His father was a socialist and strident trade unionist, but he was powerless to prevent his son falling under the spell of an inspirational new leader. Henry Metelmann tells Nick Morrison about life in the Hitler Youth - and how he believed in the master race.

HENRY was just 16 years old and in a position many of his countrymen would envy - yards from the stage and almost within touching distance of his idol. It was with a mixture of awe and adoration that Henry listened as the man who had transfixed a nation began to speak.

"He started off quietly and then he let loose and the forelock in his hair came down in that way it did," Henry recalls, more than 60 years on. "I was so close. There he was, the greatest man on Earth. He was so charismatic, I could have died for him. I believed in him. Whatever he said, we shouted 'Heil! Heil! Heil!'."

That encounter with Adolf Hitler in a Hamburg hall was one of the proudest moments of Henry Metelmann's young life. But his membership of the Hitler Youth, which brought him the privilege of the front row, was also to drive a wedge between Henry and his father. And in his devotion to the Fuhrer lies an explanation for how a generation fell under Hitler's spell.

Henry was born in 1922 into a Germany wracked by hyperinflation. This economic collapse created the conditions for the rise of Nazism, but it meant little for young Henry, although he remembers his parents telling him the reason he was smaller and thinner than other children was that they had been unable to afford proper food for him.

He had joined the boy scout movement, but when he was 12, the year after Hitler came to power, it was decreed that there should be only one youth movement, the Hitler Youth.

'My father hated the Nazis. He was a labourer on the railways and involved in the trade union movement and he thought Hitler was just a tool of the rich," Henry says. "He said I was being brainwashed and I was being used, but I thought he was so old fashioned."

But his father's opposition was silenced by the concentration camps. One night, two cars came for one of their neighbours.

"From then on my father was frightened. He said not to tell anybody what he said at home, because they would put him in a concentration camp. He lost his influence over me, and the only influence I had was from the Hitler Youth," Henry adds.

He read Mein Kampf - "It was the greatest book on Earth," he says - and absorbed the propaganda. He was taught how to throw grenades, how to capture and defend a trench, how to shoot. They were taken on camps by the river, in the forest, by the Alps - otherwise undreamed of holidays. In the evenings they sat around camp fires and sang anti-Jewish songs. It was all part of creating a generation whose loyalty was to a racially pure Germany, and to the Fuhrer.

"My mother used to sew my clothes and I felt I looked a bit shabby, but now I was in the Hitler Youth I had brown shirts and leather. Police cleared the roads when we marched through the streets and I hoped somebody would see me. For the first time in my life I thought I was important.

"They told us we were the master race and it was our God-given duty to force our way on the rest of the world. We were more intelligent and they didn't understand but it was good for them," he says.

"When you are young and you cannot read foreign newspapers you cannot compare anything, you have only got that one source of propaganda. If the outside world can't tell you, and the inside world is afraid of concentration camps, the brainwash is total."

After leaving school, Henry was apprenticed as a locksmith on the railways. One of the first questions was whether he had joined the Hitler Youth. Those of his classmates who hadn't joined often had problems finding work.

In 1940, when he was 18, he was called up and given a place in the Panzer division. "I was so proud. I thought I couldn't rise higher than that," he says.

He went first to newly-occupied France, where the German army was in no mood to be magnanimous to the country which had defeated them more than 20 years earlier. "We chased people off the pavements. 'Get off the pavement, you Froggy'. It was great."

In 1941 he was posted to the Eastern Front, joining the Sixth Army of General Paulus. When the 22nd Panzer Division arrived in Russia there was snow on the ground. It was the middle of June.

"We beat the hell out of the Russians. Always we were told we were the best soldiers in the world," he says.

But it was in Russia that the first doubts started to set in. Driving his tank over a bridge, Henry saw three Russian prisoners being marched towards him. As he approached, one of the soldiers fell to the ground straight in front of him.

"I stopped and my commander said 'Why have you stopped?' I had to go on. They made me a murderer."

He met a Russian girl, Anna. He says it was only puppy love and nothing happened, but it made him question the mantra that the Germans were superior to other races.

The Sixth Army pushed on, towards the prize of the Middle East oil fields, but at Stalingrad the advance was halted. In the chaos of the German defeat, Henry was briefly captured by the Russians, only to escape. After arriving back in Germany in 1944, he was sent to the Western Front, where he was captured by the Americans a few weeks before the war ended.

"I remember looking at them and thinking 'How the hell could we lose a bloody war against this lot?',". He was put on board a ship and crossed the Atlantic, arriving in New York the day Victory in Europe was declared.

"It was terrible. A life without Hitler. We couldn't understand what was going to happen to us and to Germany."

Henry was taken to labour camps in Arizona and California, picking hops, fruit and cotton. And as well as the physical work, there was the re-education. "We had meetings and discussions and slowly doubt set in that I had been caught up and become a criminal. It was a painful process," he says.

Some of his fellow prisoners found the adjustment hard. After one meeting, he was threatened for making anti-Nazi comments, saved only because he played for the prisoners' football team. Another occasion he was taken to the lavatory where a German who had spoken against Hitler had been strung up.

"I can't blame them because the brainwash was so deep and the shock from believing we were the greatest nation on earth and then we were beaten was very traumatic," he says.

Towards the end of 1946 he was shipped back across the Atlantic to a prison camp in Britain. It was 1948 before he was released, but when he returned to Germany, he found there was nothing left for him there. His father had died of cancer, his mother had been killed from injuries suffered in a bombing raid on Hamburg. He had been offered a job by a brewer in England and decided to return and make his home in Britain.

Henry later followed his father into the railways, as a signalman. He married Monica, a Swiss au pair, and had two children. Now widowed, at 83 he still works as a groundsman for Charterhouse public school in Surrey.

It was after he had been invited to give a talk in a church hall that Henry became an evangelist for peace, warning of the dangers of ideology and dictatorship. Now he has reconciled himself to his past, although it was a painful process.

Ten years ago he read an English translation of Mein Kampf. "I thought 'What a load of bollocks!' I can't understand that I ever fell for it," he says. "But we were in a stream and we couldn't get out of it. I think my father would have understood."

* A Hitler Youth: Growing up in Germany in the 1930s by Henry Metelmann (Spellmount £18.99) is published on Frida