personal story

Peter Becker was a member of the Hitler Youth and the indoctrination efforts of Nazis in the 1930s. Peter was six years old when his mother enrolled him in a Hitler boarding school for the future Nazis in 1935. He studied the normal academic subjects, but was constantly exposed to Nazi ideas and prepared for a future life in the military. He came to believe in Hitler as the savior of Germany. He says that everything was very carefully structured, “...we were not aware of being indoctrinated. We were not aware of what was being done to us.” Peter now describes his indoctrination as a subtle process. It took two years after the war had ended for Peter to come to terms with the damages that the Germans had really committed. He had become a Nazi without even realizing he was. He eventually moved to the United States and became a professor at the University of South Carolina.