Radio Live - Podcasts - Keen On America - Helene Munson on Hitler's Boy Soldiers: Can Germans Ever Forget the Second World War?

Helene Munson on Hitler's Boy Soldiers: Can Germans Ever Forget the Second World War?

Author: Andrew Keen May 30, 2022 Duration: 28:49

Helene Munson on Hitler's Boy Soldiers: Can Germans Ever Forget the Second World War?

Podcast episode

Helene Munson on Hitler's Boy Soldiers: Can Germans Ever Forget the Second World War?

Keen On America

Society Commentary Culture News

Keen On America is a sharp, fast-moving podcast hosted by author and commentator Andrew Keen. Known for asking impertinent questions, Keen cross-examines some of the world’s most thoughtful voices on politics, economics, history, culture, the environment, and technology. Each episode digs beneath headlines and hype to uncover what is really shaping America today and how those forces connect to global change. Listeners can expect challenging conversations rather than easy talking points, as Keen presses guests to explain not just what is happening, but why it matters and what might come next. Whether you are trying to make sense of polarized politics, rapid technological disruption, or shifting social norms, this show offers a bracing, critical lens. Tune in and listen episodes of Keen On America to hear Andrew Keen interrogate the ideas and assumptions that define contemporary American life.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew is joined by Helene Munson, author of Hitler’s Boy Soldiers: How My Father’s Generation Was Trained to Kill and Sent to Die for Germany.

More episodes

Don't Be Yourself: Why the Cult of Authenticity Is Killing Not Just Your Career but Your Life

Don't Be Yourself: Why the Cult of Authenticity Is Killing Not Just Your Career but Your Life

06.10.2025 Duration: 43:33

Just be yourself many career coaches tell us. But for the psychologist and entrepreneur Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, the reverse is true. Don’t Be Yourself Chamorro-Premuzic advises in his new book, arguing that authenticity…

Episode page

Two Freedoms and Two Americas: Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King's Incompatible Versions of Liberty

Two Freedoms and Two Americas: Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King's Incompatible Versions of Liberty

05.10.2025 Duration: 53:33

What unites America, it used to be said, is a common commitment to “freedom”. But in our disunited times, it's worth remembering that two incompatible versions of freedom have actually divided rather than brought the Uni…

Episode page

The Uberification of Academia: Why Adjunct Professors are Living in their Cars

The Uberification of Academia: Why Adjunct Professors are Living in their Cars

05.10.2025 Duration: 46:52

We’ve done a couple (here and here) of shows recently about the war on cars. But we never discussed the connections, both literal and metaphorical, between the damage of “Big Car” and “Big University” . According to the…

Episode page

How to Lose Loudly: What the Left can Learn from the NRA

How to Lose Loudly: What the Left can Learn from the NRA

04.10.2025 Duration: 40:11

One of the most painful lessons of the Kirk assassination is that conservatives are running rings around progressives in political mobilization - especially of young Americans. So how to make the left relevant in America…

Episode page

More Than Chinatown: Bruce Lee and the Invention of Asian American Identity

More Than Chinatown: Bruce Lee and the Invention of Asian American Identity

03.10.2025 Duration: 40:23

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” were, of course, the closing words from Polanski’s 1974 movie, Chinatown. But the point of Jeff Chang’s new biography of Bruce Lee, Water Mirror Echo, is that by 1973, when Lee died, As…

Episode page

The AI Pioneer Who Chose Purpose Over Profit: Jim Fruchterman on Why Big Tech Can't Be Trusted with Our Future

The AI Pioneer Who Chose Purpose Over Profit: Jim Fruchterman on Why Big Tech Can't Be Trusted with Our Future

02.10.2025 Duration: 44:16

Back in 1990, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Jim Fruchterman chose purpose over profit. In his new book, Technology for Good, Fruchterman explains how nonprofit leaders like him are using software and data to solve…

Episode page

World Enemy Number One: Nazi Germany's Obsession with 'Judeo-Bolshevism'

World Enemy Number One: Nazi Germany's Obsession with 'Judeo-Bolshevism'

01.10.2025 Duration: 53:31

It’s not exactly news that the Nazis didn’t like the Jews. But according to the Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck, author of World Enemy Number One, the Nazi obsession went so far as to believe that the Soviet Union was…

Episode page

The True Cost of Roadkill: Cars Have Caused 60 to 80 Million Deaths in the Last 100 Years

The True Cost of Roadkill: Cars Have Caused 60 to 80 Million Deaths in the Last 100 Years

30.09.2025 Duration: 53:58

The numbers are mind blowing. According to Roadkill authors Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, cars have killed more people than both world wars combined. That’s how toxic our relationship with cars has been over the last c…

Episode page

Is that $320,000 College Degree Really Worth It? The President of Brandeis on why Colleges Must Adapt or Become Irrelevant

Is that $320,000 College Degree Really Worth It? The President of Brandeis on why Colleges Must Adapt or Become Irrelevant

29.09.2025 Duration: 36:32

It’s the $320,000 question both parents and students are asking themselves: Is that four-year liberal arts degree really worth it? According to Brandeis University President Arthur Levine, it’s a question they should, in…

Episode page

The Dark Passions Driving American Politics: Why Liberals Must Acknowledge Anger, Fear, and the Lust for Domination

The Dark Passions Driving American Politics: Why Liberals Must Acknowledge Anger, Fear, and the Lust for Domination

28.09.2025 Duration: 46:07

Some liberals might shake their virtuous heads and tut-tut disapprovingly. But, as the Brookings scholar William Galston argues, Donald Trump’s Old Testament politics of retribution has exposed the limitations of liberal…

Episode page

The AI Assistant That Knows Your Life Before You Do: The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End?

The AI Assistant That Knows Your Life Before You Do: The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End?

27.09.2025 Duration: 37:59

“It’s happening. The question is whether it’s a dream or a nightmare. This week, OpenAI introduced Pulse, an AI assistant that knows what we want to do and think before we do. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare welc…

Episode page

TRUMP IS NOT POPULAR: How a Sub 40% Approval Offers Hope for the Dems

TRUMP IS NOT POPULAR: How a Sub 40% Approval Offers Hope for the Dems

26.09.2025 Duration: 54:20

“What Trump is doing is not popular”. For the This Old Democracy podcaster and veteran Democratic activist Micah Sifry, that’s the good news of Trump’s sub-40% approval rate. The bad news, Sifry warns, is that the Dems r…

Episode page

The Idiocracy Trap: Why Smart Machines are making Humans Dumb & Dumber

The Idiocracy Trap: Why Smart Machines are making Humans Dumb & Dumber

25.09.2025 Duration: 46:28

Jacob Ward warned us. Back in January 2022, the Oakland-based tech journalist published The Loop, a warning about how AI is creating a world without choices. He even came on this show to warn about AI’s threat to humanit…

Episode page

Halfway to Hungary: Jonathan Rauch on the Authoritarian Playbook that Trump Borrowed from a Small, Landlocked Central European State

Halfway to Hungary: Jonathan Rauch on the Authoritarian Playbook that Trump Borrowed from a Small, Landlocked Central European State

24.09.2025 Duration: 44:34

So where exactly is Trump’s America? According to the Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch, the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power is “half way to Hungary” - the small, landlocked Central European country r…

Episode page

The Case Against the United Nations: The Israel Obsession, Rwanda, and the Haiti Peacekeeping Scandal

The Case Against the United Nations: The Israel Obsession, Rwanda, and the Haiti Peacekeeping Scandal

24.09.2025 Duration: 48:00

Donald Trump made his own controversial case against the United Nations at the UN today, lecturing world leaders that “the UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.” But he was beaten to thi…

Episode page

Logo

Select station

—

VOL