Who were you?
What did you do?
And what did you see
With those haunting, haunted eyes
That plead even now with me?
Perhaps it was just a big boys' game
Or you longed so much to be the same
As the Neu-Men in dark blue
Their jutting jaws and snarling teeth
Calling out to you.
Mephisto's deadly bargain dies
With Night-time's wilfull lies.
Eir asks for the soldier-boy
And begs the gods tender mercy
To the Monster's chosen toy.
Who were you?
And what did you know
At the bitter end of it all?
A thousand years not to be
And still-life to live, at tyrants' fall.
From January 1945, the Nazis had stripped the schools of all boys and some girls aged 13 and above to fight alongside elderly conscripts in the Volksstrum, the People's Army. In the previous year, a special 10,000 strong SS Division had been created of 16 and 17 year olds and, deployed to Normandy, became infamous for its particularly cruel treatment of prisoners.
As many as 25,000 German children took part in the defence of Berlin with casualty rates in many units as high as 80%. Elsewhere, a million school age troops were deployed with little training and often few weapons against far superior Soviet soldiers. Raised in Nazi schools and steeped in its mythology, they often fought to the bitter, fatal end.
But many also survived. The Americans even took the surrender of an 8 year old boy. Their bewildered mixture of anger, fear and confusion is evident in their Prisoner of War photographs. Yet these children made old before their time were far from unique to the Second World War or to the Nazis: even today, there are around 250,000 child soldiers, 40% of them female and all of them frequently subjected to a wide range of physical and psychological abuse. Although declared a crime in international law after 1949, using children in war remains to this day a frequent stain on all humanity.
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