TV Reviews : ‘Confessions of a Hitler Youth’ Presents a Chilling Picture of Nazi Past

The bracing air of a deep confessional blows through the brief, potent HBO special “Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth” (tonight at 10). But this interview conducted by the off-screen documentarian Pierre Sauvage (“Weapons of the Spirit”) hardly marks the first time that Alfons Heck has related his shocking passage from boyhood innocence into a young Nazi trooper.

Heck, who now lives in San Diego, has lectured widely on his past--often with lecturing partner and Auschwitz survivor Helen Waterford--and has authored two elegantly written memoirs, “A Child of Hitler” and “The Burden of Hitler’s Legacy.”

So Heck, quite unlike almost any other living member of the Hitlerjugend , has told and retold his confessional many times, which is why with Sauvage he seems as bluntly honest as a good historian. Unlike the recent documentary, “All Jews Out!,” in which German elderly still are reluctant to admit to any personal responsibility for Nazi horrors, Heck spells out the tragedy.

He declares in no uncertain terms that the terrifying Crystal Night, when synagogues were torched and German Jews attacked, “signified the end of German innocence.” He invokes the irrational ecstasy of a Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, where Hitler embraces his comrades as “my youth.” He offers an anatomy of how children can be indoctrinated with any idea, even one that forces those children to look on impassively as their former Jewish playmates are taken off to death camps.

Producer Arthur Holch’s ability to pull together archive footage precisely matched to Heck’s narration has a chilling effect: Most of the film is so free of wear and tear that it seems new, a weird visualization of the fear that a new variation on Hitler’s youth could happen again.