The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  A student essay written in 1938, however, registered the effects of years of indoctrination on the opinions of the young. ‘Jews’, it claimed, ‘do not constitute a race in itself, but are a branch of the Asiatic and Oriental race with a negroid mixture.’ Jews, it went on, had made up 60 per cent of the higher civil service under the Weimar Republic (an estimate many times higher than the true figure) and ‘the theatre was completely Jewified too’, an equally drastic, vulgar overestimation. Despite this, ‘You’ll never have seen a Jew working, because they only want to trick their fellow men, non-Jews, out of their hard-earned money.’ Jews, it concluded, ‘had driven the German people into the abyss. This time is now over.’133

  These student essays reflected a sharp change in the direction of teaching, ordained from above. History, ruled a directive issued on 9 May 1933 by the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, had to take a commanding position in the schools. The idea that history should be objective, added the General German Teachers’ Paper (Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerzeitung) on 9 August 1933, was a fallacy of liberalism. The purpose of history was to teach people that life was always dominated by struggle, that race and blood were central to everything that happened in the past, present and future, and that leadership determined the fate of peoples. Central themes in the new teaching included courage in battle, sacrifice for a greater cause, boundless admiration for the Leader and hatred of Germany’s enemies, the Jews. 134 Such themes found their way into the teaching of many other subjects too. Biology was transformed to include ‘the laws of heredity, racial teaching, racial hygiene, teaching about the family, and population policy’ from the latter part of 1933 onwards.135 Basic reading primers acquired a picture of Hitler, often in the company of children, on their cover or as a frontispiece, or sometimes both. Tiny children learned to recite verses like the following:My Leader!

  I know you well and love you like my mother and father.

  I will always obey you like I do my father and mother.

  And when I grow up, I will help you like I will my father and mother,

  And you will be pleased with me.136

  Reading books such as the German Reading Book, issued in 1936, were filled with stories about children helping the Leader, about the healthy virtues of peasant life, or about the happiness of Aryan families with lots of children. A favourite was a story by Hitler’s press chief Otto Dietrich, recounting Hitler’s bravery in flying by aeroplane through a massive storm during the Presidential election campaign of April 1932. The Leader’s serenity conveyed itself to Dietrich and the other Nazis on the plane and calmed the terror they felt as the winds tossed the plane about the sky.137 By the mid-1930s there was scarcely a reading primer which did not mention one Nazi institution or another in a positive way.138 Picture-books for the very young portrayed Jews as devilish figures lurking in dark places, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting blond-haired German child.139

  Some textbooks from the Weimar era remained widely in use for a while, though they were increasingly frequently censored at a local or school level, and already in 1933 the state committees that checked school textbooks were purged and staffed with committed Nazis. A steady stream of directives flowed from the education authorities in the regions, while additional teaching materials were also issued by Nazi teachers’ organizations in different parts of the country. Thus teachers knew within a few months of the Nazi seizure of power the basic outlines of what they had to teach. A directive issued in January 1934 made it compulsory for schools to educate their pupils ‘in the spirit of National Socialism’.140 In order to help achieve this aim, the Breslau regional chapter of the Nazi Teachers’ League for instance had issued more than a hundred extra pamphlets by the beginning of 1936 on subjects from ‘5,000 Years of the Swastika’ to ‘The Jew and the German Person’. They were sold to pupils for 11 pfennigs each. In some schools the teachers added to the education of their pupils in such matters by reading out loud to them articles from Julius Streicher’s The Stormer.141 All this was backed up by a whole battery of central government requirements, ranging from forced attendance in every school hall in the land to listen to Hitler’s speeches when they were broadcast on the radio, to the compulsory requirement to watch films issued by the school film propaganda division of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry from 1934, including movies thought to have an appeal to the young such as Hitler Youth Quex and Hans Westmar. In every school, libraries were combed for non-Nazi literature and Nazi books stocked instead. Increasingly, classes were interrupted in order for the teachers and pupils to celebrate a whole variety of Nazi festivals, from Hitler’s birthday to the commemoration of fallen martyrs of the Nazi movement. School noticeboards were covered in Nazi propaganda posters, adding to the general atmosphere of indoctrination from very early on in the Third Reich.142

  From 1935 onwards, regional initiatives were augmented by central directives covering the teaching of a whole variety of different subjects in different years. By 1938, these directives covered every school year and most subjects, even those without any directly ideological content.143 The teaching of the German language had to focus on speech patterns as the product of racial background, German words as instruments of German national consciousness and modes of speech as expressions of character.144 Even physics teaching was reoriented towards military-related topics such as ballistics, aerodynamics and radiocommunication, though necessarily a good deal of the teaching of basic principles had no clear political point of reference.145 Biology was redirected towards the study of race.146 Basic arithmetic textbooks compiled under the Education Ministry’s direction also began to appear from 1935. A central feature of these books was their inclusion of ‘social arithmetic’, which involved calculations designed to achieve a subliminal indoctrination in key areas - for example, sums requiring the children to calculate how much it would cost the state to keep a mentally ill person alive in an asylum.147 ‘The proportion of nordic-falian blood in the German people is estimated as ⅘ of the population,’ went one such question: ‘A third of these can be regarded as blond. According to these estimates, how many blond people must there be in the German population of 66 million?’148 Geography was recast in terms of Nazi ideology to stress ‘the concepts of home, race, heroism and organicism’, as the chapter headings of one handbook for teachers put it. Climate was linked to race, and teachers were advised that studying the Orient was a good way into the ‘Jewish question’.149 Innumerable geography textbooks propagated concepts such as living-space and blood and soil, and purveyed the myth of Germanic racial superiority.150 World maps and new textbooks emphasized the importance of geopolitics, implicitly underpinned the concept of ‘one people, one Reich’, or traced the expansion of Germanic tribes across East-Central Europe in the Middle Ages.151

  II

  Despite all these developments, teachers in some situations did retain a little room for manoeuvre. Many village schools were tiny, and the majority of all elementary schools still had only one or two classes in 1939. Teachers here could exercise a degree of freedom in interpreting the materials they were fed by the regime. Moreover, some textbook writers seem to have colluded implicitly with officials in the Ministry of Education to include a good dose of ideologically neutral material in their publications, enabling teachers whose priorities were educational rather than ideological to exercise a degree of choice.152 One handbook for primary schoolteachers, issued by the National Socialist Teachers’ League in 1938, insisted that the three Rs had to remain at the core of the curriculum. Children would serve the nation better, its author declared, if they mastered basic skills of literacy and numeracy before going on to secondary tasks.153 The more intelligent pupils, such as the artist Joseph Beuys, who went to school in a Catholic area of western Germany during this period, later remembered how they could spot which teachers were ‘opponents of the regime beneath the surface’; sometimes they distanced themselves by easily deniable gestures such as adopting an unorthodox stance or attitude when renderi
ng the Hitler salute.154 One teacher in a Cologne school greeted his class ironically every morning with the salute: ‘Hail, You Ancient Germanic Tribesmen!’ Many made it clear that they were paying no more than lip-service to Nazi ideology.155 Yet such ambiguities could have a damaging effect on teaching. As one girl who left Germany at the age of sixteen in 1939 reported, the children were well aware that many of the teachers

  had to pretend to be Nazis in order to remain in their posts, and most of the men teachers had families which depended on them. If somebody wanted to be promoted he had to show what a fine Nazi he was, whether he really believed what he was saying or not. In the last two years, it was very difficult for me to accept any teaching at all, because I never knew how much the teacher believed in or not.156

  Really open dissent in the schools had become virtually impossible long before the eve of the war.157

  As employees of the state, teachers fell under the provisions of the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, and politically unreliable pedagogues were soon being identified by a network of investigative committees established by the Prussian Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, who was himself a schoolteacher and a Nazi Regional Leader. Packed with active Nazis and controlled by the Regional Leaders and local Nazi officials, these committees brought about the removal of 157 out of 1,065 male secondary school heads in Prussia, 37 out of 515 male senior teachers and 280 out of 11,348 tenured male teachers. No fewer than 23 out of 68, or 32 per cent, of all women heads of secondary schools in Prussia were sacked.158 In some areas the proportion was higher. In the Social Democratic and Communist stronghold of Berlin, for instance, 83 out of 622 head teachers were fired, and progressive institutions such as the Karl Marx School in the working-class district of Neukölln were reorganized under Nazi auspices, in this case with the loss of 43 out of 74 teachers.159 Those Jewish teachers who were not fired in April 1933 were compulsorily pensioned off in 1935; two years later, Jews and ‘half-Jews’ were formally banned from teaching in non-Jewish schools.160 Yet in general the proportion of dismissals was relatively low. The fact that so few non-Jewish teachers had been purged suggests powerfully that the great majority of schoolteachers were not unsympathetic to the Nazi regime. Indeed, they had been one of the better represented professional groups in the Party and its upper echelons before 1933, reflecting among other things a widespread discontent at salary cuts, sackings and job losses as the Weimar Republic reduced state expenditure during the Depression.161

  The National Socialist Teachers’ League, founded in April 1927 by another schoolteacher-become-Regional-Leader, Hans Schemm, increased its membership rapidly from 12,000 at the end of January 1933 to 220,000 by the end of the year, as teachers scrambled to secure their positions by this obvious manifestation of their loyalty to the new regime. By 1936, fully 97 per cent of all schoolteachers, some 300,000 in all, were members, and the following year the League belatedly succeeded in merging into itself all the remaining professional associations. Some, like the Catholic Teachers’ League, were forcibly closed down, in this case in 1937. Others, such as specialist groups of teachers in particular subjects, continued to exist as separate entities or sub-groups of the National Socialist Teachers’ League. The League initially had to contend with a rival organization, the German Educationalists’ Community, backed by a rival Nazi boss, the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. But it emerged victorious. From 6 May 1936 the League was formally responsible for the political indoctrination of teachers, which it carried out by setting up political education courses, usually lasting for between one and two weeks, in its own special camps. Of the teachers employed in German schools in 1939 215,000 had undergone this training, which, like the fare offered at other Nazi camps, also included a large dose of military drill, physical jerks, marches, songs and the like, and required all the inmates to wear a military-style uniform for the duration of their stay.162

  The pressures on teachers to follow the Nazi line were not just exerted from above. An incautious word in class could result in a teacher being arrested. On one occasion, a 38-year-old teacher in the Ruhr district told a joke to her class of twelve-year-olds that she immediately realized could be given an interpretation critical of the regime; despite her entreaties to the children not to pass it on, one of them, who had a grudge against her, told his parents, who promptly informed the Gestapo. Not only the teacher, who denied any intention of insulting the state, but also five of the children were interrogated. They had liked their previous teacher better, one of them said, adding that this was not the first time that the woman under arrest had told a political joke in class. On 20 January 1938 she was brought before the Special Court in Düsseldorf, found guilty and ordered to pay a fine; her three-week imprisonment on remand was taken into account. She had already been dismissed from her job at the beginning of the affair several weeks before. In everyday schoolroom situations, which were saturated with political obligations of one kind and another, fears of denunciation must have been widespread. Teachers under suspicion were likely to receive frequent visits from the inspectors, and every teacher, it was reported, who tried to reduce the impact of the increasingly Nazified teaching he was required to give, ‘had to consider every word before he said it, since the children of the old “Party comrades” are constantly watching out so that they can put in a denunciation.’163

  Pressures to conform worked both ways; children who failed to give the required ‘Hail, Hitler’ greeting, for example, could be disciplined; in one instance, where Catholic schoolgirls were found greeting each other with the formula ‘H.u.S.n.w.K’, which a pro-Nazi girl learned, under a promise of strict secrecy, meant ‘Heil und Sieg, nie wieder Krieg’, ‘Hail and Victory, War Never Again’, a full-scale police investigation was launched. The new emphasis of the regime on physical education and military discipline played into the hands of traditionalist disciplinarians and martinets as well as newly fledged Nazis among the teaching staff. Corporal punishment and beatings became more common in schools, as the military spirit began to permeate the educational system. ‘In his lessons’, wrote a headmaster admiringly of one of his teachers, ‘a sharp Prussian wind blows, that does not suit the slack and idle students.’ Correspondingly, children who failed to show the required upright posture, who did not stand to attention smartly when addressed, or who showed any kind of ‘softness and slackness’ were in for trouble from Nazis and authoritarians on the staff.164

  Yet teachers had to endure a barrage of criticism from adult Nazi activists at every level, starting with Hitler himself, and going on to what one group of teachers called ‘a tone of contempt for the teaching profession’ in the speeches of the Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach. The result of such open contempt was, they went on, ‘that nobody wants to take up the teaching profession any more, since it is treated in this way by top officials and is no longer respected’.165 This observation was no idle complaint. Continuing pressure by the government to keep pay down in order to make money available for other aspects of state expenditure, such as armaments, added to the deterrent effect. In small village schools, teachers found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet as they were deprived of their traditional sources of additional income as village scribes, while many found it impossible to function as paid church organist and choirmaster at a time of growing conflict between the Church and the Party.166 Increasing numbers of teachers took early retirement or left the profession for other jobs. In 1936, there were 1,335 unfilled posts in elementary schools; by 1938 the number had grown to nearly 3,000 while the annual number of graduates from teacher training colleges, at 2,500, was nowhere near adequate to the estimated need of the school system for an additional 8,000 teachers a year.167 The result was that by 1938, class sizes on average in all schools had increased to 43 pupils per teacher as compared to 37 in 1927, while less than one-fourteenth of all secondary schoolteachers were now under the age of forty.168

  Those teachers who re
mained in the profession soon lost much of the enthusiasm with which so many of them had greeted the coming of the Third Reich. The militarization of educational life caused increasing disillusion. ‘We’re nothing more than a department of the Army Ministry, ’ teachers were reported to be saying in 1934.169 The training camps they were required to attend were particularly unpopular.170 More and more time had to be spent away on officer training courses and military exercises.171 The lives of school heads and administrators were made a misery by endless regulations and decrees poured down from a whole variety of different agencies, one often contradicting the other. A Social Democratic observer described the situation in drastic terms towards the end of 1934:Everything that has been built up over a century of work by the teaching profession is no longer there in essence. Only the outer shell is still standing; the school houses and the teachers and the pupils are still there, but the spirit and the inner organization has gone. They have been wilfully destroyed from above. No thought any more of proper working methods in school, or of the freedom of teaching. In their place we have cramming and beating schools, prescribed methods of learning and apprehensively circumscribed learning materials. Instead of freedom of learning, we have the most narrow-minded school supervision and spying on teachers and pupils. No free speech is permitted for teachers and pupils, no inner, personal empathy. The whole thing has been taken over by the military spirit, and by drill.172