The Development of German Children’s Literature on the Subject of the Third Reich and World War II

Before the guns fell silent in Europe, German authors were already writing children’s novels that dealt with the Third Reich and World War II.1 Naturally, these books were not published in Nazi Germany, but in Switzerland, Sweden, and Holland. A trickle of books for children set in the Third Reich began to appear in West Germany starting in 1947, gradually swelling to a strong current by the 1980s. The numbers increased from the sixteen titles published between 1940 and 1945 to several dozen in the 1950s and then surged to hundreds in the subsequent two decades.