A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.

An item in the New York Times Book Review highlights a children’s book that, the paper says, “reminds” readers that there were “victims on both sides” during World War II.

The Times squib about the book “We Are Wolves” by Katrina Nannestad contains only a single full sentence, with no byline attached. But what a sentence it is: “This historical novel about the orphaned German children who sheltered on their own in forests at the end of World War II reminds young readers that there are victims on both sides of war.”

What a strange choice to highlight this book from among the many that are published. Had the Times chosen to highlight that there were “victims on both sides” of the US Civil War — or, of, say, the January 6, 2021 US Capitol attack or the August 2017 racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia — there’d probably be an outcry from Times readers about false equivalency or moral obtuseness. “‘Bothsidesism’ Is Poisoning America,” as a 2019 headline in The Nation put it.

Yet when it’s a book portraying German children as genuine “victims” of World War II, the Times plays along, no skepticism or cautionary notes at all.

As for the book itself, I had a look. The book begins by saying “This is a made-up story,” but it also says  that“the wolf children, the Wolfskinder, were real.”

“The wolf children were victims of war,” the book says.

The book begins with a reference to “our beloved leader, Adolf Hitler.”

“We love Hitler,” a character insists. “‘Heil Hitler!’ I shout as the soldiers disappear down the street. As one, they raise their right arms in the air and reply ‘Heil Hitler!’”

The Times item says the book is for “ages 10 to 14.” Whether you’d like your 10 year old to read a story from the point of view of a character shouting “‘Heil Hitler!” is up to you or any book-buying parent, I suppose, but on the Times website the item appears under “What to Read” — so a Times reader might plausibly take the item for a recommendation. Be warned.

The tone of the book changes after the German-soldier father of the characters goes missing in action.

“Hitler is a rat! A big fat dirty rat who lies!” a character says. “Hitler is a worm … he has lost our papa, and other people’s papas and big brothers, and now he has left us all alone to fight the Red Army in the middle of a terrible blizzard.”

“Hitler is a swine! … a big fat smelly swine! … I hate Hitler!” and, “Hitler is a goat … with fleas crawling all over his bottom!”

The focus on Hitler as a villain, though, serves, perhaps conveniently, to exculpate the individual Germans. “It’s not our fault. It’s Hitler’s fault. Hitler started the war and lost it,” one character says. That may accurately portray how Germans viewed it, but how many readers will see through that lie to a truth closer to that portrayed in the title of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners?

The roaming German children in the book encounter a former Hitler Youth member named Karl who ran away rather than follow orders to kill Jewish prisoners. Readers may be left with the false impression that such acts were typical rather than unusual. The caveat about the book being a “made-up story” is welcome, but historical fiction for children is a risky endeavor when it deals with the Holocaust era.

Doubtless some German children were indeed traumatized and deprived by the effects of World War II. What purpose, precisely, the Times sees in informing young American readers of that in 2022 is a mystery.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.