Home-grown Nazi horrors and doomed romance as Nancy Drew’s fertility is threatened by the Fuehrer. Warner Bros.’ Archive Collection has released 1943’s smash WWII meller, HITLER’S CHILDREN, directed by Edward Dmytryk (MURDER, MY SWEET, THE CAINE MUTINY) for RKO, and starring Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, Kent Smith, Otto Kruger, H.B. Warner, Lloyd Corrigan, Erford Gage, Hans Conried, Gavin Muir and Nancy Gates. Sensationalism directed with a lurid eye, HITLER’S CHILDREN delivers the exploitation goods for fans of “Golden Age” B programmers. No extras for this good fullscreen black and white standard DVD transfer.

Germany, 1933. A small, dusty Berlin lane — and mile-wide ideologies — separate the American Colony School, run by Professor Nichols (Kent Smith, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, TV’s THE NIGHT STALKER) where happy, laughing kids play baseball and ping pong, and the Horst Wessel School, where row after row of sullen, ramrod-straight Hitler-Jugend listen to lessons about how Germany was betrayed by the Versailles Treaty, and how the Fatherland must one day rule the world. American-born but German-raised Karl Bruner (Tim Holt, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE) can’t help but be attracted to German-born but American-raised Anna Muller (Bonita Granville, NANCY DREW...DETECTIVE, THE LONE RANGER) when she cracks him over the head with a baseball bat, an attraction Anna returns whenever Karl shows up in his Nazi-style hiking shorts. However, Sunday picnics with her and the Professor, and reams of freedom-loving Goethe can’t sway Karl from the Fuehrer’s grip, and he’s soon swept up in the storm of Nazism on the march.

Germany, 1939. Lieutenant Karl, now an aide to silky, evil Gestapo Colonel Henkel (Otto Kruger, SABOTEUR, DRACULA’S DAUGHTER), is drawn back into Anna’s world when Anna is declared a German citizen and forcibly removed to a woman’s camp where she’ll be trained as a mother/soldier for Germany. With the help of frightened journalist Franz Erhart (Lloyd Corrigan, THE GHOST BREAKERS, CONFESSIONS OF BOSTON BLACKIE), Professor Nichols tracks her down, but she insists he leave her alone, lest he be punished — a sentiment seconded by a conflicted Karl. When Karl tries to help make life “easier” for Anna by putting her name up for spy school, she balks, and is sent back to camp, this time as a common laborer. Karl, still in love, begs her to have his baby for the Fatherland, to save herself. Anna, still in love, refuses to have a child for the Fuehrer, and escapes the camp. Now on the run, will Anna and Karl find happiness in the Third Reich?

HITLER’S CHILDREN was a massive hit when released in January, 1943, bringing in for RKO over $3 ½ million dollars in rentals (off an $8 million dollar U.S. gross), on a paltry $200,000+ budget. It was one of the top ten grossing movies of 1943, and certainly the most profitable (budget to gross ratio) movie in RKO’s history. Figuring out why a movie was such a boffo ticket seller is frequently a guessing game, particularly when almost 75 years have since passed (and back when there was little if any reliable audience data from the studios). While it’s tempting to blow off HITLER’S CHILDREN as sensationalistic hyperbole that captured a titillated war-time audience, it’s important to remember the storyline had a basis in then-timely fact: it was very loosely adapted from journalist Gregor Ziemer's well-regarded book, Education For Death, detailing his ten years as an American teaching school in Nazi-run Germany (anyone who’s read even a little bit about Hitler’s Germany will see that the “sensationalistic” material in HITLER’S CHILDREN comes off as positively quaint compared to what really happened there).

There’s no question, though, that RKO sold HITLER’S CHILDREN from a shocking mens’ magazine angle; the one-sheet movie poster copy screams, “WE KNOW WHAT TO DO TO WOMEN WHO ARE NOT FIT TO BE NAZI MOTHERS!” over the image of a jack-booted thug holding a whip (it could easily be an Argosy or True cover). But shocking melodrama alone probably didn’t account for this cheap B’s huge crossover appeal to A-level audiences and grosses; its doomed love affair between feisty, pretty Bonita Granville and wavering sadist/sensitive lover Tim Holt (the underrated Holt is terrific here) must have intrigued the increasingly female-centered home front audiences that didn’t mind a little Nazi perversion to spice up their dime store romance. Except for one or two instances of obviously slipped-in Commie propaganda from admitted Reds Emmet Lavery and director Dmytryk (who took over for fired Irving Reis), the script sticks to a basic Nazi-meets-girl, Nazi-loves-girl, Nazi-loses-girl romantic melodrama framework, with a (now fading fast) all-American context of God-given individual freedom threatened by an all-powerful, dangerous State (“Hollywood Ten” Dmytryk wasn’t lying when he eventually turned rat for HUAC; Communist agit-prop was present in a lot of his early outings — just listen to a strident Granville calling for people to “unite,” because “the whole world is everybody’s business now,” after a fellow student questions the League of Nations’ worth).