Helen Roche (Classics 2004) is the co-creator of a new documentary exploring the Napolas, elite boarding schools founded by the Nazis to train the future leaders of the Third Reich.
Forgotten Voices: The Third Reich’s Elite Schools builds on many years of research originating during Helen’s PhD in Classics at Gonville & Caius College between 2008 and 2012.
For her PhD, which explored the influence of ancient Sparta on 19th- and 20th-century German military education, Helen interviewed a number of former Napola pupils and quickly realised that these schools were largely overlooked in history books about Nazi Germany. Thus began her mission to amass an archive of eyewitness accounts, which became one of the sources for her 2021 book The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas.
Helen is now excited to share more of this material with a wider audience in her new documentary.
“Having an interaction and co-creating a source with another person is something very individual and unique,” says Helen. “You can never create the same oral history interview twice – if you interviewed them a week or a year or 10 years later, it would be different.
“I also find it extremely interesting to see the subtexts that come out in different interviews. Some of them are trying to create a usable past, so they’ll downplay the political nature of their education. But others are really open-minded about how it might have affected them or what would have happened if the war had gone a different way. Seeing how much people have come to terms with the past and how it affects them is incredibly interesting and moving.”
Forgotten Voices, co-created with filmmaker Alan Fentiman, compiles original video interviews and location footage from sites of former Napolas. The documentary had its German-language premiere in May at Brandenburg’s State Centre for Civic Education – where Helen has also collaborated on an exhibition about the Potsdam Napola (running until October) – and its English-language version will debut at a preview screening in Caius’ Bateman Auditorium on Friday 11 July.
Helen, who is accustomed to presenting history on the page, has found her first foray into documentary-making a rewarding experience.
She says: “I’ve always wanted to be able to communicate history in a way that people would enjoy. Being able to use the visual medium to tell stories and see the similarities to and differences from composing a narrative for a book – it’s been completely different. You have to be much more pared down and, to an extent, less nuanced with a short film. But there are other things you can do visually which are really interesting.
“At the same time, when you don’t have space for infinite complexity, you have to be careful about how you present this material so that it doesn’t in any way seem to be making the Third Reich seem like a good thing. There are so many far-right actors who could take what you’re saying and misuse it, or people on the other side of the political spectrum who might misconstrue what you’re doing. But that can help you clarify your ideas, and I think it’s been very good for my practice as a historian.”
The preview screening of Forgotten Voices will take place in Caius’ Bateman Auditorium at 8pm on Friday 11 July. The co-creators will present briefly on the genesis of the project, and the practical and ethical challenges it involved. The screening will be followed by a Q&A. All are welcome to attend.
