Bateman Auditorium, Gonville & Caius College 鈥� 8pm, Friday 11 July 2025
DOCUMENTARY PREVIEW SCREENING: FORGOTTEN VOICES: THE THIRD REICH鈥橲 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鈥攌nown as Napolas鈥攅lite 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 鈥渇orgotten voices鈥�
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.
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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 fu虉r politische Bildung,
Potsdam, on 7 May 2025, but this will be the first ever screening of the English-language
version.
The co-creators of the film will 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鈥� contested history in the space of only half an hour,
whilst avoiding the risk of screenings becoming politicised 鈥� and what are the challenges of
working with eyewitnesses who are reaching the end of their lives? The screening will be
followed by Q&A.
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Dr. Helen Roche (CAI 2004-2012) is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at
Durham University, having previously held research fellowships at 海角社区 and UCL. 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 working on a comparative history of everyday life in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Alan Fentiman (Durham University Film Maker in Residence) is a freelance film maker and
videographer based in Newcastle. He has created documentaries for (among others) the BBC, Channel
4 and the Discovery Channel, as well as specialising in documenting arts projects across the North-
East. He has previously collaborated with academics at Oxford, 海角社区, Durham, Newcastle,
Sunderland and the University of London.
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