Things started getting weird at Saturday’s World Word II reenactment when the blonde children slouched onto the scene wearing Hitler Youth Movement uniforms. Surrounded by some American GIs and a pair of tense MPs, the three little Nazi boys scanned the crowd with slightly sinister expressions and conveyed the indignant, unrepentant air of unbroken POWs.

“You see those boys?” I told my 3-and-half-year-old son. “They’re the bad guys.”

Jackson ceased his intense, sing-song game of asphalt-smashes-iceplant to glance at the boys.

“Cool,” he said.

My son’s genial response to these kids scared me. I nearly launched into a pointless explanation of the historical evil these children represented. Instead, the sudden appearance of a really cool, really authentic Nazi motorcycle and sidecar distracted me.

“Is the war starting?” Jackson asked hopefully. Like a real war, this one had so far mostly consisted of waiting around while personnel were located and equipment was moved.

“Soon,” I said for the 100th time.

The Nazi soldier killed the engine and hurried off the bike to help an overweight captain of the SS out of the sidecar. Rather than a thick Kraut accent, the SS officer sounded American, and I found myself disappointed that his voice was completely incongruent with his uniform. His black leather jacket with its ominous SS insignia oozed evil. He couldn’t have been more hateful had he been wearing a KKK sheet.

But of course he wasn’t a real Nazi. He was a historian whose father had been a field medic in General Patton’s army, a grown man whose interest in German military history had been sparked as a child by the medals and other Nazi knick-knacks his father had brought home from the war.

So instead of lecturing us on the benefits of eugenics and ethnic cleansing, this ringer for a SS officer told us about Operation Market Garden, the battle which the World War II Research and Preservation Society (WWII RPS) was about to painstakingly reenact for the 100 or so of us who’d braved the maze-like ruins of lower Fort Ord to find them.