A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika

In this starkly candid account of one boy's indoctrination into the Hitler Youth, we see a side of Nazism that has been little recorded. This autobiographical account is a rare glimpse at World War II from a German boy's viewpoint.

Alfons Heck was born in Wittlich, a small town in the Rhineland of Germany in 1928, and raised on a prosperous farm. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he was immediately exposed to incessant Nazi racial propaganda, beginning in elementary school.

Heck joined the junior branch of the Hitler Youth, the "Jungvolk" at the age of ten. Although he was an altar boy, he became a fanatic member of the Hitler Youth after he had been selected to attend the last Nazi Party Rally of the Third Reich at Nuremberg in 1938, where he fell under the spell of Hitler when he saw him in person.

During the war he was a member of the elite "Flying Hitler Youth, and although he was still in high school, he was accepted as a future officer cadet of the Luftwaffe. By 1944, he was a top-rated sailplane pilot looking forward to a career as a pilot. But after the Allied invasion of June 6, 1944, he was instead sent to the Siegfried Line as a Hitler Youth captain (Gefolgschaftsfuehrer). He rose quickly to the command of 3,000 Hitler Youth engaged in the fortification of the "Westwall" (Siegfried Line) defenses. He met Adolf Hitler at a conference shortly before the Battle of the Bulge in November of 1944, when Hitler inspected the Western Front.

Heck was captured in March of 1945 by units of Gen. Patton's Third Army. In July of 1945, he was turned over to the French. As the last commander of his Hitler Youth district, he was sentenced to one month of hard labor by a French military occupation court for his role in organizing Hitler Youth units fighting in the defense of his district. He was,however, cleared of having committed any war crimes.

After graduation from college he worked briefly as a reporter for his hometown newspaper. When it closed, he was employed as an interpreter for the American Military Police in Frankfurt, but decided to escape the ruins of Germany. He was granted a permanent resident visa to Canada in 1951. During his years in Canada, he took a course in journalism at the University of Victoria. He worked in various jobs, from railroad worker to lumber mill inspector and restaurant manager.

He and his Canadian wife emigrated to the United States in 1963 in search of better job opportunities. Heck became a U.S. citizen in June of 1969. He became disabled from a career with Greyhound Lines in 1970 by a major heart attack.

He began to teach German at a private language school on a part time basis, and since 1979 has worked off and on as a translator and interpreter in San Diego Courts and for the Department of Justice. He is a certified German translator.

He eventually returned to his first avocation, writing, by submitting articles to leading newspapers, often political commentaries. Over the years, he was published in many papers and won six San Diego Press Club awards. But it took nearly forty years after the end of World War II before he was ready to come to terms with his own past by writing "A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days when God wore a Swastika."

Heck has lived in San Diego with his wife of 38 years since 1970, and has been a member of the San Diego Press Club since 1979. He is listed in Gale's Contemporary Authors. At the age of 72, he continues to write and lecture on the enigma of the Third Reich.