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"Blood and Honor: Youth under Hitler" / "Blut und Ehre: Jugend unter Hitler" was a made for TV movie about growing up in NAZI Germany. The title comes from the motto of the Hirler Youthm enscribes on their knives. The film uses English speaking German boys and both a German and English-language version was produced. The film depicts boys and girls in their Hitker Youth amd BDM uniforms reasonably accurately. The uniforms are a little smarter than in reality. Many boyswear white knee socks. That was done usually for formal events, but was not very common. Some boys wear short pants as a suit, others with their Hitler Youth uniforms. In one scene where a boy and a girl are caught in a tent together examining themselves by a prudish adult. This was accurate as HJ and BDM officials were very prudish. The boy and girl units of the Hitler Youth were strctly separated, but there were occassions when they were in contact. There is a very sad ending with what happens to the boys, especially the Jewish boy. Jeffrey Frank plays Hartmut Keller at age 15 years. A British reader provides some interesting information about the production. This dramatization of Hitler's corruption of his nation's young people from 1933 to 1939, with the focus on four families, is distinctive in that it was filmed in West Germany simultaneously in English and German by a bilingual all-German cast. Shown in this country in two parts of two and a half hours each on an ad hoc network of independent stations, the production stars Jeffrey Frank, through whose eyes the horror unfolds. Frank (Michael Caine's son in "The Island") is the only American in the cast, although his German-born parents themselves were Jewish victims of the Nazis, but managed to get out of the country. Award-winning American producer Daniel Wilson was responsible for bringing the film to this country. It was an unusually sympathetic protrayal of life under the Nazis and could only have been made, even then, as it was indeed made by a Jew with impeccable credentials. I knew the the producer though not well. They recreated an HJ parade in a square in Munich very very early one Sunday morning. They had special permission, requiring an act of the Bundestag, to hang Swastika flags from the buildings. And the swastikas had to be out of sight by 06.00 am and the filming and all Nazi uniforms off the streets by 08.00 am. He said that the only people about at that hour on a Sunday, apart from the cast and crew, were very elderly Germans. He found their reactions to the flags, the band and the young actors in HJ costume very interesting. Nine out of ten of them would put their heads down and hurry away, as if from a pervert exposing himself in public. But one out of ten, always elderly gentlemen, stood proudly to attention as the parade passed and were obviously transported back to the halcyon days of their youth. That was scary, the producer thought. The film series depicted the improvement in living standards and diet of a German family from the Depression, through the coming of the Nazis, on to near the end. The series was mainly about a young boy who was an ardent Nazi and his sister, who narrated the series, and was more liberal. He joined the SS and was involved in some minor atrocities, but cleared of liability after the war. She commanded a garment workshop using Jewish women as slave labor. She was very proud of having done all she could for her "girls", and particularly pleased that out of four hundred girls she lost only a handful to sickness and none to execution. After the war she served four years in prison for her "crimes". I remember her last speech delivered to camera as an elderly lady. "My brother though, who murdered many people, was never charged so he was able to emigrate to America. You maye have met him if you live in Los Angeles and have recently bought an expensive German car. He owns a showroom there." Lovely dramatic touch. I tried to find trace of the series on You Tube, but there is none that I can see. The Producer told me that he got a lot of flack for making it too sympathetic to ordinary Germans and there was little chance of it being repeated. Perhaps it had been airbrushed out of TV history.

Created: 7:26 AM 9/22/2009
Last updated: 7:26 AM 9/22/2009