Customer Reviews

Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web

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If you need a reminder of the continuing hurt to families caused by World War II, direct your browser to www.its-arolsen.org . The site, in a complex of buildings in Arolsen, Germany, houses an organization called the International Tracing Service. ITS was established by the Western Allies in 1943 to help cope with the millions of human beings in Europe uprooted by World War II. The work of the ITS and its 15 miles of files continues to this day as people continue to attempt to discover what happened to loved ones.

Nor is the ITS just a faint echo of a long-ago conflict. In 2001 the organization responded to 400,000 queries.

For those who want to understand what happened to Europe 60 to 70 years ago, Lynn Nicholas' "Cruel World" fits next to Piers Brandon's "The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s" and Richard Vinen's "A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century."

Nicholas's US Foreign Service family lived in post-war 1940s Europe and she never forgot what she saw there as a young child. "As life has gone on, I have become more curious about what I saw then and have been struck by the continuing damage done to families by rigid ideologues," she writes.

The result of this curiosity is "Cruel World," an account of how dedicated true-believers, devoted to some of the worst intellectual fads of the last century, attempted to reorganize and "cleanse" their societies.

The strength of "Cruel World" is its broad country-by-country scope; the depth of Nicholas's research, and her ability to explain the mechanics of how the ideologues operated to achieve their goals.

In her exploration of the intellectual underpinnings of the era and the damage they caused, Nicholas ranges from Vermont to the Soviet Ukraine and most countries in between.

In Vermont an official survey designed to improve the state's gene pool came up with a list of 6,000 "defective" individuals. "Unfortunately, some of those included not a few of Vermont's most respectable citizens and had to be revised," writes Nicholas.

In the Ukraine, nationality and class were used to justify mass murder by starvation in 1932. This "cleansing" was enforced by indoctrinated true-believers of the Soviet persuasion rather than of the National Socialist variety, who would arrive in 1941 to put their particular beliefs to work on the long-suffering population.

An important objective of the of the National Socialist regime in Germany, Nicholas's principal focus, was to radicalize young people.

In some cases they were all too successful. The Hitler Youth combat division went to war in 1943 with 10,000 boys dedicated to the cause. They were deemed too young to smoke so they received extra candy rations instead. Apparently just 600 were alive when the division retreated to Germany.

And Nicholas reports on some of the odder by-ways of World War II, including the history of the Hegewald settlement, an SS colony in the Ukraine that came complete with a Wild West-style fort.

Nicholas has the knack of being able to leaven effectively the numbing flood of statistics and monstrous programs of murder and population transfer with personal accounts that snap into focus the realities of the period as theory was put into practice.

She offers memoirs of Jewish children chased out of their orphanage to live in the street, or, parentless, wandering along the German-Dutch border, "small figures, `shy as deer,' running away among the trees." There is a scene of a teacher hounded by his radicalized students.

Also striking is the low-level meanness and spite of those times, as is the eagerness of professionals, intellectuals, civil servants and others with careers to promote, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon.

But in the middle of the expanding catastrophes that spread across Europe during the period, there were also small beacons of think-for-yourself decency in every country. Some were to be found in unlikely places. One example: the members of a deeply traditional student dueling fraternity in Germany decided, when asked to expel their non-Aryan brothers, to expel their Nazi members instead.

"Cruel World" is a history of a dark period in Europe's recent past, a reminder of how Pied Pipers can lead human beings to deny the humanity of others. It is a reminder also that we need to be vigilant and deny latter-day Pied Pipers the opportunity to do so again.

No one will ever know the number of children killed, injured or made to suffer during World War II. The number of children simply vaporized in the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the fire storms in Tokyo or Dresden will never be known. Tragic as these incidents are, the deliberate actions of the Nazi's stand out with a particular cruelty because they were deliberate, the active policy of the Government that should have been in charge of their welfare, not their death.

In this monumental work, Ms. Nicholas discusses the lives of children in the Nazi world. The book is wide reaching covering the special 'orphanages' of the SS set up to generate more racially acceptable people, to the deliberate starvation and killing of children in concentration camps and other institutions, and the enlistment of Hitler Youth into special military divisions. One such division she reports entered the war with 10,000 'troops,' 600 made it back to Germany. The famous last movie of Hitler giving awards to the children outside his bunker as he shook with palsey shows his treatment of these children.

Throughout the book the sadness, the futility, the inhumanity of this use of children fills every page. Then you look at a magazine and see the children in Africa, in the Middle East and elsewhere carrying their AK-47's. You would think that we would learn.

I found this to be an amazing read. I found myself reading a few dozen pages and stopping, simply astonished at what the most scientifically advanced society let itself believe, and do to millions of children; then returning and reading more. It took almost a month to whittle through it. Combine this with, say, Thomas Sowell's "Vision of the Anointed" and one hears a modern day echo of the kind of elitist thinking that rationalizes ethnic clensing. Or how, if unrestrained, Wahabi Islam would exterminate we infadels with similar panache'. This book made me THINK!

This is a note directed at the author of this book. Ive been studying WW2 for 50 years and have probably read hundreds of books, some memoirs on the war. Ive never read a book such as this which so thouroghly descibes the madness and the pervasiveness of the Nazi cruelity to all peoples of Europe, not only children. The madness of the Nazis social and racial planning and the horror which it fostered has never been presented better. Im not going to analyse the book, chapter and verse but simply want to say if anyone wants to get a visceral feeling of what the horrors of Nazism were, this is the one book to read. James e Vigiletti, Attorney at Law

Lynn Nicholas's "Cruel World" has tied together so carefully,and in such a scholarly way, all of the threads...the complete facts, the stories, the horrors of the millions of people from so many countries who suffered and were killed by the Nazis...into a complete quilt that will, hopefully, be required reading in all of our schools and colleges. This is a must read.

I have yet to read Lynn Nicholas's earlier work, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War and it's on my TBR list, but I was eager to read this since the subject of the Holocaust and especially of the lives of children during this horrific period has always been of interest to me. Her research is impeccable - the author has drawn her material from numerous interviews conducted with survivors, extensive research into the governmental and military archives of various nations, and the correlation between Nazi policies and the actions of other governments such as the USSR in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, etc. The reader is presented with a far-ranging view of what was happening to the children of Europe during the reign of the Nazis, including the children who were sent away from Europe (without their parents/families) to England on the Kindertransport; children who were evacuated to the countryside (to evade bombardment and also to get better nourishment); the young soldiers serving the Reich; the unfortunate children of Europe deemed unproductive and subhuman because of their mental and physical disabilities (who were doomed to be murdered through euthanasia); the Aryan children who were torn from their own families in German-occupied nations and forced to undergo Germanization - all part of the Nazi master plan to breed an Aryan master race; children who were forced to endure long periods of time in hiding; children from races deemed subhuman such as Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians, etc. who were selected for forced labor, child labor, inhuman medical experiments, and systematic murder by way of starvation and gassing, etc. A powerful and compelling account that should be required reading.

The horror inflicted upon the children of Europe was not confined to the period of the war as the book also looks at the fate of the children left alive at the end of the war - those who had lost all their living relatives in the Holocaust; the ones who had been selected for Germanization (many of whom had been so young at the time they were taken from their families that they could not recall where they were from); the millions who ended up in Displaced Persons camps, etc. This is a harrowing read that recounts the trapped lives led by millions of children in Europe during WW II, the aftermath, and serves as a timely reminder - of the dangers of prejudice and bigotry.

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Perhaps the forgotten horrors of the Nazi debacle: the fate of the children not just during the war but afterwards. The book does an excellent job of adding just enough Holocaust history to keep the reader aware of the horrors surrounding the mistreatment of the children. It is not enough that 1.5 million children perished at the murderous hands of the Nazis: millions more were orphaned, displaced. The book is extremely well-written and researched. If there is a weakness it is that it does not spend enough time on the heroes of the Holocaust, those who risked their lives to save the children. Many organizations are mentioned, such as the Polish underground Zegota, yet Irena Sendler, in charge of saving the children is never mentioned. Otherwise, this is an excellent read and tells the story that needs to be told.

My mother is a history buff and when she received this book she called to say how thoughtful it was. I had reservations about sending such book as a Mother's Day gift but it worked out wonderfully.

I agree with Karen Sadler's review of this book (see her review from 2005). I found this book to be quite repetitive in many instances. Most of the book is actually about WWII and the facts are quite well known to most history buffs. Thus, I would say that 75% of this book is just a history book describing WWII. Therefore, if the reader is familiar with WWII, then this book will seem to be a "rehash" (as Karen Sadler stated in her review) of what most history lovers already know about this famous war.

According to the title and side flap descriptions of this book, a reader might be led to believe that this book would have been more specific, regarding the children of the Holocaust. However, many facts that would have been extremely valuable to the reader are skimmed through, while other facts about the children of WWII are expanded and then repeated over and over again.

If the reader is not knowleadgeable about WWII and wants to read a book about what led to WWII and how the people were treated, then this book will interest the reader. The majority of this book is a combo lesson on WWII-101 and WWII-102.

I found the most interesting parts of the book to lie in the last 2 chapters, because in these chapters, the author describes what happened to the children of the war AFTER it was all over.

For those who are just now studying the history of Europe in the last mid-century, this all-embracing book on the impact of Nazi planning on all children may be a good place to start. For someone like me who has been reading about this stuff for about five years now (since being introduced to the medical ethics of Nazi use of children in medical school), this book tended to be an adequate rehash of a lot of information I had been introduced to in other books. Those books such as 'When Medicine Went Mad' by Caplan, the Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, 'Crying Hands', "The Origins of Nazi Genocide" by Henry Friedlander...and many, many more, this book did not contain enough new information, or provide new philosophical or ethical or moral input into this awful time in our human history to be worth the read.

I would recommend this book as a place to start, but there is so much out there that is so much better. Stories of real life poignantly written, information concerning those who sacrificed to save the lives of others...that this book becomes merely a listing of all the atrocities children went through throughout the world in a rather mindless way.

Karen Sadler