Perspective

The author of Hitler Youth is Susan Campbell Bartoletti. She has a series of award-winning children's nonfiction, fiction, and picture books, and before she started her writing career, she was a teacher for eighteen years. She is thus well equipped to be presenting difficult material like the Holocaust and World War II to a younger audience.

Bartoletti offers a mostly neutral, balanced, and objective perspective on the circumstances surrounding the Hitler Youth. While it might be easy to condemn Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust, Bartoletti attempts to portray the reasons why pro-Nazi German citizens felt the way they did. For example, she relays the excitement of many youths at the prospect of summer camp. For German boys and girls, membership in the Hitler Youth sounded like a vacation full of outdoor adventures. Any moral/ethical judgements are thus left up to the reader after he or...