Perspective

The perspective of A Child of Hitler is that of Alfons Heck, a German-born survivor of World War II and former highly-ranked member of the Hitler Youth. Alfons serves both as narrator and protagonist, though decades of age separate the two experiences. Alfons narrates from his perspective as a child and teenager as he can best recall though he often reports events in the future and discusses the fates of people he encountered that he had no way of knowing at the time.

The young Alfons was a German nationalist, ardent Nazi and a fanatical devotee of Hitler. He was prepared to kill or be killed for the German Reich, which he identified both with Hitler and the German nation as a whole. Alfons grew to associate the Russian Bolsheviks with the Jews and saw them both as dangerous, racially inferior and savage. Consequently, he had no opposition...