Tags: Claudia Michelsen | Dennis Gansel | Joachim Bissemeyer | Martin Goeres | Tom Schilling

The Napola were the famous Nazi Youth (Napola - Elite fur den Fuhrer), the specially trained teenagers of the Führer.

Despite our knowledge of WWII, the film manages to capture the excitement they experienced as Hitler's soldiers, and provides a very different perspective to what I knew of the war.

In Napola (AKA Before the Fall) Frederich is the son of a poor family, and he is accepted into the Academy due to his excellent boxing skills. His threat to expose his parents to the Gestapo for speaking against the Führer reminds us of innocence lost and destroyed by the ambition of the nazi party.

The pride of these boys as they are accepted into the Academy is intertwined with the certain knowledge that they will die in war, fighting for a cause they don't know to be false. At the end, Frederich must choose between his pacifist best friend, or the war.