Alfons Heck biography book

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On the last day before the Americans occupied his home town Heck’s Aunt Tilly said to him, “The handwriting was on the wall a year ago. At age 17, Heck became commander of 6000 of the Third Reich's last defenders, many of them just boys of 13 and 14, of the Westwall along the Rhine. The priest did not return.

Of the nine and a half million German war dead, two million were teenagers, both civilians and Hitler Youth. He was appointed leader of about 10 other boys. He devoted himself to the task of eventually becoming a Luftwaffe fighter pilot. As suggested by the subtitle, Hitler was like a god to him as he grew to become a fanatical follower of Nazism and a leader in the Hitler Youth.

One of his antiaircraft crews shot down a damaged B-17 bomber trying to return to its base. He recalls Hitler’s speech as mesmerizing the enormous crowd of Hitler Youth with his every word. It is clear in his grandmother’s responses to Heck’s unwavering devotion to Nazism that his grandmother was not impressed by Nazism and the war it brought on.

He later immigrated, first to Canada, working in several British Columbia saw mills, then to the U.S. where, living in San Diego, he became a Greyhound long-distance bus driver.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Alfons Heck remained silent about his wartime activities and his involvement in the Hitler Youth, but he read hundreds of books about the Third Reich, tracing the lives of surviving Nazi leaders and maintaining an interest in West German politics.

Heck was outraged at such outward hostility toward the Fuhrer and had planned to report it to higher authorities before Leiwitz talked to him later that night to tell him first-hand accounts of the slaughtering. As for his war efforts he was awarded an Iron Cross, the award that every Hitler Youth boy wanted to be awarded.

Post war and death

Heck was unable to believe that the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime had actually taken place.

Heck’s father prevented Rudi from doing so, and if Heck’s grandmother and teachers were not so passive they too could have slowed the process before it snowballed.

It is this burden of guilt that he wishes to share with those elders who failed him and his peers when they were being blindly led.

The “goddamn Hitler Youth fanatics,” as one corporal muttered about Heck, also had a sort of contempt for the older Nazis (177). To us these men were… sort of a necessary apparition until we, the new, lean generation were ready to take over” (83).

When asked by the officer if he would ever disobey another command, he responded, “No, not even to save me” (76).