personal narratives, german

Irmgard Hunt chronicles the experiences she had as a child growing up in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden during Hitler's Nazi regime.

Jurgen Herbst offers an account of growing up in Nazi Germany from 1928 to 1948.

A collection of personal recollections in which men and women share their stories of survival during World War II.

Testimony from twenty-nine German women survivors of the Third Reich which provides a portrait of life on the German home front and of the society that spawned Hitler and the Holocaust. The oral histories of these women provide a perspective of Germany during the pre-World War II era and after.

Recounts Clemens Forell's escape from a forced labour camp in Siberia, describing how the German soldier managed to escape and his three-year trek across the wastes of Siberia in search of freedom.

Theresienstadt became the "showpiece" ghetto of the Third Reich so the world would think that the Nazis were treating the Jews humanely. It was controlled by the SS but run by a council of Jewish elders and presented to the Red Cross as an idyllic utopia. In reality it was a holding post for Jews being shipped to Treblinka and Auschwitz. Philipp Manes was a middle-class Berlin merchant who considered himself a German first, and then a Jew. He wrote his firsthand account of his life in Theresienstadt before his deportation to Auschwitz where he and his wife were killed.

Presents a memoir of a child who lived in Berlin during World War II and how it affected three generations of middle-class German women who endured the bombing, Russian and Allied occupation, the Berlin Airlift, and post-war recovery.

Helga Schneider, abandoned in 1941 by her mother who joined the Nazi SS and went to work as a guard at Auschwitz, discusses her second and final meeting with the woman, who at age eighty-seven and confined to a Vienna nursing home, remained unrepentant about her past.