Defeating the Totalitarian Lie

Book excerpt: The main preoccupation of my parents during the Nazi years was to save us children from Nazi indoctrination says Hilmar von Campe. At 10 years old, like every other child, he had to enter the Hitler Youth and at 18 he was conscripted into the army. He was a gunner in a tank in the Yugoslavian theatre fighting the Soviet army, became in 1945 a prisoner of war of the Communist Tito government and in the same year staged a sensational escape crossing seven borders. His reports about the Nazi years and the war are a lesson of history as he brings facts unknown to most Americans. He describes the whyit came about, his own moral responsibility and how his life changed. The Nazi system, like any other totalitarian system, he says, is based on lies. Lies are at the root of the problem in the world. You cant defeat them with money or armies but only with the truth. Hilmar compares developments in American society and in the world today with what happened in preNazi Germany and warns America to turn away now from the destructive ideological path we are on.