principles. The incorporation of new alternatives and individual opportunities yielded an open rather than a fundamentally changed system. This may have been the best way for education to meet the major political themes of 20th-century Germany: individual rights as the criterion of policy determination and the European community as the broader context of national development.

The establishment of the Third Republic (1870) brought about the complete renovation of the French schools, in the process of which education became a national enterprise. In 1882 primary education was made compulsory for all children between the ages of 6 and 13. In 1886 members of the clergy were forbidden to teach in the public schools, and in 1904 the teaching congregations were suppressed. France had thus established a national free, compulsory, and secularized system of elementary schooling. (Although secularization was a necessary government strategy, it was also necessary to permit private Catholic schools, and these continued to enroll a significant number of French children.)

In spite of the attempt to unify education through national purpose and centralized means, two parallel systems existed: that of the public elementary schools and higher primary schools and that of the selective, overwhelmingly intellectual secondary lycées and their preparatory schools. The lycées emphasized Classical studies through the study of Greek and Latin. It was not until 1902 that this exclusive emphasis was challenged by a reform promoting the study of modern languages and science and not until the period between World Wars I and II that education was seen to have a vocational function, other than grossly in a social-class sense, and thus to require democratization.

The administration of education in France remained highly centralized and continued to be concerned with every aspect of national education, including curricula, syllabi, textbooks, and teacher performance. At the head of the system was the minister of national education, who was advised and assisted by a hierarchy of officials. The country was divided into 27 educational administrative areas, each known as an "academy." The chief education officer was the rector, the minister's most important representative, who administered the laws and regulations. The inspectorate, represented by regional inspectors under an inspecteur d'académie and by national inspectors, had extensive bureaucratic and supervisory powers.

Changes after World War II

From 1946 education was included in the plans developed by the central planning commission in France. In general, government was friendly to educational development and reform. Student protests in the late 1960s caused an antagonistic reaction, however, and teacher resistance appeared to work against many government reform initiatives. Government reform trends moved toward increasing administrative efficiency and accountability, meeting national economic needs through improved technological education, improving the articulation of system parts, opening the school to the community, and correcting inequalities, through both curricular and organizational provisions. Attention was given not only to "socializing" the system but also to correcting inequalities suffered by French ethnic minorities and immigrant children, to amending social-geographic inequalities, and to increasing options for the handicapped in both special schools and, after the mid-1970s, regular schools.

In 1947 a commission established to examine the educational system recommended a thorough overhauling of the entire school system. Education was to be compulsory from age 6 to 18. Schooling was to be divided into three successive stages: (1) 6 to 11, aimed at mastery of the basic skills and knowledge, (2) 11 to 15, a period of guidance to discover aptitudes, and (3) 15 to 18, a stage during which education was to be diversified and specialized. The system consistently developed from one featuring a common elementary school to one incorporating a progression into separate paths. Reforms aimed to provide equality of educational experience at each stage and to create curricular conditions that furthered career advancement without abridging general education or forcing students to choose a profession prematurely.

Preschool education was given in the école maternelle, in which attendance was voluntary from age 2 to 6. Education was both compulsory and free between 6 and 16 years of age. The five-year elementary school was followed by a four-year lower secondary school, the collège unique, which was the object of much attention. The first two years at the collège unique constituted the observation cycle, during which teachers observed student performance. During the remaining two years, the orientation cycle, teachers offered guidance and assisted pupils in identifying their abilities and determining a career direction.

At the upper secondary level, from age 15 to 18, students entered either the general and technological high school ( lycée d'enseignement général et technologique), successor to the traditional academic high school, or the vocational senior high school ( lycée d'enseignement professionel), encompassing a range of vocational-technical studies and qualifications. Students entering the former chose one of three basic streams the first year, then concentrated the next two years on one of five sections of study: literary-philosophical studies, economics and social science, mathematics and physical science, Earth science and biological science, or scientific and industrial technology. The number of sections and, particularly, the number of technological options were scheduled for expansion. There was a common core of subjects plus electives in grades 10 and 11, but all subjects were oriented to the pupil's major area of study. In grade 12 the subjects were optional. The baccalauréat examination taken at the end of these studies qualified students for university entrance. It consisted of written and oral examinations. More than half of the 70 percent who passed were females. The proportion of the age group reaching this peak of school success increased continuously, with corresponding effects on entrance to higher education.

Vocational-technical secondary education included a wide variety of options. Each of the courses leading to one of the 30 or so technical baccalauréats required three years of study and prepared students for corresponding studies in higher education. Students might also choose to obtain, in descending order of qualification requirements and course demands, the technician diploma ( brevet de technicien), the diploma of vocational studies ( brevet d'études professionelles), or the certificate of vocational aptitude ( certificat d'aptitude professionelle). A one-year course conferring no specialized qualification was also available. As an alternative, youths might opt for apprenticeship training in the workplace.

Higher education was offered in universities, in institutes attached to a university, and in the grandes écoles. Students attended for two to five years and sat either for a diploma or, in certain establishments, for university degrees or for a competitive examination, such as the agrégation. Undergraduate courses lasted for three or four years, depending on the type of degree sought.

The universities went through a period of violent student dissatisfaction in the late 1960s. Reforms ensued encouraging decentralization, diversification of courses, and moderation of the importance of examinations. Nevertheless, the failure or dropout rate in the first two years remained high, and there were marked differences in status among institutions and faculties.

Teachers were graded according to the results of a competitive academic examination, and their training and qualifications varied by grade. The five grades ranged from the elementary teacher to the highly qualified graduate agrégé, who enjoyed the lightest teaching load and the highest prestige and who taught at the secondary level or higher. The differences had long been a matter of concern, as had the entrenchment of the higher levels of the teaching establishment. The system had resisted reforms calling for more uniformity in teacher status, changes in method and content orientation, teacher cooperation, interdisciplinarity, and technological familiarity. Reforms to extend the level of common education, to increase options at the upper secondary level, to strengthen the technological component, and to introduce steps to improve the link between school and work were nonetheless achieved. Internal reform proposals included the more flexible organization of time and content and the addition of extracurricular activities appropriate to the real life of youth and society. Government forays into decentralization promoted community links at the school level and school program initiatives. The outcomes affected the system at best gradually, however.

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Education - Education - Nazi Germany: After Adolf Hitler's accession to power in 1933, the Nazis set out to reconstruct German society. To do that, the totalitarian government attempted to exert complete control over the populace. Every institution was infused with National Socialist ideology and infiltrated by Nazi personnel in chief positions.

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what it was like for Hitler youth children and what they had to do.

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As the irreverent 2020 film Jojo Rabbit explores the roles of children in the Third Reich, historian Emma Butcher reveals more about these youth groups and explains how their young recruits became the final frontline for Germany...
On 14 September 1935, Adolf Hitler stepped up to a podium facing a 50,000-strong crowd in the rally grounds of Nuremberg. His fists clenched, he spoke in a sharp, angry tone that captivated his audiences. This time, the entire crowd was made up of Hitler Youth members, an organisation created by Hitler in 1933 that was used to educate and train boys aged 10 to 18 in Nazi principles. In his speech Hitler cited his 1925 manifesto, describing his ideal Hitler Youth subject: "Swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel."

How many children joined the Hitler Youth?

The youth were the future of the Nazi regime's survival, and their unified militancy was vital to Hitler's utopian vision of a thriving fatherland. At the time of his 1935 address, almost 60 per cent of German boys had joined the Hitler Youth, and in 1936 it became a state agency that all young Aryans were expected to join to be educated physically, intellectually and morally. In fact, the youth group became inescapable - all other youth groups either disbanded or were absorbed into the movement, and opportunities such as summer camps and sports facilities were now only open to members.

By early 1939, around 82 per cent of eligible boys in the Greater Reich belonged to the Hitler Youth, making it the largest youth organisation in the world. On 25 March 1939 the law on membership tightened, and it became mandatory for all Germans aged 10 to 18 to join; those who failed to comply were threatened with criminal prosecution, including parents who refused to relinquish control of their youngsters.

Gender division was paramount to Nazi strategy. Boys were considered future soldiers for the Nazi cause, and as such every activity from local to national level was designed around physical strength and experience of military drills and weaponry.

The League of German Girls

Girls, meanwhile, were part of a different organisation, branded the League of German Girls. Although physical fitness was valued, sports tended to be more focused on unity and working together, such as synchronised gymnastics.

The League was primarily concerned with teaching girls aged 10 to 18 domestic skills such as cooking, sewing and first aid; essentially the normative gender roles that ensured good matrimony and motherhood. As Ilse McKee wrote in her 1960 autobiography, Tomorrow the World: "We were Germany's hope in the future, and it was our duty to breed and rear the new generation of sons and daughters who would carry on the tradition of the thousand-year-old Reich." The youth were preparing for the next youth; the Nazi regime was to dominate the world, and sustain it.

The Hitler Youth and Jojo Rabbit

In the recently-released film Jojo Rabbit, directed by Taika Waititi, the plot focuses on a young boy named Jojo living in Nazi Germany towards the end of war. His imaginary friend is a childish yet supportive version of Hitler, who encourages him to be the Nazi he dreams of being.

The film is interesting because it highlights the role of German children during these later war years, as they transitioned from the fatherland's strength and hope for the future, to weapons of the 'now'. The militant talk that implored young subjects to devote themselves to the strength and defence of the fatherland was binding. In the film, at a Hitler Youth camp Jojo is instructed to kill a rabbit, told "we want hardened warriors - those who are prepared to kill at will". This is similar to the Hitler Youth vow: "Be ready as a brave soldier, to stake my life at any time for this oath."

Young recruits

The rhetoric of war became an important part of German children's identities: by 1943 militant oaths were no longer the chant of campfires but real-life pledges, while the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls were used as reserve units due to depleted German manpower. By 1945, sectors of the German army, such as the 'Volkssturm' (People's Storm), were using children as young as 12; there were even all-female 'Werwolf' (Werewolf) guerrilla units. These young recruits became the final frontline for Germany and were brandished at the forefront of its propaganda machine.

On 20 April 1945, as the war was drawing to a close, 19 boys aged between 10 and 14 were paraded in front of Hitler's bunker, where he would later kill himself. The footage was broadcast as a newsreel in the few cinemas left standing in Berlin - the boys have their Iron Crosses pinned to their chest and Hitler's jarring words remain hopeful, almost paternal: "Despite the gravity of these times, I remain firmly convinced that we will achieve victory in this battle, and above all for Germany's youth and you, my boys."

One of these boys was Alfred Czech, known as Hitler's youngest hero, who earned his medal saving German soldiers as his home village was attacked. In 2005 he was interviewed about his encounter and quick transition into soldierhood in the Volkssturm: "As a small boy, I didn't reflect much, I just wanted to do something for my people," he said. "I didn't think it was insane to send children into battle. It was war." The interviewer, Tony Paterson, notes that Czech still has a photograph of his encounter framed on the wall, hanging behind his budgerigar. For many of Germany's youth, the idea of the 'fatherland' sustained, and Hitler's words continued to be trusted by his children.

Children on the frontline

The blind determination of a defeated Germany saw the regime push children to participate in dangerous situations and risk almost certain death. One of the most shocking situations children found themselves in was being armed with anti-tank 'panzerfausts' and anti-aircraft guns. In Jojo Rabbit, this episode is parodied when Jojo's friend Yorki struggles to hold one of the weapons, which is twice the size of him, before dropping it and accidently blowing out a building. In reality, the scenes were not much different. At the battle of Berlin in April and May 1945, boys and girls were on the frontline using their quasi-military training in a last effort to stop the Soviet Army invading Berlin. There was even a radio station, Radio Werewolf, that rallied children with the cry of "Besser tot als rot " - better dead than red.

During the battle a young girl named Theresa Moelle spotted, along with her friend Anneliese, a Soviet tank coming towards them. Anneliese gave Theresa her panzerfaust and she fired: "There was a flash, followed by a puff of smoke. Suddenly, the lid of the tank blew off, followed by a rush of bright red and yellow flame and sparks." Later, Theresa remembers being captured, bound and gagged by Soviet soldiers, surrounded by a sea of severed German heads while their captors urinated on a poster of Hitler.

This was not an exceptional encounter. During Germany's final desperate weeks, more children were rounded up, taken out of school and sent out to the frontlines against the Soviets. Heinz Shuetze later recalled that at just 15 years old he was put in an SS uniform and sent to fight Soviet forces on the front line after being given half a day's training with a panzerfaust. A survivor from Soviet confrontations, Guenter Dullni, remembered how "[the Soviets] had no mercy for child soldiers, particularly when you were slapped into an SS uniform". Against all the laws and principles of war, the brutality exhibited in these final battles demonstrated that children were not eligible for protection, but merely an easy target.
Dr Emma Butcher is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and researcher at the University of Leicester. She is author of The Brontës and War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and the upcoming Children in the Age of Modern War (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Throughout the duration of the war, Germany's youth groups transitioned from gender-divided clubs that secured Germany's future strength to back-up armies composed of miniature recruits and, ultimately, gun fodder. Whereas once German youth represented the longevity and strength of the Reich, each child quickly became disposable when all future hopes were dashed by impending defeat. Through testimony, and now film, these children's experiences are being highlighted, showing how dependant ideologies are on mobilised youth, and how entire generations can be manipulated and mutated into weapons and soldiers.

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Hitler Youth: how the Third Reich used children's organisations to wage war

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They started out as youth groups designed to educate German boys and girls in Nazi principles and secure the longevity of the Reich for future generations.

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what it was like for german kids in ww2

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The memories have the patina of childhood: fragmented, vivid, without resolution. They place us, as readers, immediately there. And next to them, portraits of the elderly people whose childhoods we're glimpsing. These are the Kriegskinder, or 'war children': so-called because they grew up in Nazi Germany during World War Two.

"One day I am at the Wilhelmsaue, a small pond in Berlin," remembers Brigitte, who was born in Dortmund in 1937. "A dead woman is floating on the water, face down. Her skirt has ballooned, wind blowing into it and she is sailing across the pond."

Forty-four photos and accompanying anecdotes are gathered in the new book Kriegskinder. Photographer Frederike Helwig captured the images and Anna Waak collected the memories, some of them spoken for the first time; viewed through the filter of a child's eyes, they are by parts humdrum and shocking. The glowing tip of a cigarette; the clatter of pebbles being thrown into a dead man's mouth; two tomato plants on the balcony of a home that has been destroyed. Small details that bypass the intellect, offering a different way into a subject widely covered by historians.

"My access to this subject was on the emotional side, not through history or statistics - the numbers, and what they did and how they did it, which we all grew up with and know," Helwig tells BBC Culture. "The problem with that is the perpetrators are always 'the others' - we're trying to establish that this happened in most German families, and how can that happen?"

One of her subjects has had to confront that more than most. Born in 1939, Niklas Frank is the son of Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, and he travelled through Europe with the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands in the acclaimed documentary My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did. His memory in Kriegskinder is from a childhood shopping trip with his mother and nanny. "We are driving through the Krakow Ghetto where my mother buys her furs and scarfs for a price of her own choosing. I am standing in the back of the Mercedes, my nanny Hilde sitting next to me, in front next to the driver my mother," he recalls. "I am wearing a black and white Pepita suit.

"The people look on sadly. I stick out my tongue to an older boy. He turns around, walks off, I feel like I won. I laugh triumphantly, but Hilde pulls me silently back into my seat." Although it describes a juvenile encounter, it's a disturbing memory. "Most of the first-hand accounts in the book are quite anecdotal," says Helwig. "What they say is interesting - but also what they don't say."

Many describe death in the only way they could comprehend it, as children. "One day a hanged man is lying in front of our house in Berlin. A German. He had tried to hide from the war in a ruined building and they hung him from the crossbar of the lamp post," says Werner. "When he was dead they cut him loose. He lies there for days with his mouth open and we children throw pebble stones into it.

"Eventually they take him away and bury him on the side of the road. Because no dead bodies can lie in the city streets trucks arrive, dig him and others up and throw them onto the trucks. We children watch. Then we have to go and have lunch. It's maize porridge for lunch, but I can only think of the corpses with their tattered clothes and bones sticking out and I feel sick."

Replayed through their senses, remembered via taste or sound or smell, the memories of the Kriegskinder bring past events into the present. "To this day, many remember the air raid shelters, the bombing raids, the fear of the adults around them, the dead and wounded, the hanged and the suicides, the bombed houses and playing in the rubble," writes Alexandra Senfft - the grand-daughter of a Nazi war criminal, and author of The Long Shadow of the Past: Descendants Face their Nazi Family History - in the foreword for Kriegskinder. "Clear or hazy, many have images of flight, and of the 'Russians'; they still feel the hunger and taste the chocolate given to them by American soldiers."

To read these memories is to be brought closer to a place of understanding: by seeing them as children, even as we look at them as old people, we acknowledge the ambiguities of who they are. "To recognize perpetrators in one's father or mother and to reconcile this recognition with one's love towards them is an act full of ambivalence and unbearable tensions," writes Senfft. "Often, the concealed crime weighs so heavily on the descendants' psyche that they can hardly process it: how can a beloved and loving father have been a murderer at the same time?

"A minority manage to differentiate between the perpetrator and the loved parent and to integrate both, to let each stand alongside the other. Yet the majority either deny the misdeed or break with their parent." Although a generation has passed since the war, what took place lives on in family dynamics.

"What the Kriegskinder did not come to terms with they passed onto us grandchildren," writes Senfft. "Psychologists have found that many grandchildren internalized their grandparents' experience even if the Nazi era was never spoken of. Grandchildren thus often possess the family memory without having experienced the events themselves."

Helwig found this when she had children herself. "It took me becoming a parent to actually be able to really empathise with my parents having witnessed World War Two at the ages of five and six," she says. "The idea for this book came when I was talking to my friends, asking them how are we going to teach our children about this history, and how do we keep them interested in it - or how do we teach them the responsibility which comes with it?

"Through those conversations with my peers, came also the realisation that our parents were probably a little bit odd at times, and they have these behavioural patterns which show us that they grew up during the war. It opened up a whole dialogue between us."

This was her real aim - initiating a conversation. "Every German knows about the Holocaust, we're educated with it, it's been documented at large, but what hasn't really been talked about in German families is what did the great-grandfather do, or what exactly happened - there still seems to be a taboo there."

That isn't necessarily because the Kriegskinder want to remain silent. "That generation is now at a time where they've carried all this for a long time and a lot of the people we interviewed were actually quite open about it, but said that many people were not really interested in what they had to say."

Helwig hopes that by bringing together recollections from childhoods in Nazi Germany with portraits of a generation whose memories will soon vanish, her book can help change that. "There's an emotional process happening, and through that emotional process hopefully it creates a curiosity to ask more questions and to have frank conversations, to be able to access that time," she says. "It's not about victimising this generation, it's important to try and encourage the generations to start talking to each other."

The book ends with a quote from Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On: "Violent conflicts create zones of silence in a society. The deeds and responsibility of the perpetrators are concealed. Thus also the suffering of the victims, the role of the spectators... The silence is often passed on to the next generation."

Kriegskinder is published in a climate that gives a renewed urgency to these conversations. "The book wants to raise a certain awareness that, yes, it was a long time ago but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen again," says Helwig. "When we started this project in 2014, we lived in a very different world from today. I told friends in Germany that I was doing this book about the Kriegskinder, and the response was 'oh interesting, but do we need to talk about that still? Look at Germany today' - it was at the height of Merkel and Obama - and suddenly, two years later, Germany and Europe and America are faced with very different scenarios."

In her foreword, Senfft acknowledges how collective silence can infect wider groups. "Research ... has shown that trauma and severe stress can be hereditary; that which is not dealt with can be passed on to the next generation." And it leaches out beyond the family. "What is not brought to light and engaged with individually and within the family finds its way into society and politics."
The exhibition Below is a selection of six portraits from the book, which is out now, published by Hatje Cantz. Kriegskinder is on view at F3, Berlin from 2 February to 8 April 2018.

"Because I'm malnourished I am sent to my great aunt in Switzerland. She is married to an upholsterer; it has a nice smell of leather, but ants run through the apartment. My aunt puts down herring heads to divert the ant trails. In the apartment, there is a gorgeous sofa and on it are some small booklets. Because my aunt is often in Zurich during the day I've got time to look at them. I suffer the worst shock when I realize that they are about concentration camps and that those camps were in Germany. Those pictures...One time in the middle of the street in the village someone slaps me in the face and yells: 'You nasty German!' and I cry."

"The winter is so cold that ice floes drift on the Rhine. The city lies in ruins, an adventure playground. On the way to school I pass the Gereonskirche. One of the two steeples is destroyed, in the other the bells still hang. Near the central station I walk beneath the railway bridge. Everything is in ruins. My mother tells me that here used to be the hospital in which I was born. Only the exterior walls are still standing; the same is true for our house in Blumenthalstrasse in which we lived prior to the war. I discover the remnants of my pram in the iron skeleton of the balcony.

"The Cologne Cathedral does not seem to be damaged much. Only in one spot a bomb or grenade must have hit it. They've inserted a brick filling there to keep the tower from collapsing. Hohenzollern Bridge is completely destroyed and lies in the Rhine. At the bastion, American soldiers have built an auxiliary bridge, the so-called Patton Bridge. Patton was an American general. When cars go over it, especially lorries, the wooden planks rattle and create a lot of noise. I take the tram to school. The doors are open, inside it's crammed and outside people stand on the footboard, me too. There is a new O-bus line. It seems a miracle that an omnibus can drive quietly without engine noise. It only rattles a bit when it drives over potholes."

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How the children of Nazi Germany remember World War Two

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A new book has gathered the memories of 'Kriegskinder', next to portraits of them as they are now. Photographer Frederike Helwig reveals how they remember childhoods in Nazi Germany.

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Youtube video on what it was like for kids in ww2

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Educational Videos for Students (Cartoons on Bullying, Leadership & More)

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Watch a World War 2 Documentary for Children. World War 2 for Kids in Elementary School Cartoon

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all of these photos make me realise how hard it was for the Jews during these times.

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this is a giant classroom of Jewish kids. this makes me think back to a part in my book where they group the jewish up and take them away.

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this is a classroom of Jewish kids. this makes me think back to a part in my book where my main character finds out that they are making the Jewish kids go to a different school than the other kids.

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they are pulling the Jewish kids up in front of the other kids to make fun of them for being Jewish. this makes me think back to the part in my book where they pull the Jewish kid up in front of the class to discriminate against him for being Jewish.