Irmgard, often feeling lonely in her quest, was determined to face the truth of her country's criminal past and to bear the responsibility for an almost unbearable reality that most of her elders were determined to forget. After the fall of the brutal dictatorship and the suicide of its mad architect, many of her neighbors and loved ones still clung to their beliefs, prejudices, denial, and unacknowledged guilt. Here, in a picture-postcard world untouched by the war and seemingly unblemished by the horrors Germany's master had wrought, she accepted the lies of her teachers and church and civic leaders, joined the Hitler Youth at age ten, and joyfully sang the songs extolling the virtues of National Socialism.īut before the end - when she and other children would be forced to cower in terror in dank bomb shelters and wartime deprivations would take a harrowing toll - Irmgard's doubts about the "truths" she had been force-fed increased, fueled by the few brave souls who had not accepted Hitler and his abominations.
The very model of blond Aryan "purity," Irmgard sat on the Führer's knee for photographers, witnessed with excitement the comings and goings of all manner of famous personages, and with the blindness of a child accepted the Nazi doctrine that most of her family and everyone around her so eagerly embraced. It is a provocative story of a family and a community in a period and location in history that, though it is fast becoming remote to us, has important resonance for our own time.On Hitler's Mountain is a powerful, intimate, riveting, and revealing account of a seemingly halcyon life lived mere paces from a center of evil and madness a remarkable memoir of an "ordinary" childhood spent in an extraordinary time and place.īorn in 1934, Irmgard Hunt grew up in the picturesque Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, in the shadow of the Eagle's Nest and near Adolf Hitler's luxurious alpine retreat. On Hitler's Mountain is more than a memoir-it is a portrait of a nation that lost its moral compass. As the Nazi crimes began to be accounted for, many Germans tried to deny the truth of what had occurred Hunt, in contrast, was determined to know and face the facts of her country's criminal past. In May 1945, an eleven-year-old Hunt watched American troops occupy Hitler's mountain retreat, signaling the end of the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war-and a few brave adults who opposed the Nazi regime-aroused in her skepticism of National Socialist ideology and the Nazi propaganda she was taught to believe in. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden-just steps from Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat-Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood.
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