Film Premiere – Forgotten Voices: The Third Reich’s Elite Schools

What happens when a school system is built to serve a dictatorship? This powerful and unsettling 30-minute documentary uncovers the hidden legacy of the National Political Education Institutes—known as Napolas—elite boarding schools founded by the Nazis to train the future leaders of the Third Reich.

Through haunting first-person testimony, rare archival materials, and the expert insight of historian Helen Roche, the film delves deep into how these institutions indoctrinated boys into a militarized, racially charged ideology from childhood. Featuring the “forgotten voices” of former Napola students, interviewed in their homes across Germany, the film paints an unflinching portrait of daily life under authoritarian control: brutal discipline, ritualized violence, and the systematic erasure of individuality in service to the Nazi cause.

Drawing on fifteen years of research on the Napolas (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten), in 2025 Helen Roche (Durham University) and Alan Fentiman (Durham University Film-Maker in Residence) have created a short film based on a corpus of original video-interviews with surviving former Napola-pupils, as well as location footage from sites of former schools. The German-language version of the film (Die Napolas im 3. Reich: Geschichte und Erinnerung) received its premiere at the Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Potsdam, on 7 May 2025, but this will be the premiere of the English-language version.

The film and its co-creators will be introduced by Professor Rebecca Clifford of Durham University. Roche will then present briefly on the genesis of the project, and the practical and ethical challenges which it involved. For example, how can one create a sufficiently inclusive narrative about these schools’ contested history in the space of only half an hour, whilst avoiding the risk of screenings becoming politicised – and what are the challenges of working with eyewitnesses who are reaching the end of their lives?

The presentation and film screening will be followed by a Q&A.

Dr. Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at Durham University. Her work has been featured in the press nationally and internationally, including appearances in The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, on the BBC and Sky News. Key publications include Sparta’s German Children (2013), The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas (2021), and Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (ed., 2018). She is currently writing a trade monograph on the history of everyday life under fascism in interwar Europe.

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