Chapter 9 Summary and Analysis

The book skips ahead to the D-Day offensive of mid-1944. A young twenty-three-year-old SS commander, Emil Durr, saved his gun crew from certain death at the hands of a British flamethrower tank by charging the tank and holding an explosive to it, destroying the tank. Emil Durr was just one of many fanatical fighters who grew up in the Hitler Youth program.

Hitler's administration increasingly pulled from the Hitler Youth for fresh bodies as it suffered heavy losses as World War II went on. The army created a special youth division, the SS-HJ, recruiting the best and brightest Hitler Youths. Ten thousand SS-HJ recruits were sent off to a training camp near Beverloo, Belgium in the spring of 1943. They trained fiercely for five months.

By April 1944, the SS-HJ division was twenty thousand teenagers strong. It was deployed to Normandy, France, in...