By means of archived memoirs, published memoirs, and school essays from the 1947–1949 period, this article investigates how the Hitler Youth generation (born 1925–1933) narrativizes their family histories. The postwar memories of the National Socialist era differ depending on medium and time among the Hitler Youth generation.
Both are fundamental in helping one to grasp the struggle of this generation to master the Nazi past on national and personal levels. This paper shows how archived memoirs pass family stories intergenerationally using Fivush and Merrill's enlarged definition of ecological systems to investigate family stories. Its main conclusion is that these stories serve as memory tools for passing tales of Nazi Germany family life; hence, this exposes narrative gaps and inconsistencies as well as occasionally the narrator's incapacity to deal with compromised family members. Consequently, they turned to the young population of Germany to bear the heavy weight of reconstruction; most of them had belonged to the Hitler Youth and were
likewise psychologically shattered and lost.