HITLER'S CHILDREN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 216, 13 August 1943, Page 21

HITLER'S CHILDREN

(RKO-Radio)

LORD VANSITIARI, | imagine, would not like this film; neither would those critics who disapproved of

The Moon is Down and The Watch on the Rhine. It may also be disappointing to some people who are misled, perhaps by the title, perhaps by the publicity, into hoping for an orgy or sadism and atrocity. For Hitler’s Children presents Nazis who remain human beings even when they are most unpleasant; some German citizens who are not even unpleasant, a valiant old Catholic bishop (H. B. Warner), who defies the authorities-and, believe it or not, a hero (Tim Holt), who is actually a Gestapo captain! And though there are a good many raw patches, they do not spread over the whole picture. The story is simple melodrama-cum-propaganda (where one ends and the other begins I wouldn’t like to say), about a German-born American girl (Bonita Granville), who is being educated in Germany before the war and is claimed by the Nazis as a citizen of the Reich. When she resists, they spirit her away to a "Labour Camp," where she is threatened with horrible penalties, Her sweetheart, who has graduated from the Hitler Youth to the Gestapo in the course of the story, tries to win her for Nazism, but fails, and ends by dying with her in denouncing the system, There is much that is improbable, a good deal that is silly. But I frankly went fearing the very worst and found the treatment so much less lurid and, indeed so much more intelligent than I had expected that I am inclined to give the film comparatively high marks.