'The Third Reich’s Youngest Nazi

Posted by Christopher Eger May 26, 2008

Only four years old when Hitler invaded Poland and barely a year older when his home near Minsk in the former Soviet Union was occupied by the Axis powers, Ilya Galperin found himself in a most unenviable positioned. He was an orphan brought up in the madness that was the eastern front. Being adopted by the pro-Nazi Latvian police (many of whom were credited with some of the worst atrocities committed in the Soviet Union) the boy was renamed "Alex” by the soldiers, uniformed and made an honorary member of the unit.

He wandered across the war zone with the unit and was even forced to partake in Jewish pogroms and war crimes. The fact that he was a Jew and Russian by birth he carefully hid. The young mascot met Hitler, handed out candy bars to Jews being lined up to board trains to death camps, and even lured girls to be gang raped by squads of his soldier-uncles.

By the time the war was over he was just Ten years old.

By age 15 he had fled to Australia and reinvented himself. He kept his secret hidden for more than forty years until telling his family. Now his tragic story has been told in an excellent article by Olga Craig from the Telegraph and in the book - The Mascot: The Extraordinary Story of a Young Jewish Boy and an SS Extermination Squad, by Mark Kurzem, who is the son of one Alex Kurzem, an old Australian carpenter formerly known as Ilya Galperin.