And from then on, the holidays meant that we had no father. He probably was killed by the French underground. My father died very early in the war, in 1941. My mother was always hustling and working so we would have food and clothes.Īlso, there was a hush over the country, over the town because of all the death messages that came. The women had to take on every single job that previously was done by men, whether it was mowing the grass in the farms or chopping our wood for our wood stoves. And the women had to fend for themselves, with the men away.Ī. The radishes would grow to the size of a fingernail and the carrots would grow to the size of a pinky, so we were very, very hungry. We had two stony little gardens that we had to chop out of a mountain meadow. Our suffering was mostly that we lived in very small quarters because every free room was eventually confiscated for refugees and evacuees.Īnd the other thing was that in the mountains there was no food growing. It was nothing compared to being a child in the city with daily bombings. In Berchtesgaden, in terms of the sheer physical environment, we were a small town in the mountains and we were fairly sheltered from, for instance, bombing. So to what extent did you feel sheltered as a child?Ī. I don't know if the adults knew but most of the adults tried very hard to keep any bad news from us children.

We knew there were concentration camps but we did not think that they were death camps. I looked at that as a watershed recognition of what a horrible regime it had been and what the Germans had done.

I learned about that during the Nuremberg trials. When did you first realize that Jews were being killed in the concentration camps?Ī. 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.Q. 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.

On Hitler's Mountain by Irmgard A. Hunt