Auf Wiedersehen!: A Teenage Girl Chronicles the Destruction of Her Hometown and Worldview during the Second World War

In this lecture, Professor Ostoyich will present the experiences of “Hildegard Weber,” a thoroughly-indoctrinated member of the League of German Girls (the female division of the Hitler Youth), who chronicled her war-time experiences in diaries. Her diaries provide an unfiltered view of what Adolf Hitler, National Socialism, and the war meant to her.  With each passing year, Hildegard increasingly filled her diary with horrific accounts of Allied bombing raids and lists of the city’s dead. With the end approaching in April 1945, she embraced the impending defeat.  She also chronicled the first year of the post-war occupation.  Her assessments of the Allied soldiers and her fellow countrymen are frank and scathing.  She described how the Allied soldiers kept Nazis as prisoners in her former school and how her fellow Germans turned on each other and disassociated  themselves from National  Socialism.  By investigating the impact of the Third Reich  on ordinary people such as Hildegard, we can truly start to discern the lessons of this dark history.