NONFICTION - May 5, 1991

HITLER’S CHILDREN by Gerald Posner (Random House: $20; 280 pp.) . This is a mesmerizing, blood-chilling book, a set of oral histories of the sons and daughters of 11 of Hitler’s top men. It is barely possible to read more than a few pages at a time; the contrast between innocent childhood experience, and the awful understanding of that experience that came with time, is enough to make you weep. The young son of Poland’s Governor General Hans Frank remembers driving through the Warsaw ghetto in the family limousine, and being held up to a window, where he saw a woman standing silently against the wall. Don’t be frightened, he was told. She’s a witch, and she’ll be dead soon. She was, he later learned, a member of the resistance who had been captured that day. The only truth was that she would indeed be dead soon, with his father’s blessing. Whether saddened, enraged or philosophical about a father’s past, each child is crippled by it. Except, that is, for a few of the heirs who refused Posner’s request for an interview. He mentions one son who did not cooperate, for fear his father’s stature would be diminished because the children of men of lesser rank were to be included in the book. Truly, we should not ever forget, since clearly some prideful descendants of Hitler’s madmen have not.