WWII and my 7 year old aspie

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Thanks all for the ideas. His respite workers husband is in the military and is going to take him on the base to see the old planes, he will get a serious thrill from that. He really likes to watch the military channel. We have been taping the shows he wants to see and screening them before he watches them. I think he is more interested in the actual combat and blowing things up than anything else. He plays strategic war games online where you set up your armies and so on. I would never think of messing up his battlefields with his army men. I am also an Aspie so I understand both him and my Autistic daughter very well. He has also taken a new interest in the Atomic Bomb but we have educated him in an appropriate way about the devastation of the bomb itself. He has decided it belongs in computer games or in his mind instead of real life. I KNOW that he doesnt want to go around killing people, Im not worried about that. I understand that he relates things to video games or pretend play in his mind. I dont want to hide what happened to the Jewish people in WWII but I do want to buffer it. I remember in high school when they showed us those movies it was almost too much for me to take then, but I know that its important for him to know what happened. For now, I think we will just take it slow and age appropriate. His uncle is thrilled that he has interest in history of war but hes also not sure of how to educate him. He doesnt understand him the same way I do.
I will look for the movies that were suggested...and again, thanks everyone and Happy Thanksgiving.

My daughter was given a copy of the diary of Anne Frank when she was 6/7 and it has been her number one special interest ever since. Others have come and gone but not this one. She's 16 now and it's still going strong. She is even talking of doing holocaust studies at university.

The History channel (or similar) usually has hours and hours of WWII content. My lads love that.

War museums are great too. My guys must go to the Imperial War Museum in London every summer. Some of the exhibits are age restricted.

Some of the army barracks often have exhibitions too.

My guys also like parades like Trooping the Colour. The trick is to go to the rehearsal (maybe a week before) not the real parade. that way they get to see all the soldiers but the crowds are not so huge. The downside is that they do not get to see the Queen (or other top dignitary). We usually get the Duke of Edinborough

Have you looked for some websites about it? I bet you could find a lot of them. My husband is way into WWII too. His dad was in the 42nd Rainbow Division in the war and his company liberated Dachau. He said he marched into Dachau on his 19th birthday. He used to tell stories about it sometimes.

PaganMom

IDK, back in my young days, my obsession was aerospace related, especially military aviation and the space shuttle.

As for what to get him, I would suggest starting with a few books, I have a good one around here showing the battles of WW2 and the actual movements of the brigades and stuff like that, can't remember what it's called and I would have to dig it out. As for videos, band of brothers is epic but very violent and profane, then again, what WW2 movie isn't.

I'm probably not an Aspie, but have a lot of the traits, and I went through a WWII phase around age 8. My parents did NO regulating in terms of my nonfiction books (Judy Blume was banned, but holocaust books and medical texts were fine -- oh, and so was Poe. In grade school!), and I turned out OK. I think information helps kids make sense of the world and helps round them out. I was more focused on the human aspects (the motivation for the holocaust, the victims' stories, etc.) and read a lot of things written from the Jewish perspective, which I believe helped develop my sense of compassion. I don't know if a kid that age needs to see emaciated bodies piled like trash, but other than some of the more awful photos, I wouldn't shelter my kids from information. Of course, I may be warped by my early and indiscriminate inundation with adult nonfiction selections.

Last year at school, when my son was 6, his class studied a selection of "famous people". My son chose to concentrate on Ann Frank, which provoked a few interesting conversations, particularly as he has three friends who are Jewish.

My son wasn't interested in the military aspects of 2nd World War, only why it was started and why the Nazis wanted to kill so many people solely because they were Jewish, disabled, etc.