"I asked him a question about that time [he] was in Africa -- how he misled the British, who had a whole tank division, and all he had were some motorized carriers, and he put bedsheets on them, so there was a big cloud, and they thought there were tanks." Horst doesn't think any film could have had as much of an impact on a young boy's imagination as meeting a war hero like Erwin Rommel in the flesh, and getting to talk to him about his exploits.

It's worth noting though, that he didn't find all the Nazi leaders equally impressive:

"Goring was different. You couldn't talk to Goring. You could talk to his wife ... but I couldn't talk to him. He was different. I don't know if he was sick, or whatever."

Well, yes -- in more than one sense: He was actually fucked up on opiates at the time, but Horst didn't know that.

While Horst didn't find Nazi media propaganda very compelling, he did love the hell out of those massive rallies. Stuff like this was a huge part of his childhood:

William O. McWorkman/U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Apparently letting kids march in a parade while everyone cheers sort of rose-tints their experience of fascism.

"It was, you wanted to watch them forever. You didn't get hungry. You were proud to be part of them. Even as a young person, you had a purpose somehow. You were proud of that. It's probably equal to nowadays, what I don't understand with sports ... you were proud of that, of the whole group and of course you were constantly also told that you did the right thing."

"Like the tank commanders, they had the berets, and it was the same as like our Hitler Youth berets. They were two fingers over the left ear, three fingers over the right ear, and four fingers over the eyebrows ... you were proud of that discipline! It wasn't just a tank commander. You were part of that tank commander. You wore your cap the same way ... that kind of order, I miss the most."

"It could happen here"' is the constant worry, but Horst doesn't believe that's possible. We'll have to grow our own atrocities, because the Third Reich was a uniquely 1930s Germany thing. Children owed their parents total obedience, wives owed their husbands total obedience, and everyone owed the state total obedience. Horst maintains that Nazi propaganda "was only effective because of the total obedience ... that kind of upbringing, the mindset of our parents made the atrocities which happened in Germany possible. As soon as you understand that mindset -- as soon as you understand it was not just obedience, but total, total obedience..." only then can we understand how Hitler's regime was able to do what it did.

Older students, and especially Jewish students, recalled much more outright Nazism in their educational experience. But by the time Horst was old enough to take notice, there were no more Jewish kids in German schools. There was less emphasis on the "Jewish question" by that point -- because it was being answered by horrific genocide -- and a lot more emphasis on how evil insurance agents were:

"Hitler made no bones about it. Every year he came to our school and talked [about them]." Horst's impression at the time was that Hitler just hated the hell out of insurance agents, and unproductive people in general, but "was not against the Jewish people."

Adam Jones/flickr
Though it's not exactly like he hid those beliefs, either.

Again, mostly because he'd gotten rid of them all, and sent the rest into hiding. But even so, Hitler's tirades against things like "extending credit" were very much based in anti-Semitism:

"After World War I, at least in Berlin, there were big furniture stores owned by Jewish people; they give credit. And Hitler said, you never take credit! It's a Jewish habit of extending credit, because now they make money on your money."

The Nazis cut back on public anti-Semitism in the mid-1930s, as part of their bid for global acceptance during the run-up to the 1936 Olympics. All that anti-Semitism came back with a vengeance after the Olympics -- it was never gone, just carefully hidden -- but a kid like Horst, growing up right then in that era may not have seen the worst of Hitler's atrocities. In fact, Horst claims he had no idea the Holocaust had occurred until after the war.

"The people who talked about it got put in the concentration camps and killed ... so the only time when I heard about it was after the war, in the Nuremberg trial."

He assumed this was all just Allied propaganda ... at first.

"We didn't believe it. We didn't believe it. I didn't believe it until I really talked to people who went there, which I believed."

"I was 24 years old, and I'd never seen eggs by the dozen. In our home, even as a banker, my father on Sunday got one egg. And my brother and my sister and I, three children, we shared one egg."

During World War I, nearly a million German civilians were starved to death by a British naval blockade. That's a huge part of why Hitler was so obsessed with lebensraum, or "living space," and it's also a big part of why so many Germans supported his expansionist policies.

"See, in order to get eggs you had to go from Holland or in Belgium. They speak a different language, either Dutch or French. So between the countries you had two deep in order to get eggs, and [you had to go to France to get] rye or wheat..."

One of the most enticing promises Hitler made to the German people was that, with him in charge, they'd never starve again. They could just take Holland, take Belgium, and voila -- problem solved. That turned out to be a lie, of course.

"Milk, eggs, it was almost impossible to get [them] during the war, because people were robbed on the way in by civilians who were hungry ... Milk and eggs didn't go to warehouses, they came from the farmland and they were intercepted."

Royal Norwegian Information Service
It doesn't get as much press, but food shortages may have been a bigger killer than combat during the war.

Then, of course, there was the war itself:

"When we in the Hitler Youth [were] putting out a fire during the war, we were under constant fire ... in other words, the tanks were shooting at us, or artillery were shooting at us, or planes were strafing us, and we still had to get the wounded out and still had to put out the fire."

Keep in mind, Horst was 14 here -- an age where our biggest concern was finding rare Pokemon. Life as a German child during World War II was a nightmare. People on both sides wanted Horst dead:

"One of the things that happened was, in the defense of Berlin, if you retreated as a soldier or Hitler Youth, and had any ammo in your pocket, the SS would shoot you. Or not just shoot you, they would hang you. After Berlin surrendered the first night, the Russians were celebrating ... they get drunk, and they raped the women like crazy. So there were streets filled with drunken soldiers raping the women, and there were children hung by the SS hanging from lamps with notes around them ... What they considered a celebration was a slaughter."

"He was totally convinced he was right. I think privately, I thought he was a nutcase. Or he was a little bit short of a full load. Because some of the things didn't make any sense. Like for instance, why get rid of the Jewish people? He said they were the best salesmen in the world. Well, at the same time there were companies like Bayer ... Germany produced an array of fantastic technology. He didn't like the Jewish people? He could have used them as salesmen. They would have been happy. The guy doesn't play with a full deck ... but a lot of people in history who are capable of leading a country ... [are] mentally unbalanced, is maybe the right word."

The idea that Hitler should have drafted an army of Jews because they're natural salesmen is obviously problematic, but it illustrates an important point: Nearly a century later, and Horst is still influenced by his indoctrination as a child. Oftentimes, even without realizing it.

While Horst didn't share in it, he certainly understood the appeal of Hitler:

"He was captivating because he was a totally different speaker than you have now. When you take a look at now heads of state, especially in England, they're half asleep when they talk. Hitler was different. You would call him mesmerizing. He was extremely motivational. And he didn't talk to some old point in history. What he was talking about was right now."

So if Horst (and many other Germans) thought Hitler was a psychopath, why didn't they speak up? Because they had eyes. They saw what happened to people who spoke up. Horst's grandfather was openly anti-Hitler. He was arrested, and very likely wound up dying in a concentration camp.

"I think ... he had a loose mouth; with everything that he did right, he should have kept his mouth shut. Because I kept my mouth shut, and I know what happened to me, and what happened to the people who didn't keep their mouths shut."

The Hitler Youth didn't teach Horst that Nazis were just the best; it taught him to stay quiet, and never trust anybody else.

"It takes a while when you are a kid to arrive at your own conclusion. There's a lot of introspection, self-inspection ... it takes some time and it takes some bloody losses before your eyes are really open to the fact that you're powerless ... I couldn't find my grandfather, you know. I knew if I'm careful enough, I would make it alive, but I know if I'd gone after the people who'd taken my grandfather, even careful wouldn't save me. It's kind of a rude awakening to become an adult under these circumstances."