1h 22min | Drama, Romance | 6 January 1943
Directors: Edward Dmytryk, Irving Reis (uncredited)
Stars: Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, Kent Smith, Otto Kruger
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034856/
Not much of an expose of Hitler Youth, really. We see a couple of HY boys at home giving the evil eye to their father, and some scuffles in the schoolyard (American school adjacent to a HY school), but the synopsis overstates the case.
However, the word lurid is apt. BG (b. 1923) chews the scenery as the American girl. I don't know if such things happened: she was living with her German grandparents, going to an American school, and designated because her American parents were of German birth to be taken to a German girl's orientation camp/school. And her American school (first she was a student, but was employed there when seized) couldn't do anything to extricate her.
TH (b. 1919, looking older than his years) plays the boy who scuffled with her in the schoolyard, but grew to be an officer who sent her into Nazi custody. But since he was in love with her, and she's unable to conform to her new environment, he becomes conflicted about his decision. When he recommends her for higher education, and she refuses (she's repulsed by Nazi teachings), this gets both BG and TH in trouble. They are shot during a radio-broadcast trial. The American schoolmaster gets flown to France under threat of being arrested for treason if he doesn't go.
Another juicy detail: they purported that women who held unfit political beliefs would be sterilized. I don't remember that from my reading. But they also talked about women having children for the state, without benefit of marriage, and I do remember that. They mentioned an elderly couple making trouble and being euthanized in a hospital, and certainly euthanizing burdens to society was the start of the development of gas executions.
So this is mostly true propaganda, spun around a semi-attractive couple, one psychologically unhealthy, the other swept into an impossible situation. The title is misleading, since it's not about children, not even about teenagers after the first couple of reels.
RKO, dir. Dmytryk & Reis; 6
