The Third Reich in Power
Page 36
Measured by normal academic standards, the level of education provided by the Order Castles was not high. The overwhelming emphasis on physical training and the ideologically driven curriculum made them poor substitutes for a conventional higher education, and the criteria on which the students were selected left intellectual ability more or less out of account. In July 1939 Vogelsang Castle was the subject of withering criticism by an internal Nazi Party report, which pilloried the low intellectual level of the graduates and expressed serious doubts about their ability to give a coherent account of Nazi ideology and added: ‘Only in the smallest number of cases does blooming health and strength also vouch for a pronounced intellectual capacity.’ As early as 1937, Goebbels’s paper The Attack had raised doubts about the institution’s effectiveness after a reporter had heard one of the earliest graduates ‘give an ideologically coloured lecture, but he didn’t say much to the point. Have the right people been selected at all?’ it asked pointedly. Two years later, the situation in Vogelsang Castle descended into chaos when its commander, Richard Manderbach, whose main claim to distinction was that he had founded the first branch of the stormtroopers in the Siegerland district in 1924, was discovered to have had his youngest child secretly baptized in a Catholic church. Although Manderbach denied any knowledge of this, the Junkers greeted him in the dining hall and the teaching room with rude choruses, songs and shouts demanding to know why he had been consorting with ‘Pope and priest’. Order was only restored with his dismissal on 10 June 1939.239 As one of the students of the Adolf Hitler School housed in the Order Castle at Sonthofen, the future Hollywood movie actor Hardy Krüger, later noted, the students were constantly told that they were going to be the leaders of Nazi Germany in the future, so it was not surprising that they did not tolerate ideological backsliding. In an atmosphere that encouraged physical toughness and ruthlessness, he added, bullying and physical abuse of the younger by the older boys was inevitably widespread, the general spirit brutal and rough.240
The same ideas that inspired the Adolf Hitler Schools, the Order Castles and to a more limited extent the Napolas were also evident in yet another elite school, founded under the aegis of Ernst Röhm and the SA: the National Socialist High School on the Starnberger Lake. A private school owned by the brownshirt organization, opened in January 1934, it had only been in existence for a few months when Röhm was shot dead on Hitler’s orders. In desperation, the school’s head sought to preserve it by putting it under the protection first of Franz Xaver Schwarz, the Party Treasurer, then of Rudolf Hess’s office, where Martin Bormann was the key functionary. On 8 August 1939 Hess renamed it the Reich School of the NSDAP Feldafing, by which time it had already become the most successful of the Nazi elite schools. Housed in forty villas, some of them confiscated from their Jewish owners, the school was under the academic control of the Nazi Teachers’ League, and all the pupils and teachers were automatically members of the SA. With its powerful patrons in the top ranks of the Party, the school managed without too much difficulty to obtain lavish funding and first-rate equipment, and, with its connections to the teaching profession, it provided a much better academic education than the other elite schools, although it shared with them a common emphasis on sport, physical training and character-building. Yet critics maintained that the pupils, often the scions of high-ranking Party officials, learned only how to be playboys.241 All in all, none of the elite schools could match the standards of Germany’s long-established academic grammar schools. Eclectic and often contradictory in their approach, they lacked any coherent educational concept that could serve as the basis for training a new functional elite to rule a modern technological nation like Germany in the future. On the eve of the war, with a mere 6,000 male and 173 female pupils in the sixteen Napolas, the ten Adolf Hitler Schools and the Reich School combined, they formed only a small part of the boarding school system: at the same point in time, September 1939, other residential schools were educating 36,746 pupils of both sexes, or six times as many.242
Nevertheless, the low academic standards evident in the Napolas, the Adolf Hitler Schools and the Order Castles had also begun to become apparent in the state school system by the eve of the Second World War. At every level, formal learning was given decreased emphasis as the hours devoted to physical education and sport in the state schools were increased in 1936 to three a week, then in 1938 to five, and fewer lessons were devoted to academic subjects to make room for indoctrination and preparation for war.243 Children still learned the three Rs, and in grammar schools and other parts of the secondary education system much more than this, but there can be little doubt that the quality of education was steadily declining. By 1939 employers were complaining that school graduates’ standards of knowledge of language and arithmetic were poor and that ‘the level of school knowledge of the examinees has been sinking for some time’.244 Yet this did not cause any concern to the regime. As Hans Schemm, the leader of the Nazi Teachers’ League up to 1935, declared: ‘The goal of our education is the formation of character’, and he complained that too much knowledge had been crammed into children, to the detriment of character-building. ‘Let us have’, he said, ‘. . . ten pounds less knowledge and ten calories more character!’245 The progressive demoralization of the teaching profession, the growing shortage of staff and the consequent increase in class sizes also had their effects. As we have seen, the Hitler Youth proved a thoroughly disruptive influence on formal education. ‘School’, one Social Democratic report already noted in 1934, ‘is constantly disrupted by Hitler Youth events.’ Teachers had to allow pupils time off for them almost every week.246 The abolition of the compulsory ceremonies attached to the State Youth Day, which on one reckoning had taken up 120 hours of out-of-school preparation each year, in 1936, made little real difference in this respect.247 Despite the military-style discipline in the schools, there were numerous reports of indiscipline and disorder, violent incidents between pupils, and insubordination towards teachers.248 ‘One can’t speak of the teacher having authority any more,’ noted one Social Democratic agent in 1937: ‘The snotty-nosed little brats of the Hitler Youth decide what goes on at school, they’re in charge.’249
In the same year, the teachers of one district in Franconia complained in the half-yearly report of their branch of the National Socialist Teachers’ League that the attitude of pupils towards education was giving repeated cause for justified complaints and to concern about the future. There is a widespread lack of zeal for work and feeling for duty. Many school pupils believe that they can just sail through their school-leaving examinations by sitting tight for eight years even if they fall way below the required intellectual standard. In the Hitler Youth and Junior Hitler Youth units there is no kind of support for school; on the contrary, it is precisely those pupils who serve in leading positions there who are noticeable for their disobedient behaviour and their laziness at school. It is necessary to report that school discipline is noticeably declining and to a worrying degree.250
Educational standards had declined markedly by 1939. What really mattered was, as one Social Democratic observer noted ruefully in June 1937: ‘Whether one observes young people playing or working, whether one reads what they write or visits their homes, whether one looks through the school timetable or even follows what goes on at camp, there is only one will that rules the entire carefully devised and ever more efficiently operating machine: the will to war.’251
‘ STRUGGLE AGAINST THE INTELLECT’
I
While the Nazis concentrated a great deal of effort on turning the school system to their own purposes after 1933, they were somewhat less vigorous in imposing their views on Germany’s universities. Only in 1934, with the founding of the Reich Education Ministry, did the regime really began to get a grip on higher education from the centre. Even then, the grip was but a feeble one. Not only was the Education Minister Bernhard Rust weak and indecisive, he was also fundamentally uninterested in universities. His incurabl
e tendency to vacillation soon became the butt of mocking humour amongst university professors, who joked that a new minimum unit of measurement had been introduced by the government: ‘One Rust’, the time that elapsed between the promulgation of a decree and its cancellation. Nor were the other Nazi leaders particularly concerned about higher education. When Hitler spoke to a student audience on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Nazi Students’ League in January 1936, he barely mentioned student affairs; he never addressed a student audience again. In a fashion only too typical of the Third Reich, higher education became the focus of intra-Party rivalries, as the Office of the Leader’s Deputy, nominally under Rudolf Hess but in reality spurred on by his ambitious chief of staff, Martin Bormann, began to take an interest in academic appointments. Research funding fell under the aegis of the Interior Ministry. Regional Leaders interfered in university affairs too. The SA tried to enlist students. And the Nazi Students’ League took the lead in the Nazification of university life. The Ministry took the view that the main function of the Students’ League should be to further the political indoctrination of the undergraduates and graduates; but running the university was the job of the Rector, whom the guidelines issued by the Education Ministry on 1 April 1935 defined as the leader of an institution; the duty of the rest of the staff and students was to follow him and obey his commands.252
In practice, however, the weakness of the Education Ministry made it impossible for this principle to be applied with any consistency. Academic appointments became the object of struggles between the Ministry, the Rector, the Nazi Students’ League, the professors and the local Nazi Party bosses, all of whom continued to claim the right of political control within the universities. Like the Hitler Youth in the schools, the Nazi Students’ League and its members did not fight shy of naming and shaming the teachers they thought were not toeing the Nazi line. In 1937 a Hamburg professor complained that no student meeting had been held in the previous few years ‘in which the professoriate has not been dismissed in contemptuous terms as an “ossified” society that is not fit to educate or lead young people in the universities’.253 From 1936 the Students’ League had a new leader, Gustav Adolf Scheel. As a student before 1933 he had led a successful campaign of harassment and intimidation against the pacifist professor Emil Julius Gumbel at Heidelberg University. He strengthened the League’s position with the incorporation of all student unions and the formal recognition of its right to appoint its own leaders and run its own affairs. Scheel cultivated excellent relations with Hess’s office and was thereby able to ward off all attempts by the Education Ministry to curb his growing influence. With a seat on the academic senate of every university, the student organization was now able to gain access to confidential information about prospective appointments. It did not hesitate to make its wishes and objections known. Since it was clear that if the students did not like a new Rector they could - and would - make life very difficult for him, from 1937 onwards the Education Ministry felt obliged to consult the students’ representatives in advance, giving Scheel and his organization yet more say in how the universities were run.254
Yet in the end, the influence of the Nazi Students’ League was limited. Although it had swept the board in student union elections all over Germany well before 1933, it was in fact a comparatively small organization, with a membership that fell just short of 9,000 on the eve of Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor. Since many of these belonged to the League’s female affiliate or studied in non-university higher education institutions, and others were located in German-speaking universities outside the Reich, the number of male students in German universities who were members actually fell just short of 5,000, or less than 5 per cent of German university students as a whole.255 During and after the seizure of power, this figure grew rapidly, helped by the mixture of terror and opportunism characteristic of the process of social and institutional co-ordination in 1933. Beyond this, the overwhelmingly nationalist German student body was swept by enthusiasm for the spirit of 1914 unleashed by the new regime in the initial period of its power. Yet the Nazi Students’ League was not without competition in the student world at this time. Many students joined the stormtroopers in the spring of 1933, and following Hitler’s instruction in September 1933 that the task of politicizing the student body was to be undertaken by the SA, the brownshirts set up their own centres in the universities and put pressure on students to join. By the end of the year, over half the students at Heidelberg university, for example, had enrolled as stormtroopers. Early in 1934 the Interior Ministry made military training organized by the brownshirts compulsory for male students. Soon they were spending long hours training with the SA. This had a serious effect on their studies. University authorities began to note a drastic fall in academic standards as students spent days or even weeks away from their studies, or appeared at lectures in a state of exhaustion after training all night. Nor was that all. As the Rector of Kiel University complained to the Education Ministry on 15 June 1934:
There is now a danger that under the title ‘struggle against the intellect’, a struggle against the intelligentsia is being waged by the SA University Office. There is further the danger that under the motto ‘rough soldierly tone’ students in the first three semesters adopt a tone that must frequently be labelled no longer rough but positively coarse.
Some brownshirt leaders even told their student members that their first duty was to the stormtroopers: their academic studies were leisure pursuits, to be conducted in their spare time. Such claims encountered rapidly rising resistance amongst the majority of students. In June 1934 the national student leader Wolfgang Donat encountered ‘howling, trampling and whistling’ when he tried to address a meeting at Munich University, while some university teachers who dared to include a pinch of criticism of the regime in their lectures met with outbreaks of wild applause. Open fights broke out in some universities between Nazi activists and other students.256
That these events coincided with the first great crisis of the regime in June 1934 was not coincidental. The decapitation of the SA leadership in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ at the end of the month opened the way for a thoroughgoing reform of the Nazi presence in the student body. The Office of the Deputy Leader, Rudolf Hess, took over the running of the Nazi Students’ League and reshaped its leadership, while at the end of October the SA was effectively removed from the universities, and training with the brownshirts replaced with less demanding sports education. Membership in the Nazi Students’ League began to rise sharply, reaching 51 per cent of male university students by 1939, and 71 per cent of female.257 By this time, the League had managed to overcome the stubborn resistance of the traditional student fraternities, which in 1933 had encompassed more than half the entire male student body. Like other conservative institutions, the fraternities had vehemently opposed the Weimar Republic and gone along with the Nazi seizure of power; most of their members had probably joined the Party by the summer of 1933. At the same time, however, they had been obliged to introduce the leadership principle in their previously collective management, to appoint Nazis to top posts, and to expel any even remotely Jewish members and Jewish ‘old gentlemen’, the ex-members whose financial clout gave them a major say in how the fraternities were run. The aristocratic tone and traditional independence of the fraternities were still not to the liking of Nazi leaders, however, and when members of one of the most exclusive Heidelberg duelling fraternities were seen interrupting one of Hitler’s radio broadcasts in a drunken state and, a few days later, loudly speculating during a riotously bibulous meal at an inn on whether the Leader ate asparagus ‘with his knife, his fork or his paw’, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Shirach unfolded a massive press campaign against them and ordered that no Hitler Youth member was to join such a disgracefully reactionary organization in future. Since this went against the known views of the head civil servant of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, himself a prominent and influential
‘old gentleman’, the matter landed with Hitler. In a two-hour monologue before assembled Nazi dignitaries on 15 June 1935 the Leader made it clear that he expected the fraternities to wither away in the Nazi state as remnants of a bygone aristocratic age. In May 1936 Hitler and Hess openly condemned the fraternities and barred Party members from belonging to them. Seeing the writing on the wall, Lammers had already abandoned his defence of the fraternities, and by the end of the academic year the fraternities had either dissolved themselves or merged into the Nazi Students’ League.258