Hitler's Children

This powerful piece of anti-Nazi propaganda shows the horrors of life in Germany under Hitler's rule, before anyone really knew just how bad things were. Bonita Granville plays Anna, a German-American student at an American school in 1930s Germany who befriends a Hitler Youth from next door named Karl (Tim Holt). As the Nazis rise to power, Anna is yanked out of school through a bureaucratic mix-up, mistaken for a German and forced to undergo persecution, flogging, and other horrors at the hands of the thuggish Nazis. Karl meanwhile wrestles with his conscience and social conditioning, as he struggles to find his ostracized friend. One memorable sequence has the terrified girl hiding in the attic of a church as the Nazis search for her in the presence of the startled congregation. Unabashedly lurid and manipulative, the film was a huge hit at the time, revealing young director Edward Dmytryk's genius at combining sociopolitical propaganda and suspense, staple elements of his work throughout the next 30 years of his career.