About the film

This Third Reich elite schools documentary explores one of the lesser-known chapters of the period — the Napolas, or National Political Education Institutes, elite boarding schools created to train the future leaders of Nazi Germany. Boys as young as ten were drawn into a world of strict discipline, ritual violence and relentless ideological indoctrination — institutions designed to strip away individuality and produce unwavering loyalty to the state. The film sets out to explore that history through the people who lived it, now in their nineties and among the last surviving witnesses.

Made in collaboration with Dr Helen Roche, a historian at Durham University whose research has focused on the Napola schools for more than a decade, the film brings together first-hand testimonies, personal photographs and footage filmed inside the abandoned halls of former Napola buildings. The German-language version, Die Napolas im 3. Reich: Geschichte und Erinnerung, had its premiere at the Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung in Potsdam in 2024. An early cut of the English-language version screened at Cambridge University in July 2025, where Helen and Alan introduced the film and took part in a Q&A. The trailer above offers a first look at the English-language version, which is currently being developed further subject to additional funding. A UK screening is planned once that work is complete.

Approach

Over several years, Alan and Helen travelled across Germany filming interviews in living rooms and kitchens, sometimes returning to the same locations across different seasons. Working with interviewees in their nineties brought particular care around timing, energy and the emotional weight of what was being recalled. Many of the men shared photographs from their own collections — images that had sat in drawers for decades — which became important visual material in the edit alongside footage of the school buildings themselves.

The central questions shaping this Third Reich elite schools documentary throughout production were ethical as much as editorial. How do you stay truthful to painful and complicated memories without flattening them? How do you film testimony from people approaching the end of their lives in a way that respects both the historical significance and the personal intimacy of what they are sharing? How do you present this material to audiences without the screening itself becoming politicised? These questions informed every decision, from how interviews were conducted to how the archive was handled in the edit.

Sitting in living rooms and kitchens with former Napola pupils offered a window into stories seldom heard — memories both personally intimate and historically significant.

The film does not try to resolve the complexity of its subjects. The men who attended these schools were children shaped by an extreme system, and the film holds space for that without offering easy conclusions. Editing has been a careful process of balancing testimony, visual material and historical context — trying to create something that does justice to the voices recorded and to the history they carry. The project continues, and the English-language version remains in development.