Education Under the Nazis

INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS MANN

The Book and the Author

“Whoever has the youth has the future,” said the cunning master of Germany many years ago, when he was still an obscure Austrian ex-corporal. This book damningly shows how far he has gone toward warping pliable young minds into the monstrous Nazi pattern. Here is a saddening record of infamy that has never been told before and that bodes ill for generations to come: family life poisoned and destroyed; a once proud school system debased; babes in arms pressed into a sinister system of regimentation that allows no child to draw a breath save by leave of The State.

We see a mother sigh in relief because the sun does not shine — today her child will not ask to play outside with his fellows, a joy enjoined from on high because his father was Jewish. We see hooliganism glorified, disreputable characters proclaimed as heroes. We see even arithmetic and drawing freighted with a hateful cargo of death. We see frail young frames crushed beneath the burden of heavy packs on forced marches. We see vile anatomy demonstrations with haunted Jewish children as models.

As incident piles on ghastly incident — substantiated for the most part by official documents — the reader loses any remaining feeling of security engendered by the broad reaches of the Atlantic, any wishful thinking about the passing character of Nazism. Here is a blueprint of barbarism being reared to endure. And somehow the crazy structure stands — for there is no restraint, no effective opposition.

Miss Erika Mann is peculiarly qualified to draw this picture of anguish with bold and unsparing strokes. Herself a member of the war generation of German youth, she knows at first hand the life of young people under the Empire, the Republic, and now the Third Reich. The daughter of the famous Nobel Prize winner, Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain and the Joseph series, Erika Mann has accomplished what few children of famous parents achieve. She has become a distinctive, creative personality entirely in her own right. She went on the stage when very young, became a pupil of Max Reinhardt, and scored a resounding success with her political cabaret, Peppermill, which she wrote and directed herself, and which ran for more than a thousand performances in six countries. Since coming to the United States, she has lectured widely on Nazi Germany. The most heartening note in her new book is her faith in American democracy and the most touching section deals with the almost magic effect which residence in a free country exercises on two little refugee boys. It works both ways — this “Who has the youth has the future.”

INTRODUCTION

T HROUGHOUT MY WHOLE long journey from East to West and back again across the vast continental stretches, the author of this book, my dear daughter Erika, was beside me; her faithful help enabled me to meet the demands of an enterprise, fruitful and gratifying indeed, yet at the same time not always easy. How often did she not act as interpreter between me and the public; both with the press, and when, after a lecture, I was questioned by the audience! I would answer in German, English being still rather hard for me; and she would skillfully translate — skillfully, and as I think very much to the advantage of my replies; since there was added to their content the charm of a sweeter voice and the animation of a gifted and intellectual feminine personality.

Accordingly my pleasure is great in being able to act the interpreter in turn between her and the American public; and to introduce her book to readers who are interested in the political and moral problems of the day. It has a repellent subject, this book: It tells, out of a fullness of knowledge, of education in Nazi Germany and of what National Socialism understands by this word. Yet strangely enough, the book is the opposite of repellent. For even its pain and anger are appealing; while the author’s sense of humor, her power of seeing “the funny side,” the gentle mockery in which she clothes her scorn, go far to make our horror dissolve in mirth. It enfolds the unlovely facts in a grace of style and a critical lucidity; and most consolingly opposes to the shocking and negative qualities of malice and falsity the positive and righteous force of reason and human goodness.

The fundamental theme of the book, education in Germany, proves to be an extraordinarily fruitful point of departure for an exposition of the whole National Socialist point of view. That it should be a woman who has chosen it is not strange, but it is surprising to see what a comprehensive and fully informed portrayal of the totalitarian state results from this deliberate limitation to a single theme. The picture is so complete that a foreigner wishing to penetrate into that uncanny world might say that he knows it after he has read this book. All the grim concentration of the present German leaders on the single thought of the power of the State; all their desperate determination to subordinate to that idea the whole intellectual and spiritual life of the nation, without one single human reservation—all of it comes out with startling clarity in this description and analysis, accompanied by a wealth of only too convincing detail of the National Socialist educational program.

I say program because it is of the future. It is an inexorable first draft of what the German of the future is to be. Nothing escapes it. With iron consistency and relentlessness, fanatically, deliberately, meticulously, the Nazis have gone about putting this one single idea into practice and applying it to each and every department and phase of education. The result is that education is never for its own sake; its content is never confined to training, culture, knowledge, the furtherance of human advancement through instruction. Instead it has sole reference, often enough with implication of violence, to the fixed idea of national preeminence and warlike preparedness-.

The issue is clear! It is a radical renunciation—ascetic in the worst sense of the word — of the claims of mind and spirit; and in these words I include the conceptions truth, knowledge, justice — in short all the highest and purest endeavors of which humanity is capable. Once, in times now forgotten, we knew a definition: “to be German, means to do a thing for its own sake.” The words have lost all meaning. German youth is to devote itself to nothing for its own sake; for everything is politically conditioned, everything shaped and circumscribed to a political end. The sense of objective truth is done to death; it is referred to something outside of itself, to a purpose which must be a German purpose — the purpose of the State to have absolute power over the minds of men within its borders, and to extend its power beyond them.

Such an arbitrary purpose, such a permeation of all truth and all research with political aims, makes us shudder; and the shudder is even more physical than it is moral. The program is so violent, so unhealthy, so convulsive that it thereby betrays how ill-adapted it is to the nature of the people upon whom it is inflicted — or rather, who believe that they must inflict it upon themselves. The glory of the German nation has always lain in a freedom which is the opposite of patriotic narrow-mindedness, and in a special and objective relation to mind. Germany gave birth to the phrase: “Patriotism corrupts history.” It was Goethe who said that. The true and extra-political nature of this people, its true vocation to mind and spirit, become clear today in the very immoderation, the “thoroughness” with which it abjures its best, its classic characteristics, offering them up on the altar of totalitarian politics at the behest of leaders who do not feel the sacrifice. This people of the “middle” is in actual fact a people of extremes. Shall we have power, shall we be political? Then away with spirit, away with truth and justice, independent knowledge and culture! Heroically it throws its humanity overboard, to put itself in alignment for world-mastery.

Should not one remind them of the words of the Scriptures: “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The words do not deny the existence of power. They do assert the truth: that power must have content and meaning, an inner justification in order to be genuine, tenable and recognized by mankind; and that this justification comes only from spirit. Is it not hopeless folly to seek after a good by means which emasculate and demolish the very good one is striving for? How do the German people and their leaders picture to themselves the exercise of a European hegemony paid for by such moral and intellectual sacrifices as are demanded by the National Socialist plan of education? Have, in fact, a people any calling to power, when they must make such sacrifices to achieve it? When they must put at their head all the lowest and basest elements, all the worst and crudest, most un- and anti-intellectual, and give these absolute power over themselves?

Is the world to be won over in such a wise, even after one has dominated it? Can a power persist and be applied, when it had to assert itself against the whole pressure of scorn and hatred which such methods invariably call forth? Is it not indeed a pathetic delusion, that a people who have put themselves or been put in the position of the German people today could ever conquer anything? A people intellectually debased and impoverished, morally degraded — and they expect to conquer the earth! It makes one laugh. We do not get the better of others by destroying ourselves; and nothing is more foolish than to take all idealism for stupidity. Truth, and the freedom to seek it, are not luxury-products which enervate a people and unfit them for the struggle of life. They belong to life, they are life’s daily bread. The saying “Truth is what profits me” springs from the depths; from the convulsions of an anti-idealistic ideal which deludes nobody, uses nobody to its own good, but simply hastens its own collapse. It is an open secret that German science is deteriorating, that Germany is falling behind in all the domains of the intellect. The process will go irresistibly on, it will be irretrievably consummated in fact, if the sort of people who have the say today are given enough time to put into execution their malignant program of national “fitness.”

I join with the author of this book in the hope that the higher gifts and necessities of the German people may assert themselves betimes against presumptions so false and so hostile to life and to the human spirit.

THOMAS MANN New York, May seventh, 1938.

Translated by Mrs. H. T. Lowe-Porter, Princeton, N. J. — May 28, 1938.

PROLOGUE

T HE LITTLE SWISS TOWN of St. Gall is very near the German frontier. And Mrs. M., who has come out of Germany especially to speak to me, is to meet me here. I park my little Ford in the square; a huge car, a magnificent pale Mercedes in front of the hotel, catches my attention — dusty, just come from Germany, from Munich, as the license-plates show. Its number is conspicuously low, the number of a government official. I feel uncomfortable at the sight. Mrs. M. shouldn’t even be speaking to me. It’s daring to receive me, even in a friendly hotel on neutral ground; she could be arrested for it when she returns to Munich. For haven’t I been guilty of high treason — or at least what they call high treason over there? Haven’t I failed to show the respect due the gentlemen of the Third Reich? Haven’t I chosen to leave their rule rather than accept it — to get out, go anywhere to escape the whiff of blood — Prague, Amsterdam, New York, St. Gall?

I look around for an owner for the Mercedes, and to make sure that no one has recognized me. But, in the still noon, the hotel square is deserted. I take heart, run past the doorman, up the wide old staircase to Room 14. Mrs. M. wishes to speak to me, in spite of the danger and although she does not know me personally. I knock, and she opens the door.

She is tall and blonde — a slim, strong woman with blue-gray eyes, a little bridge of freckles across her nose, and tanned bare arms. In her light linen dress, she looks like the perfect advertisement for a summer resort.

“I almost imagined that was your car,” I begin, “—the official one in front.”

She starts a little.

“An official car?” she repeats, and, very low, “Did you give your name downstairs?”

She has the nervous habit of looking about furtively, as if there might be people under the bed, past the curtains, behind the door. It is a phobia of those who come out of Nazi Germany.

“Returning today?” I ask.

Yes, she is. This is a day trip; they expect her home.

Now that we are speaking, we close the windows without a word and in perfect accord, this woman from Germany and I.

She has the Southern accent that I love. And she will be able, surely, to tell me about Munich, my native city, my childhood home that I have not seen for over four years. Sometimes in dreams I wander in its streets, or float dreaming over the Marienplatz, across the old section of the town, down towards the Isar River.

But Mrs. M. and I have things to discuss; no time for emotional excursions into dream cities.

She has stayed in Germany. No reason to leave; she and her husband are both all-Aryan. Her husband a well-paid physician; they have a pleasant apartment, a decent existence.

“As a matter of fact, it’s not a decent one,” she says. “It’s degrading. But what are we to do?”

Of course, Dr. M. is a member of the Party and of the Reich Medical Association, and of the Fachschaft (the Nazi professional union) — he must be, to exist. I needn’t ask about that.

“And you? Do you belong to any of the women’s unions ( Kammeradinnenschaften)?”

“Woman’s place is in the home,” she quotes her Führer’s inspired, living phrase.

And then laughs and admits that she is a semi-official personage in Munich.

“I’m blessed not only with a perfect Nordic long-and-narrow skull,” she goes on, “but I have the precisely correct pelvic measurements too, the desired bust, and the prescribed breadth of hip. The gentlemen on the Board of Health examined and tested, felt and measured everything, and found it all just about perfect. Then they photographed me, and listed the figures on the picture; and, all year, I’ve had the honor of gracing the calendar. The perfect brood-mare, recommended by the State! It would be funny enough, if it weren’t so sad, and so disgusting,” she adds, and the officially tested-and-photographed, guaranteed-genuine Nordic mouth is smiling wryly.

“And now you want to leave? After all this time, why?”

She opens her little bag, and pulls out a leather case. “This is why,” she says, unfolding the leather photograph frame, with its six pictures.

I look at the baby in his poses, laughing, shouting, crying, waving his hand, making a little fist. “His name is Franz,” his mother says, setting the frame up, on the table before us.

“I beg your pardon,” I venture, “but I don’t quite understand. Is it because of him that you want to leave? But your little Franz is an Aryan; everything will be easy for him, all doors opened. You see, we on the outside aren’t so much in favor of emigration,” I have to add, seeing her surprise. “It’s worse than you expect when you go away — harder, less friendly — and then, we think — you will understand — that those who can stay in the Reich safely should stay. Especially if they are not in accord with the godforsaken brainlessness about them. “It is so important that a little intelligence and reason should remain within the country.”

I look away from the pictures. But Mrs. M. is speaking without her hesitation, now — volubly, clearly, her smooth forehead lined by two deep lines of anger and decision.

“No,” she disagrees, “he wouldn’t have an easy time at all — he would be miserable. Reason! I’ve had four years of that, and I’m through with that kind of reason. I can’t even get chicken soup for the child, or stewed fruit, or a good broth. There’s no chance of buying reasonable food in those war-camps of cities. Not even hominy!” she cries, “nor rice!” accusingly. “There’s a shortage of eggs today, and tomorrow it will be butter. And it’s so much worse all the time — everything’s grown worse in four-and-a-half years — food, clothing, laws and spies. No one lives in safety in our country.” She shakes her head indignantly. “Not even the most harmless people know what it’s like not to be in constant danger — of arrest at any moment, denounced by anyone who finds it worth his while, for some unfortunate remark he may or may not have made. If my husband has to press a Nazi patient for his bill, we live in fear of his saying we’ve made fun of the Führer, or joked about the Minister of Propaganda. And if that happens, we’ll both be arrested with no one to ask why — and our son would have to manage for himself.”

I like her, standing beautiful and defiant, looking down at the pictures of her son who will have to manage, and who cannot have his hominy, and will not have his rice tomorrow. I pretend to know less than I do, and seem more ignorant to find out what this woman really thinks and feels. I need to discover the reason driving her out of her country after four-and-a-half years of “reason.” So I tell her that I know she is unhappy and worried by material lacks. But it isn’t so different from wartime. “I was a child during the War,” I argue, “we really had hardly a thing to eat, but we were gay, alert children.”

Mrs. M. interrupts me here. Her voice trembles with impatience. “What are you talking about? As if you didn’t know the difference! As if you didn’t know how sensible things were, comparatively, during the War! Germany was really threatened then, from the outside, and we did without things then for a good and sufficient reason. But now, in peacetime, so that we may threaten and bluster and our fine Herr Führer may rattle his saber and act like a madman until the world is in panic? Really, it isn’t the lack of butter that makes me decide — it’s all the other things. I want the child to become a human being, a good and decent man who knows the difference between lies and truth, aware of liberty and dignity and true reason, not the opportunistic reason ‘dictated by policy’ which turns black white if it’s useful at the moment. I want the boy to become a decent human being — a man and not a Nazi!”

Our drinks arrive: gentian brandy, from the big healthful mountain gentians — tasting like the meadows and pastures of the mountain country that is our home country, this woman’s and mine.

“To the young gentleman,” I drink the toast, “to Junker Franz — may he become a human being!”

We will have to go, soon; she, so simply, back to Munich (I feel it in the pit of my stomach and in my knees), and I “home” to Zurich, where my parents are now living. But I want to hear more from her, and the afternoon is advancing. I pretend ignorance, a little ashamed to be asking her questions that are not entirely frank, ashamed to subject her to these questions, now that her angry determined look has passed, in this late light, to helplessness and tenderness and perplexity before the meanness and injustice she is remembering. I ask her how much she can expect to influence Franz when he is a little older. She has admitted that she is afraid of the schools’ influence — the new schools, which teach that the German people are 100,000,000 strong (generously including all the German-speaking population, Dutch, Austrian, Polish, or even American), and that one is German by the grace of God and the State, and in God’s name by the grace of the Führer of the Third Reich and his Archangels, the Leaders of the Third Reich.

She expects nothing.

“There’s no influence possible,” she tells me. “It isn’t only school, it’s the Hitler Youth Group, enforced camp life, Wehrsport — sport whose purpose is to teach defense from martial attack — and by then Franz will come home, saluting with his hand up. Then, if I suggest that he go and do his lessons, he’ll say, ‘But I’m going to target-practice!’ And if I tell him he’ll never learn anything that way, with those bad manners, he can denounce me. And, at first, I shall only be warned.”

“And what about religion?” I ask, knowing the answer as I speak, “Won’t his religious teachers affect him?”

The answer is that the best of them will be in concentration camps, under the pretexts of rape, robbery, or having sold their stamp collections into foreign countries (which is punishable by death). But she tells me a story instead:

“A friend of mine, a girl from school, married very young, right after graduation. She married a Jew. And her son, Wolfgang, who is seven now, is a half-Jew. I asked her how he was the other day; and she said, ‘He’s fine — a little better today, really; at least the sun’s not out.’ I didn’t understand at all. She had to explain: ‘On fine days, all the other boys play in the yard — and then he cries because he can’t play with them—of course he can’t, he’s half-Jewish.’ The mother was quite calm as she said that,” Mrs. M. finishes, “but I won’t forget her face as she said ‘… at least the sun’s not out.’” She looks away. “And Franz, growing up, will be among the boys, true Christians, in brown shirts, playing in the yard, while little Wolfgang cries and cries.”

Mrs. M. is drawn up tall again, defiant and hard. “I’d rather have the right to comfort that boy when he cries, than not to have the right to slap my own son for that kind of revolting cruelty!” That is the alternative, the one choice of rights that is left.

She adds: “Have you any idea what a great man Wolfgang’s father was, before the government changed? He was a physician and surgeon — my husband’s superior at the hospital. Just after Hitler came in, they had an emergency operation, a little ‘Aryan’ boy with appendicitis. Peritonitis had begun; it was a matter of life and death, you see, and the Professor, who still held his post, was performing the operation himself. And in the silence of the operating room, deep under the anaesthetic, the child began to scream, suddenly, shouting phrases cut so deep into his soul that they remained even during the death under ether. ‘Down with the Jews!’ he cried out, ‘Kill the Jews, we have to get rid of them!’ My husband tells me that moment gripped him — the calm Jewish Professor, going steadily on with the operation, the knife not trembling, everything going ahead to save that screaming child. And, really, on the other side, a thing like that is far worse than any humiliation for a child, far uglier, more hopeless. It drives me mad to think that my son might ever be able to turn to death and murder in his sleep, because he had been taught to do so, and because I had no right to stop that teaching. I don’t think that could happen to me — it’s unreal, a nightmare; but it has the power of a nightmare, weighing on my chest, sitting at my head night and day; it tortures me until I weep; and when I sleep it cuts off my breath. But, profoundly in me, I know — as we know in dreams — it isn’t true, I shall never let it go that far, I shall see that my son is brought up differently. He must never pass, on the way to school, those newspaper stands, where the Stürmer is up with all its obscenities; he must never define Rassenschande (the intermarriage or mingling of Jews and Aryans), nor the best ways of doing away with the French, the Jews and the students of the Bible. Let him learn what is right, not what is expedient; let him learn something of use in his life, and not spend all his time at target-practice. Then he won’t denounce me, he will be quite fond of me and listen to what I tell him, when we speak. And he will love and serve the country we live in then; but he will know, too, that the love of freedom and justice comes before everything.”

Outside, it has begun to rain, an almost invisible small drizzle that darkens the little room Mrs. M. of Munich has rented for the day in the hotel at St. Gall. My car is open, and I realize, in a corner of my mind past all these thoughts, that I shall have to sit on wet leather….

But we still have a few details to go over. Mrs. M. is handing me her husband’s papers — copies of all his certificates, diplomas going back into his childhood. His high-school diploma is touching to me, now that it is given to an unknown person so that it may speak for him somewhere, across some ocean.

“Professor X. in Y. knows about us,” says the woman, “he seems to be slightly interested…. Here is a letter of recommendation from Geheimrat S. — I thought that might help.”

“Of course. Yes.” I nod hopefully, but I hear my own voice, a little uncertain as I speak. “Surely it will…. I do hope for the best.”

And now we are saying goodby. Mrs. M. packs the photographs in the leather case. She holds a frame, waving to me with her other hand. “Auf Wiedersehen,” she calls, “Auf Wiedersehen … in freedom!”

“Yes,” I answer from the door, “Viel Glück — and may it be soon!”

* * *

Three weeks later I read that a physician and his wife have been arrested. Dr. M. of Munich has been placed in the concentration camp at Dachau; Mrs. M., in a Munich prison. They have often made derogatory remarks, it had been reported, about the construction program of the National Socialist regime. The son of this pair, Franz M., aged fourteen months — the paragraph concludes — has been committed to the State Children’s Home. In this manner, it is to be hoped, it may still be possible to make a good National Socialist out of the boy.

HEIL

T HE LIFE OF EVERY HUMAN being in Germany has been fundamentally changed since Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. When German democracy gave way to Nazi dictatorship, the upheaval was as drastic to the private life of the individual as it was to the State. Before February, 1933, the German citizen thought of himself as a father, or a Protestant, or a florist, or a citizen of the world, or a pacifist, or a Berliner. Now he is forced to recognize that above all he is a National Socialist.

The Führer’s National Socialist Weltanschauung has to be gospel for every German citizen; his plans, and even the means to those ends, are to be unquestioningly revered.

No German group was more stringently affected by the changes of the dictatorship than the children. An adult German must be first a National Socialist, but he can — by now — be, in the second place, a shopkeeper or a manufacturer, without his shop or factory belonging to the State; but the German child is a Nazi child, and nothing else.

He attends a Nazi school; he belongs to a Nazi youth organization; the movies he is allowed to see are Nazi films. His whole life, without any reservation, belongs to the Nazi State.

Adults in Germany still retain some private interests, some knowledge of the world outside, where everything is so different from the picture inside Adolf Hitler’s head. But the young have no individual interests; they know nothing of another world, with another rule.

The Führer’s best bet lay, from the very beginning, in the inexperience and easy credulity of youth. It was his ambition, as it must be any dictator’s, to take possession of that most fertile field for dictators: the country’s youth. Not because of any ignorance of the young, but because whoever has them has the adults of tomorrow, and can flatter himself he is lord of the future.

If everything goes according to Mr. Hitler, Germans are to rule the world. “Whoever really desires the victory of the pacifist idea,” he writes in Mein Kampf, “should use all his energy in helping the Germans to conquer the world.” This future in which the Führer’s obsession is to come to pass, can be made only by the apprentices of the Nazi State: the German youth.

All the power of the regime — all its cunning, its entire machine of propaganda and discipline — is directed to emphasize the program for German children. It is not surprising that the Nazi State considers It of primary importance that the young grow up according to Hitler’s wishes, and the plans set in Mein Kampf: “Beginning with the primer, every theater, every movie, every advertisement must be subjected to the service of one great mission, until the prayer of fear that our patriots pray today: ‘Lord, make us free,’ shall be changed in the mind of the smallest child into the cry: ‘Lord, do Thou in future bless our arms.’”

And, on another page: “All education must have the sole object of stamping the conviction into the child that his own people and his own race are superior to all others.”

The Führer realizes that the education of German youth will have a tremendous influence on Germany’s future — and on Europe’s and the world’s. He gives the problem the attention it deserves.

“If anyone asks me whether I have had trouble in the past, I must answer: Yes, I have never been without troubles. But I have mastered them. If they ask if I have troubles now, I must answer: I have many troubles. And when I am asked if I think I shall have trouble in the future, then I answer in the same manner: Yes, I believe that I shall never be free of trouble. But that is not the decisive thing. I shall master the troubles of the present and those of the future just as I mastered those of the past. But I have one great worry which really causes me trouble. And that is the worry that it may not he possible to educate successors for the leadership and political guidance of the National Socialist Party.”

This matter of educating successors is a real fear. Hitler has maneuvered to make himself the absolute ruler of the lives of all Germans, and has taken over the lives of all of the German children, who not only are taken care of so that they live according to the will of the Führer, but also are made to have no guide but the Führer. And this is in the general air, that one breathes with such difficulty.

THE GREETING

Every child says “Heil Hitler!” from 50 to 150 times a day, immeasurably more often than the old neutral greetings. The formula is required by law; if you meet a friend on the way to school, you say it; study periods are opened and closed with “Heil Hitler!”; “Heil Hitler!” says the postman, the street-car conductor, the girl who sells you notebooks at the stationery store; and if your parents’ first words when you come home to lunch are not “Heil Hitler!” they have been guilty of a punishable offense, and can be denounced. “Heil Hitler!” they shout, in the Jungvolk and Hitler Youth. “Heil Hitler!” cry the girls in the League of German Girls. Your evening prayers must close with “Heil Hitler!” if you take your devotions seriously.

Officially — when you say hello to your superiors in school or in a group — the words are accompanied by the act of throwing the right arm high; but an unofficial greeting among equals requires only a comparatively lax lifting of the forearm, with the fingers closed and pointing forward. This Hitler greeting, this “German” greeting, repeated countless times from morning to bedtime, stamps the whole day.

“Heil” really means salvation, and used to be applied to relations between man and his God; one would speak of ewiges Heil (eternal salvation), and the adjective “holy” derives from the noun. But now there is the new usage.

German children say their “Heil Hitler!” as carelessly as they greeted each other in the War days with “God scourge England!” They will swallow half the consonants sometimes, making a strange new word. Or they will make a crack out of the “German” greeting, and say “Drei Liter” (three liters) instead of “Heil Hitler.” That’s fun, and no one can hold it against them. But always, formally and outwardly, and inwardly besides, the German child lives in the echo of “Heil Hitler!”

You leave the house in the morning, “Heil Hitler” on your lips; and on the stairs of your apartment house you meet the Blockwart. A person of great importance and some danger, the Blockwart has been installed by the government as a Nazi guardian. He controls the block, reporting on it regularly, checking up on the behavior of its residents. It’s worth it to face right about, military style, and to give him the “big” Hitler salute, with the right arm as high as it will go. All the way down the street, the flags are waving, every window colored with red banners, and the black swastika in the middle of each. You don’t stop to ask why; it’s bound to be some national event. Not a week passes without an occasion on which families are given one reason or another to hang out the swastika. Only the Jews are excepted under the strict regulation. Jews are not Germans: they do not belong to the “Nation,” they can have no “national events.”

You meet the uniforms on the way to school: the black S.S. men, the men of the Volunteer Labor Service, and the Reichswehr soldiers. And if some of the streets are closed, you know that an official is driving through town. Nobody has ever told you that the high officials of other countries pass without the precautions of closed streets.

And here, where a building is going up, the workmen are gone — probably because of the “national event.” But the sign is on the scaffolding: “We have our Führer to thank that we are working here today. Heil Hitler!” The familiar sign, seen everywhere with men at work, on roads, barracks, sport fields. What does it mean to you? Do you think of a world outside, with workers who need not thank a Führer for their jobs? Certainly not — what you have, imprinted on your mind, is the sentence, deep and accepted as an old melody.

There are more placards as you continue past hotels, restaurants, indoor swimming pools, to school. They read “No Jews allowed” — “Jews not desired here” — “Not for Jews.” And what do you feel? Agreement? Pleasure? Disgust? Opposition? You don’t feel any of these. You don’t feel anything, you’ve seen these placards for almost five years. This is a habit, it is all perfectly natural, of course Jews aren’t allowed here. Five years in the life of a child of nine — that’s his life, after four years of infancy, his whole personal, conscious existence.

* * *

Through the Nazi streets walks the Nazi child. There is nothing to disturb him, nothing to attract his attention or criticism. The stands sell Nazi papers almost exclusively; all German papers are Nazi; foreign papers are forbidden, if they do not please the men at the top. The child won’t be surprised at their huge headlines: “UNHEARD-OF ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST GERMANY IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA!” “JEWISH GANGSTERS RULE AMERICA!” “THE COMMUNIST TERROR IN SPAIN SUPPORTED BY THE POPE!” “150 MORE PRIESTS UNMASKED AS SEXUAL CRIMINALS!”

“That’s how it is in the world,” the child thinks. “What luck we’re in, to have a Führer! He’ll tell the whole bunch — Czechs, Jews, Americans, Communists and priests — where to get off!”

There are no doubts, no suspicion at the coarse and hysterical tone of the dispatches, no hint that they may be inexact or false. No, these things are part of the everyday world of the Nazis, like the Blockwart, the swastika, the signs reading “No Jews allowed.” They add up to an atmosphere that is torture, a fuming poison for a free-born human being.

The German child breathes this air. There is no other condition wherever Nazis are in power; and here in Germany they do rule everywhere, and their supremacy over the German child, as he learns and eats, marches, grows up, breathes, is complete.

But, past the general influence of Nazi atmosphere, three special influences in the Reich determine the life of the child: the intimate circle of the family, the school, and the Hitler youth organizations.

THE FAMILY

T HE TWO SLOGANS BEST used between 1919 and 1933 by the rising National Socialist movement were: “With the help of National Socialism we shall rescue religion from the threat of Bolshevism!” and “With the help of National Socialism we shall rescue the family from Bolshevism, which is trying to destroy it!”

They struck home in Germany, appealing as they did to two prime concepts. Even at the outset, National Socialism knew very well what it was about when it frightened the great bulk of the German middle class with the warning that Bolshevism would destroy religion, and so annul all the rights of conscience; that it would tear the family apart and offer up its members to an all-powerful government; that it would deify this monster State in place of religion. The middle-class German, traditionally a religious family-man, listened with horror to all of this. Shopkeeper, caretaker’s wife, married office girl, and well-brought-up society woman — they all agreed to support the National Socialists who desired to protect religion and the family, and who ought to be strengthened in their work.

Hans Schlemm, who in 1933 became Bavarian Minister of Education, published a challenging pamphlet two years before Hitler made himself Chancellor. He called it Mother or Comrade. Here were all the praises of the family as a unit, its rights under the state, and the individual rights of “millions of separate personalities.” And he condemned the “completely automatic, mechanically-functioning ‘mass-apparatus.’ ”

Today we regard with historical curiosity the eagerness of the man, denouncing as “Bolshevistic” the plans and ideas about to be realized in Germany by the National Socialists who later made him their Minister of State. We may replace the emblems with ‘swastika” in this passage by Schlemm, who wrote under the heading “Religion — Family”: “Brutal measures initiated this struggle [against religion]…. The cross and pictures of saints were replaced by the Soviet star, the red flag, the hammer and the sickle…” and we have an accurate picture of the daily battle against religion in Germany. “Of course,” Schlemm continues, “it is impossible to survey the process of destruction to which the family is subjected. But the family as an institution cannot be destroyed until the citadel has been razed which protects that precious jewel: the strong walls of prayer, of faith in God…. On a road of stifled prayers, Bolshevism beat its way into the life-center of the people — the family.”

Again, all we have to do is replace “Bolshevism” with “National Socialism” to have a fairly exact picture. The Nazis recognized, to their own use, that the ideology of the German citizen was fixed by two concepts: “fear of God,” and “family.” Both of these had to be attacked if either one was to be destroyed.

“It is not merely a matter of economical, financial, technical or political measures… or the socialization of goods… oh, no, it is a matter of human dignity as such. The question is this: shall free human beings be transformed into a horde of slaves?”

And, writing these words, expressing this most individualistic, democratic cry of warning, seeing so clearly what the Nazis were preparing (as far back as 1931) —was the Nazi Hans Schlemm.

One of the surprises of the National Socialist Revolution was the speed with which signs and names were altered in 1933, when it was possible to call anything black that, a week ago, had been painted white. “Save the family!” the Nazis had been shouting. “Save religion!” They knew they would have to destroy both. And they came into power, disguised as saviors, and took hold of the German family and religion, hoping to be undetected while they did away with both.

At first, it went smoothly. Nobody was even suspicious in the beginning.

The German people are naturally pious, church-going, giving great importance to family life. They know today that since Hitler came in, something has gone wrong with their churches and families. Ministers were arrested by the hundreds; more peaceful means were used against the home. The word gemütlich (untranslatable, and coming into English for its flavor) can’t be applied very well to today’s German. Gemütlichkeit flourishes in the warmth of the family; and the family is near dissolution.

Today every member of the nation — man, woman, and child — must belong to at least one Nazi organization: to the Party, to a Fachschaft (professional union), a Women’s or Mothers’ Bund (union), the Hitler Youth, the Jungvolk (young people), or to the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls). These take all the time left after one’s profession, housework, or school. Even without a deeper reason, it would be impossible for anyone to devote himself to family problems, just for lack of time.

There is a story told in Germany now: the head of a family comes home; no one is in, but there is a note on the library table which says: “Am at a meeting of the National Socialist Women’s Union. Will be home late. — Mother.” So he scribbles an answer and leaves it beside the other: “Going to a Party meeting. Will be back late. — Father.” The next in is the son, who leaves a note: “Night practice. Won’t be home till morning. — Fritz.” Hilda, the daughter, is last, and she writes: “Must go to a meeting of the Bund of German Girls. —Hilda.”

At about two in the morning, the family gets home, to a bare apartment from which everything movable has been stolen; but there is a fifth note on the table: “We thank our Führer. Heil Hitler! — The Gang.”

The break-up of the family is no by-product of the Nazi dictatorship, but part of the job which the regime had to do if it meant to reach its aim — the conquest of the world.

If the world is to go to the Nazis (for no one else, in Hitler’s eyes, is German), the German people must first belong to them. And, for that to be true, they can’t belong to anyone else — neither God, nor their families, nor themselves.

To begin with, the time they used to give to their families was taken from the Germans and placed at the disposal of the State. But this alone could not have destroyed the foundation of German family life. More subtle measures were necessary to touch the spirit. Destruction began only when, within the family itself, mutual suspicion grew great. It was not until father became suspicious of mother, mother of daughter, daughter of son, and son of father, that the family was really endangered. From the moment when no one dared speak, because every word might be reported, every gesture misunderstood and denounced, the family lost its meaning. Life within it became senseless.

Private homes are not the most important places now — the meeting-hall comes first for the members of the family. Love of the Führer, faithfulness to his State — the Nazis jealously watch over the fulfillment of this highest commandment. The man who takes his home life seriously, spending much of his time there, feeling himself a family man before he is a Nazi, is an outsider. He is suspect. He does not realize that decisive events take place only in the meeting-hall.

Torn between authorities, the Hitler child is pulled by the school and Hitler Youth Movement on one hand, and home on the other. The child feels the duel for the possession of his soul; he hears his teachers’ hidden objection when the Hitler Youth takes too much of his time, he sees his parents’ hidden frown when there is no time for home. But he also notices that the authorities over him are afraid. Fear is the general motive. Grown-ups lie out of fear, and bear false witness against each other. Since they fear even little children, they lie to them.

It is hard to find any connection between this and the heroism they always praise. The child must think: “I don’t know, I’m not afraid at target-practice, with its accidents. But suppose I don’t listen in to Goebbels’ speech? I’m afraid my teacher will know about that in the morning, then I’d be punished. The teacher could denounce my parents. Father could lose his job and be expelled from the Party; that would be the worst thing possible. I am afraid, horribly. And that’s true of my parents, too. And so we do listen to most of Goebbels’ speeches; if, somehow, we miss one, we lie about it. I tell lies in school; Father, in the Fachschaft; and Mother when she goes marketing. We all lie, out of fear.”

The child will only dimly suspect that most people have this fear, although the German populace is glorified as “heroic.” Perhaps parents have it most — the children feel this — for they are held responsible for their children, and at the same time have lost all influence over them.

Lack of time, lack of trust! No, family life is no longer gemütlich. It has lost all tenderness, all the past mutual thoughtfulness; and parental care is dead.

“The lives of all German youths belong solely to Hitler,” shouted Baldur von Schirach, now Reich Youth Leader. If a child asks its mother, for reassurance, “Am I yours?” the mother will have to answer, “No. You belong to the Führer.” And if the father breaks in, impatiently, “Don’t teach the child nonsense, dear… Of course you belong to us,” trouble begins. Something forbidden and punishable has been let slip; a quarrel is the mildest consequence. If the child is too young to go and denounce them, the father must still watch out, servants can hear. Besides, the kindergarten teacher asks what is said at home, and the baby is sure to tell the truth, he is too little to lie.

If the child is a big boy and a member of the Jungvolk or the Hitler Youth, he will rebel with all his might against tenderness. He resents emotion — even his own, which sometimes makes him throw his arms around his mother, and cry. It will destroy him in the eyes of those from whose judgment there is no appeal. He has been taught: “Those who shirk their duties just because they are tired are ‘mothers’ boys.’ Mothers’ boys cry when they are hit. Mothers’ boys run home when it is raining; they are afraid of thunder. They don’t know what a night march or war-play is. If they are tired after their daily work, they do not manage to be fresh and ready for service. Mothers’ boys don’t know the ruggedness of mountains and woods; they do not know dusty country roads, or life in a tent. Mothers’ boys rest their heads on soft pillows and sleep under silk covers. Jungvolk youngsters are hardy.” ( Morgen, organ of the Jungvolk.)

To be a mothers’ boy — ah, that would be the most terrible thing that could happen. So, after marching all day, he clenches his fists, the little soldier; and when his mother tries to give him a kiss before he goes to sleep, he turns his head away. This kiss, he feels, might have cost me my dignity. I might have become soft and affectionate. And he goes to his room, stiffening in the most manly way.

His mother looks after him, perplexed. To pass the time until her husband returns from his meeting, she opens the pamphlet on the table. She catches the word “Mother” and a few lines of poetry:

Upon his breast, shot through, they found

A gray lock with bleached ribbon bound,

And this inscription hung thereon:

“I pray for you, my dearest son.”

And, following this, the editor — Mr. Schlemm again — writes: “The first and last right to a child is of course the mother’s, who has received the child from God and gives it back to Him.”

She puts the pamphlet down and closes her eyes. “Upon his breast, shot through…” “… the first and last right….”

She looks into his room to see if he is asleep; she watches him lying flat on his back, open-mouthed, with a mesh of fine blond hair fallen across his forehead. A little look of pain runs over his face; he was very stiff from all the marching, and his hand, that she did not know was hurt, is bandaged awkwardly.

His mother looks at him, and knows: “He does not belong to me, but to the State, which will send him into war as soon as he is big enough, which has already taken him from me and made him a stranger, which insists that he march and shoot and remember that blind obedience to it counts far more than love to me.” She stands there, motionless and hoping bitterly that he will move, or call out for her. Perhaps he will murmur something friendly, thinking kindly of her in his dreams. But nothing of the sort happens. He sleeps like a log, as if he had fainted. “They’ve overtired him again,” she thinks, and remembers the family physician’s warning — delicate and considerate — against these forced marches. The boy is none too strong. “They’ll kill him in the end,” she thinks.

The dark room hardly looks like a playroom. The boy is ten. But where are the toys, the Indian feathers, the games and story-books, full of adventure and spellbound princesses? The titles that catch the light from the door are those of the books read during the long “Comrades’ Evenings”:

Aviator’s Nest in the Elder-Bushes, Life Stories of German War Aces, The Infantry Marches On, The Book of German Colonies for the Young, Peter, the Soldier-Boy, and Sister Claire at the Front.

She had to give him these books. She remembers it only too well — and his answer, when she asked whether he enjoyed them. “Of course,” he said, with his angry look, “what else is there to read?”

Well, what else is there? And his playthings: maps, a short dagger, a little dangerous-looking revolver, a few tin soldiers, a bust of the Fiihrer, a gas mask. Gas masks have just been distributed among children, and the boy has been having fun with his. He did frighten her with the ugly thing; she found him, his face covered by the gas mask and its trunk, lying on the floor one day as though he were dead. When she ran up to him, fearful and calling, he jumped up and laughed. “What nerves you have, Mother! What in the world will you do when the serious things begin to happen?” he cried, and, swinging the gas mask, went out.

She stands there, unable to walk away from her little sleeping son. What odd children, she thinks, what curious, strange children! He was five when Hitler came in; now he knows nothing but Hitler’s world that has swallowed us all. Can he like it? Can he enjoy living like this? But none of the children know any other way. They don’t play; they don’t understand what playing is. All their imagination is made use of to one end: war and conquest.

She has to. conceal these thoughts. No one must suspect them. Sink them, send them deep and secret down! But, as a matter of fact, they can be found among the high lords. Baldur von Schirach, for example, writes: “The toy-store keepers have complained to me that these babies have no desire for toys. They are interested exclusively in tents, javelins, compasses, and maps. I cannot help the toy-store keepers, because I too firmly believe with the Pimpfe (Juniors — a new German word) that the time for playing Indians is definitely past. What is a trapper in the American Wild West, compared with our standard-bearers?… Take a look at the ten-year-old Pimpf. See how he marches in front of the band, holding his banner. Compare him with the child of pre-war times. What a tremendous change!”

These proud words written by the Leader of the Reich Youth are the judgment from which there is no appeal. Parents are out-moded authorities.

One boy’s family tried to recall their child. They gave him a birthday party, with ordinary, normal, “civilian” presents: a paintbox, a picture puzzle, a shining new bicycle — and lit twelve candles on his birthday cake. How they looked forward to that party! And it went off like a political conference. Six boys had been invited, and five of them came right on time.

“Who’s missing?” the mother asked.

“Can’t you see?” said the boy, “HE’s missing — Fritzekarl!”

“What a pity!” she answered. That it should be just Fritzekarl! Two years older than her son, he was the leader in the Jungvolk, and his presence at the party was of great importance. If he did not appear, it was a sign of disfavor; the whole thing would be spoiled.

The boys, in their Hitler Youth uniforms stood around the birthday table, not knowing quite what to do with the toys. The bicycle pleased all of them, with its bell (which they took turns ringing) and its rubber tires, which were so hard to get nowadays, and which the father had finally been able to obtain after using all of his contacts in the Party, paying a high cash price, and emphasizing the fact that this was a wheel for a boy, a Jungvolk boy, and not for a girl who would never go to war! Now it stood there, complete with instructions and a copy of the German Cyclist, saying: “Boys on bicycles must try to remember the names of towns, rivers, mountains and lakes as well as the material and type of architecture of bridges, etc. They may be able to make use of this knowledge for the good of the Fatherland.”

The bell rang, and the son dashed to the front door. A sharp voice came through, crying “Heil Hitler!” and the five boys at the table turned on their heels as the answer came in a voice already breaking, “Heil Hitler!” Their superior officer was received with the “German salute,” five hands raised, great composure, solemn faces. Solemnly, Fritzekarl gave the host his birthday present — a framed photograph of the Leader of the Reich Youth, Baldur von Schirach, with a facsimile autograph! The son clicked his heels as he received it.

“I wish to speak to your father,” Fritzekarl said curtly.

The mother answered in her friendly voice, “My husband is not free just now—he’s upstairs working.”

Fritzekarl attempted to keep the note of military command in his shrill young voice. “Just the same, madam, I should prefer to speak to your husband for a moment…. In the interest of your son.”

His manner was correct, in spite of his tone. He bowed slightly to the mother as he finished his masterful little speech.

“Fourteen years old!” she thought, “but the mechanism of power backs him up, and he knows it.”

The son was blushing violently. “For goodness’ sake call him!” he said, stepping toward his mother.

The father came down at once.

“Heil Hitler!” cried Fritzekarl.

“Heil Hitler!” repeated the man. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

“Pardon me,” says Fritzekarl, who doesn’t get the joke, and retains his martial stare, “but your son was absent from our last practice exercises….”

“Yes, I know,” the father interrupts at this point, “he had a cold.”

“It was at your suggestion that he absented himself,” Fritzekarl continues, his voice breaking and going hoarse over the phrase, “You wrote me some sort of excuse, to say that he was staying home at your wish.”

The father puts his weight first on one foot and then on the other. “As a matter of fact, it is my wish that he stay home when he has such a severe cold.”

“Oh, I didn’t have such a bad cold at all,” the son breaks in. He is leaning on the handle-bars of the bicycle that his father had to fight for. “I could have gone, perfectly well.”

The man looks at his son, a long look of surprise and pain and the resignation he has learned. “Well,” he says, and moves toward the door.

But Fritzekarl stops him. “A moment, please,” he insists, but politely. “Your son was in school on that day and the following day. So he cannot have been really ill. Let me call your attention to the fact that he should have been present at practice and that it is my duty to report the absence!”

“Oh, please —” the boy was speaking for his father, quickly, bargaining “— don’t do that, please! It won’t ever happen again — will it, father? —really, never again!”

The father wanted to protest; he felt the despairing look of his wife, the outrage and embarrassment of the scene. “How dare you speak to me like that!” was what he was repeating in his mind. But he knew the consequences of such an argument, for himself, and for his son. Even if he could convince the Nazi authorities of his own part, and Fritzekarl’s rudeness, his son would still have to face the Jungvolk, paying for his father’s moment of “courage.” And so he only said, hesitatingly and stiffly, “No — it certainly will never happen again!”

“I thank you,” replied the fourteen-year-old superior of the treasonable son. The father was dismissed.

He cannot air his resentment; he has to expect eavesdroppers and spies everywhere. His wife tells their son everything — not out of malice, but in the mistaken hope of reclaiming him this way. And the new maid is a person to be feared. She listens at doors, reads everything that’s lying around the house, and she happens to be having an affair with a Blockwart; he could destroy a family single-handed. The boy would hardly denounce his own father, the man reflects, but if he repeats some remark to the maid, she will run to her Blockwart, the Gestapo (Secret State Police) will have it right away, and the doom will begin to move on them. Or, if they decide to dismiss the maid, her vengeance hanging over their heads may be even worse.

With these conditions, nothing is to the point but care and extreme reticence. Families guard this reticence, and live side by side like strangers, or enemies.

One boy of seventeen, an aristocrat, and delicate, wants to study philosophy, in spite of the times. He is slender and well-built, and most of his racial heritage is rated excellent. He has never been brilliant in sports, but, helped by his name and his determination, he may enter Hitler’s personal bodyguard ( Leibstandarte ), and he pushes towards this end passionately. He is looking worse all the time, paler and more desperate, and his foreign friends insist on getting to the bottom of it. They tell him not to lose courage; he’ll surely be admitted, all will end well. But he shakes his head: “That’s just it!” he answers. “Of course, they’ll admit me; and that will be the end of everything.”

But is he fighting so passionately for something he hates? The boy makes them swear not to tell a soul — not even his own family — and then breaks down. He tells them that his father is so terribly anti-Nazi, he loathes it all; besides being careless, he is rebellious; and for years, he has refused to join the Party. The son knows his father’s danger. “They’ll just take him away some day,” he says. “A nobleman who won’t play their game! That’s serious…. They’re after him.”

His friends begin to see the picture he is chalking in for them. “Something has to be done,” the boy continues. “We have to show them we’re good Nazis, not just arrogant aristocrats. I hate them, God knows. But I’ll join the Leibstandarte; I will not see my father endangered.”

When they meet his father a little later, he tells them: “My own son, insisting on joining the guard — horrible, isn’t it? He knows how I hate the whole business. But, if he insists, I shan’t do anything to stop him. After all, he might end by denouncing me.”

The members of a family are alone, living side by side, like strangers, or enemies.

Does the German child suffer under these conditions?

Is he subjectively unhappy?

Is he aware of loss? Does he realize his situation?

Human beings — the Germans proved this during the war — can become accustomed to almost anything if they are led to believe its necessity. And children seem to be adjusting to altered conditions, accepting their novelty without criticism. They have not been given time to come to their senses; they accept Nazi life almost unconsciously.

It is true that the average child is neither gay nor very serious. He is cruel, but not courageous; hard, but not firm in character; sly but not clever; unchildlike, not mature. So far, the average German child is neither unhappy nor even rebellious.

But were we German children of 1914 subjectively unhappy during the War? Did we protest? Did we question? Hitler’s government goes farther than the Kaiser’s in what it wishes the people to accept, but it also goes farther toward supporting its premises and making them credible. It concentrates upon the conquest of the “inner enemy”; between 1914 and 1918, there were other troubles to be met and mastered.

The isolation of the Nazi world protects the growing child from seeing things as they are, and so from unhappiness. One day the child grown up will inevitably come face to face with truth, and be struck by its lightning glare. Susceptible to the “new,” the German youth of the future will find in truth, apart from its general power, the might of the unexpected. It will have the force of a revelation.

But this has not yet happened.

Of course, some children suffer under the pressure of the everlasting propaganda, the monotony of days that are dreary in spite of dictated festivity. Many suffer because now they can never be alone, left to themselves to read and invent stories and pictures.

There are other lacks. Children who had been sent to Switzerland, because of insufficient food supplies at home, were often at a loss in the beginning for something to help them spend their time. This sudden freedom was a desert; the day was empty without commands. Only gradually, as they found themselves accepted by other people, they began to find themselves; they might sit for hours in the garden with a book, deep in a childhood world withheld at home; or eat normal food, good eggs, rich milk, and white bread. At first they couldn’t get enough. They were like the “holiday children” during the War; they would overeat on these “delicacies” and be ill. But they would soon recover and accept freedom and plenty here as they had learned to accept want and drill at home.

It is generally known that want is great in Germany, and that growing children suffer especially from it. There is a shortage of most foodstuffs: fats are rationed, and good meat, fresh eggs and pure flour have not been inexpensive and plentiful for a long time. Bread is spoiled by the addition of potato meal and other Zusatz — it is dark, damp and almost indigestible, and the breadcard, that most dreaded of war measures, seems inevitable. Great physical endurance is demanded of the children; they suffer most.

The recipes in the new German cookbooks reveal more of the actual state of affairs than the official reports do. It is not unusual to find advice on how to make a “delicious, nourishing cake” with Ersatz fat, oatmeal, and entirely without eggs. “Good, dried fish” is recommended instead of meat, which is declared — just as during the War — unhealthful. The German Woman’s Paper (No. 14) makes revealing suggestions, like this about the use of mildewed marmalade: “If there are only a few spots of mildew, we remove these and use the marmalade immediately on bread or for dessert. If there is a lot of mildew, we remove it along with the adhering marmalade, and boil the residue. We use it as rapidly as possible thereafter.” We do not waste rancid butter either, according to the same paper. “Our precious butter may taste rancid. We knead it thoroughly with salt water, and, if that does not suffice, we fry it with onions and can then use it perfectly for fried potatoes, roast meat or vegetables.”

Menus arranged by the household publications are just as embarrassed. Vobachs Frauenzeitung suggests for Wednesday dinner, after a lunch of boiled potatoes and cold pudding, nothing but “cottage cheese with linseed-oil.” That’s not much of a dinner; and it is not surprising that the children, transplanted into normal Swiss or Dutch conditions, collapse. Family reunions will not become more gemütlich because of insufficient meals; family life can never be improved by these menus and suggestions.

If life in the family has fallen to such small importance for the average German child, it is infinitely more difficult for the child of Jewish or “non-Aryan” descent. All the misery of the pariah — of being outside and despised — he must suffer because of his parents.

“If only I had other parents, ‘Aryan’ parents,” the child thinks, “I could be happy, like the others — belong to them, go marching and sing their songs. I would be a human being — not an Untermensch, an ‘enemy of the German people,’ a ‘misfortune.’ ‘The Jews are our misfortune,’ they tell us in school — my parents are Jews, and they are my misfortune. If I only had some other parents!”

Many Jewish children will look around the dinner-table and think that. Others will look for protection at home from the persecutions they find outside; but their home is unable to give them that refuge, and the child feels, “They are good, but helpless. Just as I am, they are hit by this misfortune.” Home cannot make up for what happens outside; they are all defenseless, and tragically aware of it.

The Jewish child, in contrast to the “Aryan,” has leisure; he has time to think about himself. The Hitler Youth is closed to him; he may sit at home and brood, for he is forbidden to take part in the “Comrades’ Evenings,” the “Gymnastic Games,” the “National Political Festivals.”

That child, too, sits at home, whose father is Jewish, but whose “Aryan” mother would be taintless, if she had not followed him into artvergessener Verblendung, in an infatuation contrary to her “duties to the race.” Perhaps the young half-Jewish girl sitting at the mirror resembles her mother. She looks at her blonde hair, her small, turned-up nose, and her “Nordic, long-narrow” skull; but her mother’s short face, little chin, and her head that is flat in back, are not reflected in the girl’s well-curved skull. That is a heritage from her father which she refuses to admit. “If I could hide him, if he were my secret!” she thinks venomously. “If only he were dead!”

The idea breaks over her, a great wave, and although she realizes its horror, she imagines what might happen to her if she could move into another city with her mother. She is naturally blonde, she could change her name — of course, her papers would not be in order, but something could be done about that, she feels, if only her father were out of the way. She has heard stories of half-Jews who were declared “Aryan” after their mothers took oath that they were not the issue of the Jewish husband, but of an adulterous liaison with an “Aryan.” “Maybe I’m not his daughter at all,” the girl at the mirror dreams, “Oh, God, if only that could be true!”

This devastation has entered the souls of children. If the “Aryan” child suffers objectively through the destruction of the family, the “non-Aryan” child receives the full subjective impact; he knows how great the damage is. He knows the grief of his parents because they are Jews and their chances of making a decent living have been taken from them. He sees one Jewish parent going about like a criminal, and the growing hatred or the tragic pity that the “Aryan” parent feels for the other. And he loves both his parents; perhaps, however, he adores the Führer; and his deepest wish is to “belong” — to be a “pure Aryan.”

The quarter-Jews are in the strangest situation of all; those children having (according to the Nuremberg laws) one Jewish grandparent are treated almost like “Aryans” in school; they are good enough to be aufgenordet (Nordified), and it will be their duty in time to marry a “pure Aryan.” For their part, “Aryans” are permitted to marry quarter-Jews — indeed, some of them will have to, to bring about the State’s “Nordification.” At home, the child must resign himself to the fact that one of his parents is a half-Jew. Some of these children have been given the businesses of their half-Jewish fathers, and taught that, whether the father has founded it and brought it to success or not, it actually belongs to the child, and the father is countenanced as manager by him and his mother. The Führer wills it.

These shattered “mixed” families are the exception, however. A much larger group of “mixed” families have retained dignity and pride, and have not been broken by the degradations they suffer under National Socialism. Whether by regarding themselves as a nation which they hope to see united into a national Jewish State, or by a standard of reason and humanity which is out of place in modern Germany, they stand with the opposition made up of millions of Catholics, Protestants, liberals and ordinary decent human beings. And if their children have been kept out of the Nazi schools and put in the Jewish ones, they feel personal pride and the distinction of belonging in this “camp.” They have that possibility far more than the “Aryan opposition,” which is, except for the churches, diffuse and broken up. They have a chance of organizing because they live harmoniously in closed groups. And, through all the danger, they are far more gemütlich than any Nazi—or apparently Nazi — family can be today.

Of course, many “non-Aryan” families have been reduced or destroyed under National Socialism. Robbed of a future, children were sent abroad to school or emigrated, if they could, to start life again in England or America or Palestine. The parents, alone in Germany, often do not dare to correspond with them, and many have died without seeing their emigrant children. Often months pass before the children learn of the death of these parents.

The life of the “non-Aryan” family has been altered in the dissolution. The “non-Aryan” child of a “mixed” family cannot face his relatives openly any more. He feels his situation as a problem to them, even to those whose sympathies lie with the Jewish members of the family.

The separation which exists throughout Germany in the lives of adults and children — a separation between official and private life (such as it is), between controllable and secret activities — makes schizophrenes of many children. Bewildered and torn, forever at odds with themselves, they turn in tragic confusion.

Association between “Aryan” and Jewish children is, of course, absolutely forbidden.

A little Jewish girl is going down the main street of a small town. She is thirteen, and very pretty; and coming toward her is a boy she recognizes, a friend of pre-Hitler days, who used to play in the sand with her, and who is now wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth. She waves at him, naturally and without thought. But he does not wave back; he approaches, his face set straight ahead, and dashes past as if he hasn’t seen her. Now she hurries home, head down in shame, not wanting to walk any more, after that! She hasn’t been home more than five minutes before he knocks at the door.

“Look,” he begins, red-faced and stammering, “I only wanted to know how you are, Ruth…”

She is shaken with joy, with fright and surprise. “You’re mad to come here,” she whispers. “What if somebody saw you?”

“It’s all right,” he answers. “Nobody saw me come. And you won’t tell; you’re no denouncer!”

An extreme of respect lies in the phrase. She knows it, she can be proud of it. But what does it mean about the other, the free and powerful — his comrades of the Hitler Youth? Are they denouncers? Is he afraid of them?

After he has left, the Jewish child stands at her window for a long time. Shall she tell her parents what has happened, to please them? Why did he do it? And the visit itself — was that the famous treason to his “group” that we always hear about? — a treason against National Socialism? How is he now — ashamed or proud? Is his conscience bad or particularly good at the moment?

He is neither proud, nor ashamed. He is only confused. But since he feels confused so often, he does not waste much time worrying about it.

They don’t concern themselves about their state of mind; all efforts are made so that the children of Germany shall not worry, for the country has become a powder-keg; thoughts might set it off.

Who has glanced into the hearts of this youth, whose ideas might have such power? Who knows if this emptiness, hardness, monotony, militarism — everything that starves and overstrains and kills personality— this drill for war — who knows if this is not reaching the point when it becomes untenable, when those secret hopes, worked for so long, will burst into the outer world and end the fury?

THE SCHOOL

U NTIL RECENTLY, GERMAN schools had the world’s respect: the relationship between teachers and pupils, especially just after the War, was human and dignified, and the teachers themselves were distinguished for thoroughness, discipline, and scientific exactness. The grammar schools and Gymnasien (high schools), colleges and universities, were open to all, and their moderate tuition fees were canceled for talented students of limited means. There were some, like the best American boarding schools, in beautiful, healthful places, whose modern methods allowed teacher and pupils to sit in the garden and have lessons that were remembered as stimulating conversation, or to make excursions over the hills and fields. There were performances in the school theaters, and films shown to supplement courses in natural science, history, and geography.

One subject, political propaganda, was missing from the curriculum. The German Republic refused to influence its citizens one way or the other, or to convince them of the advantages of democracy; it did not carry on any propaganda in its own favor. This proves to have been an error; and its atonement has been a terrible one. Whatever its cause, modesty or the waverings of a young and unconfident Republic, the error stands. What the Republic did toward education was done as a matter of course. Civic buildings, for peacetime use, were put up, and of these many were schools — airy, spacious, and happily adequate. They were set into service without propaganda or hullabaloo. The State was the people’s servant; it served in quiet, believing that its master, the people, would be thankful. But the State was wrong.

Unused to self-rule, the German people submitted to a new State which made itself the master, and forced the people to be its servants. The State and its Führer entered their power in a frenzy of display. The Fiihrer and his followers, shouting and raving, were the opposites of the old, submissive, quiet State. They praised their ideas as the only road to salvation; they commanded; they dictated.

What had been the field of politicians before, and known as “politics,” was now a Weltanschauung (philosophy of life), no less, and there was no other than the National Socialist Weltanschauung. It soon forced itself into the schools, changing them, making rules, interdicting, innovating, and completely changing their character within a few months.

Had the “old-fashioned” educators tried to make civilized human beings of the children in their care? Had they encouraged them in their search for truth? Left youth as much personal freedom as they thought compatible with discipline? Taken them to theaters and movies to serve educational purposes? Had they done all of this? It must all go, according to the Nazis, immediately and radically. Morals, truth, freedom, humanitarianism, peace, education — they were errors that corrupted the young, stupidities with no value to the Führer. “The purpose of our education,” he was crying, “is to create the political soldier. The only difference between him and the active soldier is that he is less specially trained.”

The changes were extensive and thorough. Where good educational methods remained, they were not new ones, but those taken over from the Republican German Youth Movement, from the progressive schools, or from Russian or American experiments. The new methods were recognizable by their violence and brutality. There was only one entirely new and entirely different idea: the purpose to which the new education was dedicated. And that purpose was the aims and plans of the Führer.

In Mein Kampf there is a short chapter devoted to the problem of the education of children, (Translator’s note: This chapter does not exist in the authorized American edition. There is a condensed version of the passages quoted here, in the chapter “The State,” pp. 167-175, from which the passages marked with asterisks are taken.) It contains the proposals of the Führer in this field, and all German children grow up today in the materialism expressed in these twenty-five pages.

“Principles for scientific schools…. In the first place, the youthful brain must not be burdened with subjects, 90 per cent of which it does not need and therefore forgets again.”* And “… it is incomprehensible why, in the course of years, millions of men must learn two or three foreign languages which they can use for only a fraction of that time, and so, also in the majority, forget them completely; for of 100,000 pupils who learn French, for example, scarcely 2,000 will have a serious use for this knowledge later, while 98,000 in the whole course of their lives will not be in a position to use practically what they have learned…. So, for the sake of the 2,000 people to whom the knowledge of these languages is of use, 98,000 are deviled for nothing, and waste precious time….”

His aversion for knowledge is strong and sincere. He has refused learning, and seems, even as a child, to have been “deviled for nothing.” Also, it is necessary for the dictatorship to keep the people as ignorant as it can; only while the people remain unsuspecting, unaware of the truths of the past and present, can the dictatorship unleash its lies.

“Faith is harder to shake than knowledge,” he continues. “Love succumbs less than respect to change, hate lasts longer than aversion, and the impetus toward the most powerful upheavals on this earth has rested at all times less in a scientific knowledge ruling the masses than in a fanaticism blessing them, and often in a hysteria that drove them forwards.”

This is the positive force that is to take the place of the 90 per cent of school material which Hitler brands as superfluous. “Faith” — in the Führer, and the truth about him concealed; “Love”—for the Führer, with respect conceded as unworthy; “Hate” — of enemies whom mere “aversion” could not destroy; and, above all, the hysteria which is checked by scientific knowledge, the “fanaticism blessing” the masses.

The positive force is summed up: “The whole end of education in a people’s State, and its crown, is found by burning into the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it an instinctive and comprehended sense of race…. It is the duty of a national State to see to it that a history of the world is eventually written in which the question of race shall occupy a predominant position….* According to this plan, the curriculum must be built up with this point of view. According to this plan, education must so be arranged that the young person leaving school is not half pacifist, democrat or what have you, but a complete German…. Also, in this case (for girls), the greatest importance is to be given the development of the body, and only after that on the requirements of the mind, and finally of the soul. The aim of the education of women must be inflexibly that of the future mother.”

The Epilogue of Mein Kampf expresses in all clearness the whole purpose of education in Nazi Germany. “A state which, in the era of race-poisoning, devotes itself to the care of its best racial elements must one day become master of the world.”

That is the aim: to make the Nazis the rulers of the world. It is towards this that Hitler stares, that Germany is equipping itself; this is fixed before the eyes of the children,

DR. RUST AND OTHER EDUCATORS

After a year of preparation, transition and experiment in the schools, Hitler’s educational program was made effective on April 30, 1934, the day on which Dr. Bernhard Rust was appointed “Reich Minister of Science, Education, and Culture For the People ( Volksbildung ).” Dr. Rust, an unemployed teacher from Hanover, had belonged to the Nazi Party since 1922. In 1925, he was promoted to the post of Gauleiter of the Party for the district of Hanover and Brunswick. He held office as educator of the republican democratic youth of his home town until 1930. Indeed, it seemed not to be his political activities against the State, whose employee he was, that led to his dismissal, but rather his nervous disorder, which was causing violent attacks of complete insanity at increasingly short periods. Dr. Rust was forced to take longer and longer holidays at sanatoriums, and the State could not hold itself responsible for his ability as a teacher, even during the moments of comparative clarity in the Doctor’s mind.

Bernhard Rust had been decorated with the Iron Cross during the War, and had written about his experience in these terms to his son: “Received today under the thunder of guns the Iron Cross. Your hero father.”

It’s a good story: Rust rises in the Party, to which the ex-teacher seems highly learned, and lands his post right after the success of the grab for power. He moves up with increasing momentum. As early as February, 1933, he is Prussian Minister of Culture, and a year later he is promoted to Dictator of Education. He has held his office with the dilettante laxness characteristic of Nazi administration, and with the nervous unpredictable jitters that, four years before, had taken away his teacher’s job. Rust makes laws now, and repeals them when he has convinced himself of their total impracticability. He not only reduced the period of compulsory public school training from thirteen years to twelve; he went farther, and tried to cut the school week. It had always been customary in Germany to go to school six days out of the seven, with only Sunday as holiday. By an edict of June 7, 1934, Rust canceled Saturday, calling it the “Reich Youth Day.” On Saturdays there were to be no lessons; only “national festivals.”

The curtailed week proved insufficient right away. The demands of the curriculum were too heavy. But the Minister brought everything back on the track, apparently, by means of an invention of his called the “rolling week.” A week began on Monday, went through six school days, omitting Saturday (national festival day) and Sunday (the regular holiday). But the next week was to begin on Tuesday, the one after that on Wednesday, and so on. The result was impossible confusion. And the Minister took months to grasp the fact that, no matter how he rolled his eight-day week, he could never put fifty-two such weeks into a calendar year. At last, rather than devise a new calendar, he decided to call off the whole thing, Reich Youth Day, rolling week, and all.

But by that time there was a new period in the measurement of time. The principal of a German high school, who spends his vacations with relatives in Prague, told them about a “Rust,” which, he explained, was “the period from the moment when the Minister of Education issues an edict to the moment when he revokes it.”

At present, the school week begins on Monday, and includes Saturday, as it used to — or, rather, as never before. For the new spirit has taken hold in the schools since 1934. The teachers, who might as a group have originally had many mental reservations toward Nazism, have fallen completely under its control, and tens of thousands of them — men of science and of the spirit, men with pedagogical experience and a sense of responsibility — are unresisting now, tools to the new leaders’ hands.

Spiritual Germany on its shield, defeated without battle and without honor, presents an image of tragic loss; and those who did oppose the enemy were always heroes, and often martyrs. Even the following passage, although not a notably courageous one, reflects to the credit of the teachers. On March 1, 1933, The Leipzig Teachers’ Journal declared under the heading, “The Field of Ruin”:

“…The 250 Reich Ministers whom we have had since 1918 (53 of whom were Democrats and 197 Liberals) were surely none of them without faults; they were not magicians, but at least they were not irresponsible…. Has nothing really been done for Germany’s youth since 1918? Did sociologic pedagogics exist only before that time? The Weimar Constitution contributed nothing save freedom in teaching and scientific research (Art. 142), the promise of uniform training for teachers (Art. 143), a State organization for the supervision of schools (Art. 144), the launching of a reorganization of the professional school (Art. 145), the institution of four years of uniform preparation for higher education (Art. 146), the support of students of special talent with limited means, the cancelation of tuition fees and often even of the cost of textbooks. Respect for the opinions of others!… Do all these things really, according to the Hitler-Hugenberg Cabinet, deserve to be condemned and done away with, although the teachers during the period in question regarded them as innovations to be gratefully accepted and regard them even today as of great benefit?”

That quotation appeared one month after Hitler came to power. It was the last expression of courage from the German teachers that reached the public. At the same time, the statement seems so naive, so ignorant of the true purposes of the new system as to make its “courage” almost an error of judgment. It also demonstrates the complete unpreparedness of the teachers and their helplessness before what was to take place. They ask blankly whether “freedom of teaching and science” and “consideration of the opinions of others” are to be condemned. “Yes,” comes the answer. “Of course, they are to be condemned and done away with.” And there is no further effort made by the teachers to save their souls.

The psychological and material motives that lie behind such obedience are another matter. But the “Laws,” “Edicts,” “Official Advice,” and other pertinent facts are before us.

In 1937, 97 per cent of all teachers belonged to the National Socialist Teachers Union (N.S.L.B.), according to Reichswalter and District Leader Wächtler; and among these were seven district leaders, seventy-eight Kreis leaders, and over two thousand dignitaries. Seven hundred have won the honor badge of the Party. These teachers are in the service of the movement; they may even be regarded as representative, and as Nazis they cannot be attacked, no matter how they function as teachers.

The Nachrichtenblatt published Herr Wächtler’s photograph: he was in uniform, under a swastika, and looked like a mad corporal who has waked to find himself a general in the field of education.

The steps taken before the issuance of Herr Wächtler’s summary are typical.

The first thing that happened, in the winter of 1933, was that all teachers of “non-Aryan” or Jewish descent were relieved of their posts. An edict was issued on July 11, 1933, that included teachers with all other State officials, ordering them to subordinate their wishes, interests, and demands to the common cause, to devote themselves to the study of National Socialist ideology, and “suggesting” that they familiarize themselves with Mein Kampf. Three days later, a “suggestion” was sent to all those who still maintained contact with the Social Democratic Party, that they inform the Nazi Party of the severance of these connections. Committees were formed to see that it was carried out, and whoever hesitated was instantly dismissed. The purge was on.

It was decided, in Prussia first (November, 1933), and later in all German schools, that public school teachers must belong to a Nazi fighting organization; they were to come to school in uniform, wherever possible, and live in camps; and, during the final examinations, they were to be tested in Geländesport — military sports

This was all deadly serious, and the teachers knew it. Hitler had cried in Weimar, “If there are still people in Germany today who say, we will not join your community, we will remain as we are, then I reply, ‘You will pass on, but after you will come a generation that knows nothing else!’ ”

The teachers, haunted by this verdict, are helping to educate this generation.

“We German educators (says Studienrat L. Grünberg, Commissioner of the Augusta State School in Berlin, in Wehrgedanke und Schule, p. 5) must set ourselves free from the conception that we are merely transmitters of science. A future passage at arms of the German people will determine if the German teaching class has become a useful factor of the German people of the Third Reich.”

That is how the officers of education babble to order. Everything is based on the “future passage at arms of the German people.” And since the Führer has made, above all, the race-consciousness of the people a duty, this race-consciousness, according to the “defense-philosophy,” must insistently occupy the thought of the German educators.

In the Spring of 1937, a decree was issued by Reichswalter und Gauleiter Wächtler:

“I hereby decree that every member of the N.S.L.B. (National Socialist Teachers’ Union) submit a table of his ancestors in three copies, with official documents of proof, or certified copies of the same, to the Sachbearbeiter (specific worker) of the political district to which he belongs, for information as to consanguinity. The Gausachbearbeiter für Sippenkunde is to examine the entries and send on table to the Reich Executive of the Teachers’ Union, retain one copy at district headquarters, and return the third to the applicant, together with all the original documents…. The table of ancestors is to be distributed later by the applicant…. On with the good work!                     “Fritz Wächtler.”

The educators sit down and “distribute.” The small heroisms of daily life exhaust any independence or courage left in them: a teacher is a hero if he says “Good morning!” instead of “Heil Hitler!” to a pupil, or if he treats a Jewish student with anything but the orthodox abhorrence, or if he singles out a really brilliant scholar who does not happen to be gifted in calisthenics. And a medal might very well be struck for the teacher mentioned in the New Sheet of the N.S.L.B. as “having failed to make contact.” “Strange,” the attack concludes, “for he is an unquestionably excellent teacher. He is an exemplary scholar. His punctuality and meticulous sense of duty have become proverbial in the circle of his associates. His method of teaching has often been tested. The results of his teachings are astonishing. His pupils look up to him as to a father. He is a true comrade to his co-workers. He is always ready to do anyone a favor. And yet… he lacks one thing. When we converse about National Socialist ideology, in spite of all his efforts to comprehend, he shows a strange uncertainty. And if his pupils ask him questions about the purpose and meaning of National Socialist measures, he often finds difficulty in giving adequate answers….”

The name of this eccentric is not given; but he knows what he may expect from now on. The Nazis themselves praise him, and cannot understand why he is unable to “make contact” with them. “An excellent teacher!” He is more; he is a secret hero in that front which fights one at a time today, and whose whole voice we shall hear when its time comes.

THE CHANGED EMPHASIS

In May, 1934, the newly organized and “purged” body of teachers began to give lessons in “National Socialist Meanings.” There were new fundamental maxims, and new textbooks. The scale of values, in order of importance, is set by the Führer:

Hereditary tendencies; general racial picture.

The character (degree of adherence to National Socialism).

The physical makeup or “body” (degree of usefulness in the event of a future war).

(And, last) Knowledge. (Here, the knowledge of objective reality, regarded as a last offshoot of liberalism, is often punishable where it is not merely regarded as absurd and reprehensible.)

But what could the knowledge of objective reality mean? Where would its place be, in a system which reduces all sciences to a single new science called Wehrwissenschaft (the science of defense, although the connection between the German “Wehr” and the English “war” is no coincidence). Education in relation to weapons, then, takes the place of education as we know it. The whole concept is peculiar to Hitler’s Germany. It has been most directly put by a high school principal, Hans Willy Ziegler, in the N.S.L.B. periodical Die Deutsche Schule (June-July, 1935): “Education in relation to weapons, then, is no special branch of general education; rather, it is, in point of fact, the very core of our entire education.”

The “core” grows, penetrates into the political branches, history, “geo-politics,” etc., and even into those which seem to be unpolitical, like mathematics and language. The textbooks demonstrate this growth.

The large, heavy schoolbooks we knew as children, one for each year, Fourth Grade Geography, First Grade History, have not entirely vanished. But they have lost most of their importance, and are replaced by the decisive little pamphlet that supplements the textbook — the propaganda pamphlet.

Three explanations rise for the changed emphasis:

First, “knowledge” is listed all the way down, far below “hereditary tendencies,” “character,” and “the body.” The old textbook, with its ballast of objective knowledge, might stand in the way of physical training in the use of weapons.

Second, development of character in the Nazi sense calls for little instruction in objective truth — that has been acknowledged — but rather for expedient falsifications, propaganda to fit the moment. If the Führer wishes to stress, in his “propaganda for Germanhood abroad,” the sad straits of Germans living in America, a pamphlet will appear, and will disappear as quickly if it seems necessary (to facilitate student exchange, for example) to play up friendly relations. The little pamphlets can be manipulated according to the news; the fat readers could not have been juggled this way.

The third explanation, and the most inclusive, has to do with the “politics of the bad conscience.” Anyone who visited the German Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1937 noticed that special care was taken to avoid all Hitler, Nazi or war propaganda. Nothing suggested that you were seeing an exposition presented by, and representative of, the most war-willed dictatorship in the world. There was not one picture of Hitler, not one anti-Jewish poster, not one model of a bombing plane. Hitler, as showman, did not seem convinced that a display of objectives would be popular among visitors from outside of Germany.

As dictator of education, Hitler entertains the same doubts of popular approval in the outer world. And so, following his habit, he advances “diplomatically,” wrapped in mystery, and the official textbooks are confined within acceptable limits; the new Reich Reader is no more honest than the German Pavilion. The Reader is full of patriotic mediocrity, cant about “Earth” and “Blood,” and a few remarks by the Führer and his officials. There are none of the riches that might have been included — nothing by Goethe or Lessing, and of course nothing by Heine.

The Reich Reader would frighten no one. It is not an open scandal; it smells of barrenness, cheerlessness, and bad taste — just as the Pavilion did — but not of danger.

But the little leaflets!

The unofficial, or semi-official, propaganda pamphlets, scattered throughout the curriculum by the Nazi Teachers’ Union or related organizations as though by chance — they are the real Reader….

The Führer offers the world a protective series of texts, only slightly offensive, while the essential pamphlets are covered by the curtains of the official libraries.

The first book that the child out of kindergarten sees is the Primer; and this, at the express wish of the Führer, has been revised to suit the times. Various primers go to different regions, but they all deal, in word and picture, with camp life, marching, martial drums, boys growing up to be soldiers, and girls to take care of soldiers.

Rhineland Children, a primer written by Richard Seewald and Ewald Tiesburger, is the most effective introduction to the military life. Children learned to read, in the past, through words more peaceful than:

Hört, wir trommeln, bum, bumbum —

Hört, wir blasen, tä terä tä tä!

Nun, das Lager räumen!

Listen to the drums, boom, boom, boom —

Listen to the trumpets, tateratata!

Come on, clear the camp!

The supplement to this primer was published by the Stürmer Verlag, is highly recommended officially, and, although it is an expensive book, has already reached a sale of more than seventy thousand copies. By Elvira Bauer, it has a title astonishing both in length and content: Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid! Uud keinem Jud bei seinem Eid! (Trust no fox on green heath! And no Jew on his oath!) On the bright red cover are two pictures with the title. One is of the fox, peering around a corner maliciously eager for his prey; and the other, a typical Nazi caricature of the Jew, beneath a star of David — huge nose, thick lips and bleary eyes, swearing his false oath with fat fingers raised. The book is printed in a luxurious edition, with many colored illustrations, and with two-color text. That is, those words which the authors wish to impress upon their readers are printed in red — “Devil,” “Jews,” “thick-lips,” “gangster.” It is impossible to describe the level of sadistic cruelty, the dishonesty and barbarism of this book, the core of all future training,

HISTORY

The tone of instruction in history was altered rapidly by the Nazis. A teachers’ textbook by Karl Alnar advises that the teaching of history “is a means of solving the political-historical task of the people…. The aim of instruction is preparation for the battle for self-assertion of a people: that is, political development. The history of the world is to be regarded from the racial point of view.”

And in the periodical National Sozialistisches Bildungswesen, Friedrich Flieder says in an essay on “History as the Essence of Political Education”: “Present and future instruction in history take cognizance of the fact that the aims are not so much scientific as essentially practical.” And he adds in italics: “The crown of all teaching of history consists of nothing but following the Führer.”

They have been winning this crown since 1933. The N. S. Lehrer Bund, Breslau district, publishes a series of three-cent Essays for the Purpose of German Renovation, which enjoys a circulation of over four million. The first issue alone (“Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Savior”) reached 347,000. In Saxony, the Bund circulates a slightly more important series, containing such titles as “Adolf Hitler,” “The Lie of War Guilt,” etc., of which the Prussian teachers’ periodical wrote, in 1934, “If the subsequent issues are as inspired, a new spirit will enter the schools.”

That spirit has entered. Wherever we look, we find it, expressed in paragraphs like those which follow, and all of which are average, typical examples, which might be exchanged for any of countless statements.

German History, by Herbert Goebel, contains these truths about world affairs during the post-war period:

“England was the greatest winner, as she was also the greatest impelling force toward the World War. Out of envy, she destroyed her rival in the field of world economics, Germany. Without her colonies, France would today be a power of secondary rank only; with approximately one-sixth colored population, European France today can hardly be regarded as a white people.”

As for the Slavs, according to Goebel, they did originally “belong to the Nordic race, but they were regarded as foreigners by the Germans, because they had very early become so interrelated with Mongolian hordes that almost nothing was left of their Nordic blood. The result of this mixing of races, as well as of later instances of the same thing, is that the Slavs have never produced any culture worthy of the name; their uncleanliness, submissiveness, lack of loyalty and sudden outbursts of wildness are their Mongolian heritage.”

Goebel grows most insistent when he is referring to German-speaking neighbors. He reports the Austrian Nazi Putsch of July 25, 1934, in the course of which the Austrian Chancellor, Dollfuss, was murdered by National Socialists, as follows:

“In the summer of 1934 there were armed uprisings on the part of the Marxists in Vienna and other places in Austria. In the course of bloody battles, the Chancellor of the Union was mortally wounded.”

A book by Karl Ruger, especially recommended for small children by Hans Schlemm (the Bavarian Minister of Education, who has since been killed in a plane crash), is an addendum to a larger volume, The Onward March of the German Nation by a Herr von Fikenscher.

“Ask your father, your uncle, etc., to tell you war stories.

“Bring anything you have at home pertaining to the War.

“In the following study period we will examine the objects brought to school: shell fragments, bullets, parts of projectiles worked into jewelry, etc. — mind the fuses! and we’ll talk about the uses to which these were put during the War. After this we’ll describe scenes, such as a day in the trenches, an air raid, black Frenchmen, a bursting bomb, the burial of a comrade (using the universally-sung melody, Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden! ), how a dying man writes a farewell letter, a day of rest behind the front (Jews).”

Karl Ruger insists that the Jews, in large numbers, were having fun behind the lines while the Germans wrote farewells and died. Surely he knows that a disproportionately large percentage of Jews died in the War; but there is no concern here, either, for the truth. The one aim is to fix “race-consciousness” and blind obedience to the Führer in the children. We go on to the “Letters of Soldiers from the Front”:

“…As for the rest, we shoot but little and are not much shot at. Our activities consist principally in sleeping, eating, smoking, and playing chess. Some of the men play cards. We write letters and read the newspapers. You see, it is quite a cozy life. Especially in the evenings, in our ‘living room,’ when there is a little candle burning on the table around which we have gathered, everyone smoking or doing away with the sweets that have come by field-post. In the background, someone is making coffee on a little stove; another man is drying his socks, a third warming potatoes, and a fourth playing the mouth-organ, while the rest hum the melody, loudly and softly, along with him; yes, that can be unbelievably cozy.”

“Cozy”; that is the atmosphere of war, although Ruger admits that “dangerous things” are occasionally found. They are: aviators, grenades, bombs, bullets, poison-gas, cannon, rifles, machine-guns, tanks, sabers, barbed wire, shell fragments — a list that each child must memorize. He must also learn “What the soldier needs,” and “All about Ersatz products.” Written exercises are on themes like “The dictated peace of Versailles”:

“The best milch cows had to be given up, and so there were only a few milch cows left, which meant little milk and that not of the best quality; city children were undernourished, a fact which is still noticeable among many of them….”

It goes on, page after page with no other purpose than to fill little children with hatred for the “enemies of Germany,” who include, aside from the Jews, everyone not in complete accord with the plans and methods of the Führer: the French, English, Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons, Slavs in general, and Russians in particular.

It shows how “Jews, criminals, and international bandits” made a revolution in Germany, and, as late as February, 1933, set fire to “our” Reichstag as a signal for the Communist world revolution. “And there were always more and more people who said: ‘Yes, Hitler is right’ always more, millions and millions. Finally men of the old government said: ‘We are ashamed. We must go!’ Nor did Reich President von Hindenburg like them any more. So he went to Hitler and said to him: ‘You make a government!’ That was on January 30, 1933. Then Hitler became Chancellor.”

But Karl Ruger lies in obedience to orders. Dr. Max Stoll, Oberstudiendirektor, in Munich, described his own methods and recommended them to others in his preface to The Onward March of the German Nation: “It would never have sufficed simply to relate events; every relation must try to give form to the general picture….” And the N.S. Educator publishes a history curriculum which finds it by no means “sufficient merely to relate events.”

GEO-POLITICS

A new type of historical instruction, and a particularly fertile field for propaganda, is the “geo-political” course. A textbook by Heinrich Schroder advocates the innovation, which will soon be generally established.

Classes are conducted as follows: a pupil is asked what he considers a “rightful battle for a common Reich,” and a little girl volunteers: “My conscience tells me what to do.”

The boy is more precise: “We must help provide bread for the unemployed, and we must get rid of the Jews. Wherever one hundred Jews are employed, there is work for only twelve Germans.” (Whatever that means….)

When the teacher invites the class to consider the German-speaking people abroad ( Auslandsdeutsche ), these are the answers he wants:

“We must help the Germans in Russia.”

“We must write to Germans abroad that they must not surrender their blood” (i.e., mix with non-Germans and so become less German).

“First we must fight to make Germany strong; and then we must come to the assistance of Germans abroad.”

The following conversation, quoted verbatim, is the clue to what Schröder and other educators mean when they speak of helping Germans abroad:

TEACHER: Our people have one blood and one language; but they lack one thing.

FRITZ: The German people have no common country.

RUDI: Adolf Hitler says that one blood belongs to one land.

ANNELIESE: We say this, but we can do nothing about it.

TEACHER: Then all Germans will never be able to live in one country?

MARIECHEN: The time must come.

RUDI: But the Führer cannot accomplish this alone. We must all help him.

TEACHER: Are you all helping him?

RUDI: I am helping by being a member of the Jungvolk and by fighting for Germany.

FRITZ: In my brown shirt I am fighting for Germany.

KARL: I have written letters to America to counteract the propaganda of the Jews who accuse us of perpetrating atrocities.

FRITZ: I have written letters to Danzig; and in my letters to Canada I have valiantly fought with my pen.

TEACHER: That is good. And I gather that our ultimate aim is clear to us all.

FRITZ: Our aim is one strong and unified Germany for all the Germans in the world.

TEACHER: Rudi has already quoted the significant words of our Fiihrer; we all utter these words reverently: “One blood belongs to one land!” Let us close the lesson by singing the Horst Wessel song.

HORST WESSEL

Horst Wessel, a national hero in the new Germany, was the son of a North German pastor, a chaplain during the War, This man, whose name-song is the national anthem now, was always fond of playing soldiers, of handling daggers and revolvers; his intelligence was definitely below normal, and he never could find his way into a civil profession. Still at school age, he joined one of the quasi-military organizations which were springing up, German nationalist in character, and composed of young men with nothing better to do who gathered in the hope that the War might yet be won. Horst Wessel became the leader of a group called Crown Princess, affiliated with the rather childish Bismarck Bund. It was not long before he was joining more sinister groups, the Viking, the infamous Organization Consul, and finally the Black Reichswehr.

Many of the members had come back from the War desperate, de^ feated soldiers, completely lost in civilian life. Some went to Silesia or the Baltic region in the hope of rescuing lost German territory; but Horst Wessel, who had been too young to go to war, was never more than an adventurous loafer. The organizations, moreover, were losing their purely nationalist character and degenerating into bands of terrorists.

The National Socialist movement, in its attempt to gather power, gathered in the debris of these Freikorps, becoming their successor; Horst Wessel became a Nazi. To appease his relatives and the world in general, he decided to attend a university; but he never was even a Bummel student (a chronic student, behaving as though the academic life were a profession), for he hardly set eyes on a university. He was living in one of the most disreputable sections of Berlin, and engaging in a more remunerative profession. The pastor’s son was living with a notorious whore, and earning money as procurer. But the Nazis made sure that he would not forget his appetite for playing soldier. While his mistress was making money, he was breaking up meetings and taking part in the bloody street fights between workers and Nazi toughs that were then so common. During one of those brawls, Horst Wessel was killed.

He had never worked in his life. He had been a degenerate who never accomplished a thing that can be counted in his favor. But he has become the national hero of Germany, and his song, Die Fahne Hoch (Up with the Flag) the national hymn.

It is one of the shabbiest works ever to reach fame; lacking talent and craft, its brutal, bombastic text is set to a melody full of mistakes — a melody Horst Wessel had stolen, which does not even coincide with the limping rhythm of the verse. Two high legal courts handed down, as late as 1937, an astonishing decision based on the authoritative verdict of musical experts of the Sachverständige Kammer für Werke der Tonkunst. It settled a suit between two music publishers, and is as follows:

“As far back as 1900, there was a popular song called Sea Voyage to Africa (beginning, ‘Once I lived in the German fatherland’), whose first line, with only a slight alteration in the sequence of notes, and minor differences in rhythm, has exactly the same melody as that of the first two lines of the Horst Wessel song. The third line and the beginning of the fourth of this song, almost bar for bar, can be found in the still older song The Fisher and his Love (beginning, ‘I am but a poor fisher-lad’). The closing bars of the Horst Wessel song correspond to the end of the second line of the Storndorfer folk song, There was a man who wanted to go home, which was, again, sung to almost the same melody in Westphalia, in the song, Sea Voyage to Africa. ”

The astonishing thing is that a Nazi court dared to pass so severe a verdict on the Nazi hymn. The judges, however, were careful not to refer to Horst Wessel as a plagiarist, but to some vague “singer of the Horst Wessel song.” Nevertheless, they went on to say: “Above all, an artist with a strong musical sense will feel himself bound to conform to the words far more than did the author of the song Up with the Flag. The very beginning shows a definite discrepancy of word and tune; the line ‘Up with the flag’ would seem to indicate a movement upwards, whereas the melody goes downward, without any apparent necessity for this. A further disagreement between words and melody is to be found in the line, Kameraden die Rot Front und Reaktion erschossen, for the text, contrary to the meaning, emphasizes die with a higher note, which, quite gratuitously, is also louder than the rest of the text.”

The hero and martyr of Hitler’s regime died as a notorious pimp; the “National Hymn,” his life work, is not only a plagiarism, but a clumsy one.

However, Nazi school children know Horst Wessel as a heroic, saintly figure of light, a godlike hero hated by the enemies of the Nazis, a man who sacrificed his life in the battle against evil. His song, they are told — and they have not so much as a suspicion that the accuracy of what they are taught is doubtful — is one of the greatest creations of the German spirit. And they sing it lustily.

MATHEMATICS

“Occidental mathematics,” writes one Dr. Erwin Geek, in The National Socialist Essence of Education, “as it has developed in the past three hundred years, is Aryan spiritual property; it is an expression of the Nordic fighting spirit, of Nordic struggle for the supremacy of the world beyond its boundaries.”

It sounds like a vast joke against learning — “an expression of the Nordic fighting spirit!” But we have been warned. At least, now, the problems in arithmetic cannot surprise us.

They all have to do with airplanes, bombs, cannon, and guns.

The booklets called Völkisches Rechnen — a new term meaning “people’s arithmetic” or “national-political problems of arithmetic” — account for this puzzling adjustment: sums in terms of bullet trajectories! Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done about national political problems with ordinary addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division as they are usually taught in the public schools. In the secondary schools, more can be done. National Political Practice in Arithmetic Lessons sets the following problems:

I. Germany had, according to the Versailles Treaty, to surrender all her colonies. (An enumeration of colonies and mandates, with estimates of population and area is given) A. What was Germany’s total loss in population and territory? B. How much did each mandatory power receive in territory and population? C. How many times greater is the surrendered territory than the area of Germany? D. Compare the population of Germany with the population of the lost territories.

II. A bombing plane can be loaded with one explosive bomb of 35 kilograms, three bombs of 100 kilograms, four gas bombs of 150 kilograms, and 200 incendiary bombs of one kilogram. A. What is the load capacity? B. What is the percentage of each type of bomb? C. How many incendiary bombs of 0.5 kilograms could be added if the load capacity were increased 50%?

III. An airplane flies at the rate of 240 kilometers per hour to a place at a distance of 210 kilometers in order to drop bombs. When may it be expected to return if the dropping of bombs takes 7.5 minutes?

Another textbook, National Political Application of Algebra, by Otto Zoll, achieves the same ends as the Practice. “How many people can seek protection in a bomb-proof cellar, length 5 meters, width 4 meters, and height 2.25 meters? Each person needs 1 cubic meter per hour, and they remain there for three hours.”

In his little book, Aerial Defense in Numbers, Fritz Tegeder asks the same kind of question: “If the speed of an airplane is 175 kilometers per hour, how many hours does it take for a plane to reach Moscow, 1,925 kilometers from Berlin; Copenhagen, 481 kilometers from Berlin; and Warsaw, 817 kilometers from Berlin?” In this problem the 7.5 minutes which, as everyone knows, a “passenger plane” needs to drop its bombs, are not mentioned.

Another book, Germany’s Fall and Rise — Illustrations Taken from Arithmetic Instruction in Higher Grades of Elementary School, which in 1936 had reached a circulation of 715,000 copies, asks: “The Jews are aliens in Germany — In 1933 there were 66,060,000 inhabitants in the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What is the percentage of aliens?”

And this is only the surface. What is to be said of such pamphlets as Mathematical Problems of Physical Training, and Knowledge of Military Science? Or Mathematical Problems for Grammar School and the Collection of Artillery Problems for Use in the Upper Classes of Advanced Schools?

GERMAN

Before we talk about the teaching of German, let us note that the Führer and Reich Chancellor, the master and educator of the German people, is hardly a master of the language. There is not a page of Mein Kampf whose errors do not hit you in the eye. Every speech of Hitler’s is crowded with grammatical mistakes; it is beyond his power to speak a few consecutive German sentences correctly.

The answer might be that he is no scholar, but a “man of the people,” as he has reiterated. But he is the people’s ruler. And his speeches are not faulty because of extreme simplicity, but because of their ambitious rhetoric, his attempts at a literary German. The Führer’s language is an indictment of his intelligence, and one to which the attention of foreigners must be called before they can fully appreciate it. Actions may be judged according to time and place, and their values may change; but style, language (apart from content) are crystallized at the moment. Hitler’s use of language is the worst imaginable, and it will remain at that level. Its danger is that, spoken by him, these utterances are for the German people — his wish is theirs, his opinion theirs, and his use of language must be their language. Those who care for the German language may be anxious for its future when they see its deterioration during the five years of Hitler’s rule; newspapers, magazines, schoolbooks — the entire official literature — have fallen into the florid yet brutal, military and vulgar forms of expression that are typical of the Führer himself.

The teaching of German, like all lessons, is not an end in itself, but teaches children how to express the thoughts of the Führer in his own language — and nothing else. A small grammar by Richard Alschner, published recently in Leipzig under the sonorous title of Sprachkundliche Kleinarbeit im Neuen Geiste (which means something like A Study of Language in the New Spirit ), says in the preface:

“Whatever moves the soul of a people, in joy and sorrow, in meditation and battle, in creation and festivity, vibrates in unison with the entire curriculum, and by no means least in the teaching of language. Here, too, it is a matter of coinciding with life itself! Proximity to the present! Relation to the people! For that reason let us also give utterance to the mighty events of the time in our lessons in German! That which fills the heart of the people is spilled by the tongue of youth! The stream of strong blood-folk thought, feeling, and will must be permitted to flow, warm with life, into the form of the word. The result will be a teaching of folk-culture in the mother tongue, and to make this live and be watchful in the growing generation, so that this may, with its own treasure of words belonging to our day and age, express the new treasure of thought, gather it into itself, and let it root ever deeper in the German essence ( Wesensart ), growing ever more deeply rooted, growing ever more into the German mode of thought, the German mode of living, and the German view of the world ( Weltschau ).”

The preface to a grammar! Doesn’t it sound more like one of Hitler’s “cultural speeches”? And the examples in the book carry it farther:

“Example 52. Horror tales from foreign countries affirm that after the National Socialist revolution Jews were assassinated in Germany; that their property was taken from them, that they were spat upon, shot down, thrown into prison, their garments torn from their bodies, and left to starve in concentration camps.

“Example 53. (On the prefix ‘un-,’ corresponding to the English ‘in-’.) If the German people remain unified they will be invincible, incomparable, inimitable, indomitable….”

If the manner in which the German people sing their own praise seems more innocuous than invincible, that must be due to the fact that it is the only way in which the “mother tongue” can be rooted deeply in the German view of the world.

In the old days, the grammars used absurd sentences to teach the rules. You might get: “The penknife of my grandfather is nice,” and be asked to write the plural of subject and predicate, being careful not to pluralize the grandfather too. But when you have: “The bombing plane of my fatherland brings destruction,” you have only to think of the content. You’ll get the idea! “The bombing planes of my fatherland bring destruction!”

The Readers deal almost exclusively with race, ancestors, roots in a common soil, heroism, the mystery of the German mission, and the German soul. The German Romanticists, properly expurgated, are in, but there is a general feeling of apology for them. The Nazi conscience is not quite clear here. The N. S. Bildungswesen (Nazi Educational World) says, on the occasion of a new edition of Herder, Grimm, Claudius, etc.: “There were no National Socialists before Adolf Hitler. But before him there were human beings, poets, scientists, and prophets among our people, who became the guardians and awakeners of German essence, and so helped to prepare the raw material out of which Adolf Hitler was able to make his movement and a new Reich.”

The German poets of the past are misused as awakeners of Nazi material. Herder, Grimm, and Claudius are innocent; aside from that, they are thrown in with writers whose names will be forgotten in Germany before they are known outside it, names like H. Fr. Blunck, Maria Kahle, H. Hanselmann (who, according to the N.S. Educator, has written, in Jakobli, a “Novel about Jacob” in two volumes, “the best novel of development” of the present age). Maria Kahle has a lot to say, particularly in the Readers of western Germany, probably because she has a fortunate way of expressing the Nazi demand for “broadening the territory of German life.” She writes:

Unser Haus ist zerstört, unsre Scholle entweiht,

Dock im Heimwehnot und in Knechtschaftsleid,

Seit tausend Jahren singt Ostseewind,

Sudetenwind, Kar pathenwind,

Von Ostlands deutscher Herrlichkeit.

Our house is destroyed and our hearth brought low,

But, homesick or enslaved, we know

How for a thousand years the Baltic wind,

The Sudeten wind, the Carpathian wind

Sang German glory as eastward they blow.

She is even clearer in prose. She writes in an essay on “Germans Outside the Boundaries”:

“Before the War we believed that the boundaries of the German people began and ended where they were mapped out as the German State. Today we are aware that the unity and growth of a people is not dependent on its geographical borders. A German can be the citizen of a foreign state and yet, through his blood and his race and his essential manner and speech, he belongs to us.”

Maria Kahle’s opinions, however, are relatively harmless, as is all the material presented directly to the children, in comparison with that contained in the directions for the teachers.

In a work called Wege zum Deutschen Lesebuch, V. und VI. Schuljahr, Messrs. Rössing, Zaum, Irle, Herfurth, and Schäfer (Bochum, Verlags- und Lehrmittel-Anstalt Kamp ) issue their exactly formulated directions. In the thesis called Germany Ought to Be Whole, the teacher asks his class, “Is the South Tyrol really German?” upon which a bright pupil answers, “It is pure German, and the population suffers because of it.” The teacher asks, “And Switzerland?” The answer, “Most Swiss are German, but Switzerland has been a separate State for three hundred years.” The teacher does not contradict this, but asks, “Do you know of another State lost to the Reich then?” “Certainly — the Netherlands.”

And now there is great mourning in the class for so many “true Germans” and areas that have been lost. This is the moment to show the way to unite them again with Germany. “Which part of the German people can one recognize in spite of oppression as being true to the German people and the German language?” And the pupil answers, with pride and defiance in his voice, “Germans across the frontier.” “Which Bund is trying to keep connections with Germans both within the borders and abroad?” asks the teacher, meaning the V.D.A. ( Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland ), the organization which has committed itself to “peaceful penetration” of all German-speaking areas outside Germany, until at last the South Tyrolese, the German Swiss, and the Sudeten German can call Hitler’s troops to their help and realize a “bloodless annexation.”

“Because we know,” the teacher says confidently, “how important it is to remain in contact with those Germans, we wish to open up a correspondence with a German school abroad. You must tell them about things at home, and send them postcards and newspapers.”

The correspondence between Nazi children and children abroad plays an important part within the Third Reich’s propaganda. The small German boys and girls are made to write to those pathetic objects, German children who are not yet allowed to live under the rule of Hitler. In the children’s newspaper Hilf Mit, under the title “Germany Works,” there appeared such a correspondence. The first of the two letters, dated June 20, 1937, comes from a small French boy named Jean-Baptiste, who lives in Marly-near-Paris.

“Dear Kurt

“In our garden all the flowers are blooming. Father is better, only he has an awful lot to do, he is now a judge in the civil court, and everybody complains that they can’t keep their contracts because the franc has fallen so low. The landlords want more money from their tenants, handworkers want higher prices for their work, and there is always much irritation and excitement for father. If we didn’t still have a little money, it would be very bad for us also, for Father says we can’t get along on his salary on account of inflation. After all, judges can’t go out in the street and demonstrate. They can’t have a sit-down strike in court. They have to be glad to get the criminals sent to prison….”

And Jean-Baptiste, a curiously un-childlike creature, who seems to have a lot of trouble in his beautiful country, goes on to tell about the Russian and German Pavilions at the Paris Exposition.

“…I will tell you my opinion without flattery. There are figures on the Bolshevik House that look as if they want to jump at the German House, to pull it down. There isn’t much inside, however — boring statistics and tables. Then I went to your house; that’s a different picture! I was most interested in light metals — and how your agriculture has come along. I really must come to Germany and look at all that when I am older. I stayed with Uncle Baptiste in Gascony last spring. That’s a beautiful place, but, in spite of that, people aren’t happy there at all…. Your House at the Exposition interested me. Of course, I didn’t believe everything about you, because we French are suspicious by nature. But I can’t get out of my head what I did see of your work. Many good wishes — I am

“Your true friend, “Jean-Baptiste.”

His German friend writes, after only a short introduction,

“…Look here, we in Germany aren’t rich. Our soil is poorer than the French, we have no empire, and we were dragged down and impoverished by the War and the bad crops after the War. When the Führer came to power the Jews all over the world were trying to overthrow us by cutting us off from raw materials…. We are working with all our strength now to promote new inventions, so that our people can have bread and profits….”

Kurt and Jean-Baptiste have the same interests; but Kurt gets to the bottom of things, and knows where misery comes from; the little French boy has to be taught by his Nazi friend.

“…I am so sorry,” Kurt writes generously, “that you, or rather your father, is having trouble because the franc is falling…. Jews always make inflations…. On the one side, they stir up the workers to demand always higher wages, while they hinder the increase of work…. The Jew persuades the people to such madness. All those who must live on their savings are forced to spend and lose them, the Jew buys up all the beautiful possessions of impoverished families, and one fine day there isn’t a cent left. Then the Jew either lends them money at Shylock rates, or, if he thinks he has got far enough, he raises his horrible bloody Bolshevism above the mass of the despairing people. That is exactly what he is trying to do now in your France.”

Kurt paints a terrible picture, but it is clear that the catastrophe could be averted, if Jean’s fatherland, threatened France, would give itself at the last moment to Hitler. “I know,” Kurt writes, “how hardworking and modest your peasants are…. I can’t understand how they allow themselves to be hounded from one devaluation of the franc to another, losing everything while the Jew laughs up his sleeve. See here, we didn’t stick any of those mad figures on our building in the Paris Exposition. We showed only what a poor people can achieve when it is well led and hard-working, as soon as it has got rid of the Jews…. I’d be awfully glad if you’d come here; you must see how we work and produce here, and what we make out of the soil…. Until then, a hearty handshake from

“Kurt.”

* * *

One of the first Nazis in Germany was a man called Dietrich Eckart, a personal friend and admirer of Hitler’s, and at one time a considerable influence on him. He was Hitler’s prototype in anti-Semitism, above all. Since he died as early as 1923, he could be converted easily into a myth. He became “faithful Eckart,” “one of our greatest dead,” “the singer of the Party,” He has played a dominating part in German Readers, although only one poem of his is known. It begins:

Deutschland erwache!

Sturm, Sturm, Sturm!

Läutet die Glocken von Turm zu Turm!

Läutet, dass die Funken zu sprühen beginnen,

Judas erscheint, das Reich zu gewinnen,

Läutet, dass blutig die Seile sich röten,

Rings lauter Brennen und Martern und Töten.

Läutet Sturm, dass die Erde sich bäumt,

Unter dem Donner der rettenden Rache.

Wehe dem Volk, das heute noch träumt.

Deutschland erwache!

Germany awake!

Storm, storm, storm!

Let the bells ring from tower to tower,

Ring till the sparks begin to shower,

Judas appears, to win the Reich’s power.

Ring till the bell-ropes redden with blood.

Ring for the burning, the martyred, the dead.

Ring out storm, and let the whole earth shake,

Revenge to the rescue, and thunder overhead!

Woe unto those who dream today!

Germany, awake!

In commentary on the poem and what the author represents, a collection called Die Fahne Hoch (Up with the Flag) (No, 36, Neues Verlagshaus für Volksliteratur ) carried a short biography of the poet, “His father wished him to study medicine…. Suddenly, in the midst of his studies, he became very ill. He took morphia, became an addict, and remained one after his recovery. His condition was so serious, and his irritability so great, that he himself saw he could not continue that way…. He decided to find a sanatorium for nervous disorders. During his stay at the sanatorium, his first great poetical plans matured….” And the report continues, full of revolutionary pride. “Young Eckart did not allow himself to be caught up in a bourgeois profession; his father gradually realized this and stopped arguing with his son.” After that, it is naturally “comprehensible that the Jewish press rejected this booklet and suppressed it…. His father died in 1895, and left him a considerable fortune… and Dietrich Eckart made such generous use of it that within a few years there was not one cent left.” But when the frivolous young man met Adolf Hitler, “the corporal from the world which was as yet utterly unknown to him… he realized with astonishing clairvoyance the great qualities of a leader in this man, and submitted himself to Hitler unconditionally…. Thus Dietrich Eckart stands before us… the German poet whom his people will never forget, because they cannot forget him.”

They will not forget him and cannot, because the propaganda ministry will not hear of it, because he is part of the myth. This is a German poet in Hitler’s good grace: Dietrich Eckart, called, not by his enemies, but by his Nazi worshipers, a spendthrift, a morphia addict, who would not allow himself to be caught up in a bourgeois profession. He wrote miserable, bloody cant; and he did not become Hitler’s friend in spite of his weaknesses, any more than he wrote his verses in spite of them. Because of his qualities, because he was a useless, refractory wreck, he has been taken into the Nazi Valhalla, to a place beside Horst Wessel, the pimp, and Leo Schlageter, the railway wrecker. What happens inside the heads of school-children who are given such heroes?

RACIAL INSTRUCTION

After a meeting of the Racial Office of the Party, Dr. Bernhard Rust issued an edict, which may be summarized:

Racial Instruction is to be given in all classes. (Appropriate conclusions are to be drawn from Racial Instruction in all branches of public and private life.) The spirit of National Socialism must hold first place throughout the course. It must be enforced in order to:

1. Give pupils an insight into the relationship, causes and effects of all basic facts having to do with the science of heredity and race.

2. Impress the pupils with the importance of the science of heredity and race for the future of the nation and the purposes of the government.

3. Awaken in the pupils a sense of responsibility toward the nation, as represented by both its ancestry and its posterity; imbue the pupils with pride in the fact that the German people are the most important exponent of the Nordic race, and to influence them in favor of complete Aufnordung (Nordification) of the German people.

This is to be accomplished early enough so that no child shall leave school without a conviction of the necessity of pure blood.

The German schools consider no method that may carry out this wish of the Führer too superstitious, too brutal or clumsy.

“A child is likely to have keen vision,” the periodical N. S. Bildungswesen, in an essay on “Illustrations and Pictures for Use in Racial Instruction,” says. “It will therefore be easiest to bring the unity of the German people into his consciousness if we show him, on the one hand, pictures of racially gifted beings similar in type and, on the other, different types racially foreign to it and of varying qualities. In the matter of the Jews, such types are to be chosen which, to our way of feeling, clearly have the most unpleasant characteristics — not such representatives as have already attained a certain external similarity to the people offering them hospitality ( Wirtsvolk )…. And, not the least, emphasis must be placed on the fact that mental inferiority and confusion show in the face. The Jewish-Bolshevistic politicians and criminals offer particularly varied and extraordinarily informative material.”

Another specialist in the field, Professor Ernst Dobers of the High School for the Instruction of Teachers in Elbing, writes in his book The Jewish Question — Material and its Treatment in Schools:

“How do we wish our people to look? We place two groups of pictures side by side: on the one hand, Nordically classified bodies and faces, sportsman types, Olympic athletes, soldiers, typical officers, leaders; on the other hand, we present a group of Jews, whether these are ordinary contemporaries or the ‘great’ of Judah, such as the majority of Bolshevist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg, Hilferding, Eisner, Theodor Lessing, Gumbel, Stampfer, Rathenau, Theodor Wolff, Georg Bernhard, Hirschfeld, Kestenberg, or whatever their names may be. It will naturally result that the children will feel kinship with the one side, and, quite naively, passionate rejection on the other; that is a matter of course. It is then the object of the spoken pedagogical word constantly to strengthen and to build up with knowledge and perception this consciousness of the German child’s old nature and the complete foreignness of the other.”

It is conspicuous that we are given no example of the “Olympic athletes” or “typical officers.” Possibly Professor Dobers fails to consider Goebbels a “Nordically classified body.” Possibly he remembers that the Jewish heavyweight boxer, Max Baer, defeated the “Aryan” Schmeling (and, since then, the Negro, Joe Louis, has beaten him in record time), and that there were quite a number of Jewish winners in the Olympic games. “The ‘great’ of Judah,” however, are specified; and it is typical of the lack of education of Nazi educators that they list capitalist bankers, editors of bourgeois newspapers and liberal scientists all as “Bolshevist leaders.” Rosa Luxemburg is the only Communist on the list, although she shares the fate of murder by the Nazi with Kurt Eisner, Theodor Lessing and Walther Rathenau.

Lack of education, deliberate falsification. This pair of Nazi qualities is evident in teaching everywhere — in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, notorious lies, which are recommended for use in the schools, and in such books as Herrmann Gauch’s New Elements of Racial Instruction, the standard work of this new “science,” which states baldly:

“We can advance the assertion” (after a detailed description of the Nordic and non-Nordic human being) “at the base of all Racial Science; there is no concept of ‘human being’ (‘man’) in contradistinction to animals separated by any physical or mental trait; the only existing differentiation is between Nordic man, on the one hand, and animals as a whole, including all non-Nordic human beings, or sub-men, who are transitional forms of development.”

Herrmann Gauch and his theory are no exception. They are representative— all of these statements are tragically typical — of the material fed the Nazi child. And when he continues: “…It has, however, not been proved that the non-Nordic man cannot be mated with apes…” he is repeating the deep conviction of his Führer. For it was Hitler who said: “A popular state will… in the first place, bring marriage out of its place as a permanent racial dishonor and give it the sacredness of that institution whose mission it is to create images of the Lord and not monsters between man and ape.”

A more cautious textbook, The A B C of Race (warmly recommended “for general use” by the Munich School of Racial Politics), portrays a big-nosed Jew, but protects itself this way: “Of course we must not confuse a purely external expression with Race. Race means Soul. And there are men who do, as a matter of fact, show some Nordic traits, but they are Jews in spirit.”

The ABC outlines Germany’s four great problems:

1. Germany has too little territory, because of the loss of her colonies.

2. One-third of her population lives in exile (the 35,000,000 Austrians,^[1] Czechs, Swiss, Dutch, Danes, Alsatians, and Americans, who belong by blood and language to the “Greater Germany”).

3. The menace of the Jews (“a mixture of Asiatic and Negro blood, with a tiny amount of European blood”).

4. The falling birth-rate.

“A nation without territory in time becomes a nation without people…. If, however, we all fight together under our mighty-National Socialist leadership and under the protection of the new racial laws, then the glorious Nordic future of Germany is assured. Did not the Führer himself prophesy: ‘A nation that fosters only its best stock in a racially degenerate age must become master of the world’?”

A marching song has recently been produced for children, that describes how the world will look when the Germans conquer it:

Und liegt auch von Kampf in Trümmern die ganze Welt zu Hauf,

Das soll uns den Teufel nicht kümmern, wir pfeifen drauf.

Wir werden weiter marschieren, wenn alles in Scherben fällt,

Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt.

Though the whole world lie ruined around us after the day of war,

What the devil do we care — we don’t give a hoot any more,

We will go marching forward, though everything fall away,

For the world will be ours tomorrow, as Germany is today.

It is necessary for Germany to hate, passionately and ceaselessly, everything that stands in the way of world mastery. Even the innocent concepts of “Reason,” “Piety,” and “Love of Peace,” threaten it. Hatred is nurtured; and it is easier to hate a man than an idea; people you see in the flesh, than people far away; a relatively small number than a greater group. Hatred for the Jews, then, seems the best and most “productive.” Fuel of all sorts is therefore added: calumny, pseudo-science, and pornography.

One of the oldest and most intimate friends of the Führer is Julius Streicher, Gau Leader of Franconia and editor and publisher of the weekly, Der Stürmer. Although Streicher has had bitter enemies in the Party ranks, Hitler remains with him, because he regards him as a good hater. He values the smut of Streicher as a weapon in the Nazi struggle, and approves its use in teaching. Distinguished foreigners, traveling through Germany, are always assured that no sensible person ever reads the Stürmer, that Streicher himself has “good intentions,” although “sometimes he goes too far in his eagerness” — another fact to be disparaged for the outer world. As a matter of fact, the Stürmer, which writes almost exclusively about sexual outrages, bedroom gossip, and scandal, is read in the schools to children between six and fourteen; its denunciations are themes for their homework, and their “education” is based on its improprieties.

The principal of the Overbeckstrasse School in Cologne, Max Burkert, writes: “From your glorious fighting magazine, the Stürmer, I have cut the photos of a number of Jews who once were permitted to rule Germany, and have mounted them, as the accompanying photograph will show. Armed with this illustration, I lecture on the Jewish question in all the upper classes of my school…. How deeply-rooted your idea already is can be seen from the following story of an experience I had with a nine-year-old pupil. He came to school one day and said to me: ‘Sir, yesterday I went for a walk with my mother. Suddenly, as we passed the Kaufhof (a Jewish store), my mother happened to remember that she badly needed a few balls of twine. She wanted to give me some money to go into the shop and buy the twine for her. Whereupon I said to my mother, “I will not go in there. You will have to do that yourself. But I promise you that, if you do go into that shop, I’ll tell my teacher tomorrow. He will order you to come to school, and then you’ll see what happens.” ’

“If the accompanying picture pleases you, my children will be very glad, especially if you publish it in the Stürmer. I am convinced that such pictures can only set a good example.

“Wishing you nerves of steel in the furious battle, I am with best greetings and

“Heil Hitler, “Max Burkert, “Principal.”

Each week the Stürmer publishes similar letters to the editor, abundant evidence of its wide circulation in the sanctuaries of education. Erna Listing, who lives in Gelsenkirchen, writes:

“Dear Stürmer!

“Gau Leader Streicher has told us so much about the Jews that we hate them quite thoroughly. In school we wrote a composition under the title ‘The Jews are our Misfortune.’ I should like to see my composition in print.

“The Jews Are Our Misfortune

“Regrettably, there are still many people today who say: Even the Jews are creatures of God. Therefore you must respect them. But we say: Vermin are animals too, but we exterminate them just the same. The Jew is a mongrel. He has hereditary tendencies from Aryans, Asiatics, Negroes, and from the Mongolians. Evil always preponderates in the case of a mongrel. The only good thing the Jew has is his white color…. Jesus once said to the Jews, ‘Your father is not God but the Devil.’ The Jews have a wicked book of law. That is the Talmud. Furthermore, the Jews see the animal in us and treat us accordingly. They take away our property and our money with great cunning. In Gelsenkirchen, the Jew Grünberg sold us offal. They are allowed to do this, according to their book of law. The Jews instigated uprisings and urged us into War. They led Russia into misery. In Germany they gave the K.P.D. (Communist Party of Germany) money and paid all the murderers. We were standing at the edge of our grave. Then Adolf Hitler came. Now the Jews are in foreign countries and instigate everyone against us. But we are not to be led astray: we follow the Führer. We buy nothing from Jews. Every penny we give them kills one of our people.

“Heil Hitler!”

And, in a postscript, the Stürmer: “Like us, all readers of the Stürmer will rejoice at what Erna has to say in her school composition. The Stürmer has given Erna a little Christmas present.” For her “deeply Christian” composition!

Another child, nine-year-old Helga Gerbing, sends a letter dated Lenzing 29 (no one outside of Germany knows what the Nazi word for the month of May means, except that “Lenz” is a medieval word for spring). Helga encloses a composition, in the name of the Fourth Grade for girls, entitled The Cuckoo and the Jew.

“The cuckoo is the Jew among birds; for it is very like him in appearance and also in what it does. Its hooked beak reminds one of the hooked nose of the Jew. Its feet are small and weak, which is why it cannot walk easily on the ground.” (Note: As we know, the German eagle has an Aryan nose and marches like a champion!) “The same is true of the Jew, who also does not have a beautiful manner of walking. When this bird calls ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’ It makes the same gesture as the Jewish merchant trying to show his politeness, so that the German shall buy from him. Both these Jews, the bird as well as the human one, are parasites, that is, they both desire to become rich and fat at the expense of others…. But we human beings are not so stupid as the birds. We won’t stand for this and we are expelling the impertinent ‘cuckoo’ from our country. We children in Roth help as much as we can toward this end. A number of our class often keep standing by the Baer warehouse; then when buyers wish to enter, the children call: ‘Aren’t you ashamed to buy from a Jew? Yah!’ and then the woman gets red in the face and goes away again.

“Heil Hitler!”

“Well, Stürmer, that pleases you, doesn’t it?” Helga adds. And it does. “Like teacher, like pupil,” the paper comments. “If little Helga of the Fourth Class for Girls, in Roth near Nuremberg, writes such excellent compositions, then we have her teacher, Hilde Palmedo, to thank, because she knows how to educate the young in the spirit of these new times.”

And we must be grateful to countless teachers that the Stürmer can publish, again and again, classroom photographs that show copies of the paper hanging on the wall — complete unexpurgated editions, including outrages and bedroom scandals, listing the names of those who have “trespassed,” and those who have been “seduced,” and are to be spat upon. The Stürmer prints letters from teachers asking their colleagues to use it along with the textbooks, and naive letters from children which prove the success of this pedagogic instrument. And for those children whose teachers have the conspicuous courage to keep the Stürmer out of the classroom, there are the newsstands where the Stürmer is displayed at every other corner in every German town.

The front page of the New York Times guarantees daily “all the news that’s fit to print.” We might have promised that for this book; but the pornography of the Stürmer is not printable. It must suffice to mention its existence and importance, and, most significant of all, to demonstrate its use as a text in the German schools “for the better development of racial knowledge in primary near-to-life instruction,” in the language of New Germany.

RELIGION

Religious study in the Third Reich has no meaning different from that of other instruction: it means lessons in National Socialism, the religion of the National Socialists. Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth Leader, cries, “The experience of comradeship in battle, the experience of unity is, for us, not only a political but a religious experience as well.” And Alfred Rosenberg is even clearer: “When an S. A. man puts on his brown shirt, he is no longer a Catholic, a Protestant or a believer in Germanhood” (not even that!) “but only a German fighting for his entire nation.”

That Religion is still taught in the schools seems, at first glance, merely a tactical concession, to make it possible to remain within acceptable limits and avoid battle with the strong power of the Church. An attempt is made to turn this necessity into a virtue, to enlist simple faith, which demands no proof, into the service of the cause. “Faith” is to replace “knowledge.” The German must believe in the world mission of Germans; in German superiority; in the divine purity of his Führer. The lessons in Religion are an opportunity to bring up children in a faith which, to be sure, is at the other pole from Christianity, in that it preaches hate as against love; arrogance versus humility; force versus charity. Nevertheless, it is called by the National Socialists “positive Christianity.”

Every class in Roman Catholicism opens with the formula: “Heil Hitler! Blessed be Jesus Christ, in all Eternity, Amen,” and closes with: “Blessed be Jesus Christ, in all Eternity, Amen. Heil Hitler!” The sequence, sandwiching everything else between Heils, is enforced by an edict of January 5, 1934. And the Protestant religious lessons, which include the same formulas, must, according to the “Plan for Teaching Evangelical Religion in Public Schools in the National Socialist Spirit,” emphasize “that the existence of our people, in their racial peculiarity, has been willed by God and that it is an act of unfaithfulness toward God if racial values are not considered or if they are destroyed.”

All of this is simple, if you accept the premise that Hitler has come to his people directly from God. After that, there can be no scruples: his plans are God’s plans, his methods God’s methods, and his will God’s will. It is so easy that a man like the Reichsstatthalter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, can exclaim, “Our faith is nothing but the Weltanschauung of the Führer! No one can serve two masters! This world-theory gives expression to the will and to the conscience given us by God!” And Dr. Robert Ley, leader of the German Workers’ Front, adds, “Our only aim and purpose must be to live according to the teachings of Adolf Hitler, which are the gospel of the German people.”

“Our only purpose,” they say, “our only aim. The gospel,” they assert. Nothing could be less complicated.

Of course, at the beginning, while the regime was still expecting an opposition (which never materialized), it must have been difficult to combine the “New Gospel” with the lessons in Christian faith which had been hastily prepared for school use. Edicts, then, were ambiguous and complex, lacking the admirable directness of Mutschmann or Ley today.

The edicts addressed to teachers of religion may be summarized: Both faiths, National Socialism and Christianity, draw their strength from the God of the Universe. Teachers must remember that they have to do away with differences of opinion, and emphasize the German experience of God. The Old Testament must be carefully expurgated. Only those portions of it which treat of biological questions or are necessary for the understanding of the New Testament are to be used. For, as a whole, the Old Testament mirrors the Jewish spirit, and tells of the downfall of a people having nothing to do with godly matters.

This official description of the Bible is a gentle one. At mass meetings other opinions appear: Gau-Obermann Krause described the Old Testament in the Sport Palace in Berlin as a “book for cattle-drivers and procurers”; and he was never reprimanded.

Officially, the Nazis demand the recognition of Jesus. But they convert him into a hero without fear, a Siegfried of Nordic stamp who waged war on the Jews until he was killed by them. Side by side with the gentler words intended for export, there are any number of Krause-like comments. The Fountain, in the Jan. 2, 1934, issue, declares: “How high Horst Wessel towers over that Jesus of Nazareth! That Jesus who pleaded that the bitter cup be taken from him! How unattainably high all Horst Wessels stand above this Jesus!”

It must be repeated that nothing can be said in Germany without official sanction. Thus, the words of journalists are, in their way, as “official” as government statements. Journalists write what Ministers think; but the Ministers are careful.

In the schools, too, the Ministers have helpers, with “Lines of Direction” and “Plans for Education,” which enlighten the populace as the Ministers desire. One group of Hanover teachers published a three-part curriculum for religious instruction.

1. God and Nature: Christian tradition and its explanation. The mechanical-materialistic concept of the world and its end-products, namely, Liberalism and Marxism [in France, Germany, Russia]. The modern scientific concept of the world and its religious meaning. Biology and Christianity. 2. Religion and Race: a. Hebraism and Christianity. b. Roman Christianity from the Council of Trent to the present time. c. Islam, Buddhism. d. The German Faith Movement. 3. Christianity and the Germanic Weltanschauung: Germanic faith in God and the Christian mission. The Savior. The ideals of monks and knights in the Middle Ages. Parsifal, Ekkehard. Luther [here the addition of suitable letters from Paul]. Arndt [a militarist playwright] and Schleiermacher [a philosopher whose place here is arbitrary] with retrospective accounts of Pietism and Idealism. Statesmen and soldiers: Bismarck, Hindenburg, W. Flex. Christianity and National Socialism. Struggles for a National Church in past history and in the present.

It would be superfluous to remark that the whole curriculum is an insult to the Christian religion, “Biology and Christianity” — it is difficult to find two other such remote concepts, anywhere. And “Hindenburg and Walter Flex” — a general and a writer on military subjects, in the religion course! Yet these gentlemen find room in their curriculum for “race,” “the ideal of knighthood,” “Arndt” — whatever pleases the Nazi leaders is taught. German children learn that Hitler is pious and reverent; this is one of the things they must believe — it cannot be proved. After the blood bath of June 30, 1934, they were informed that the Führer had piously and reverently retired to the solitude of his little house in Berchtesgaden, near Munich. He was visited there by a little old woman, who asked him how he hoped to accomplish his mission, and how he had come to arrange the blood bath. “Silently the Führer pulled a volume from his pocket… it was the New Testament.”

There is a “Twenty Questions” game in Religion, as there is in Geo-politics, and with the same purpose.

“Who, children, is it in these days who most reminds us of Jesus — through his love of humble people and his readiness for self-sacrifice?”

And the answer is: “The Führer.”

“Who most reminds us of the disciples, because of their loyal attachment to the Führer?”

“General Goering, Dr. Goebbels, and (before the blood-bath) Captain Roehm.”

One teacher went further. The pupils in the Public School in Wanne, Queen Louise’s School, had to copy this “Credo” from the blackboard: “I believe in Germany, God’s other beloved Son, Master of His own Self, conceived under the Nordic Heavens, born between the Alps and the Sea, suffered under Papists and Mammonists, calumniated, beaten, and thrust into misery, tempted into Hell by Devils of all sorts after decades of poverty and affliction, arisen again from the national Death into Ekkehardt’s, Bach’s and Goethe’s world of the Spirit, where He sitteth at the side of His brother of Nazareth, at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

The writer of that lunatic passage is named Deppe. It was quoted in the General Evangelical-Lutheran Church Newspaper on May 14, 1937.

There are slogans provided for German youth. The children must learn one a week, and recite it each day of that week. “Judas, the Jew, betrayed Jesus, the German, to the Jews.” What impressive madness! And no one can distinguish the religious slogans from the National Socialist ones:

Versailles ist Lüge, Schmach und Schand,

Versailles ist Dein Tod, O Vaterland, —

Du bist ein deutsches Kind, so denke dran,

Was Dir der Feind in Versailles angetan!

Versailles was a lie, a shame, a brand,

Versailles was your death, O Fatherland,—

You are a German child, so think thereon,

What at Versailles your enemies have done!

“But the Fatherland sitteth on the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty….” Is it National Socialism or is it religion?

It is both; it has to be. The words and concepts are synonymous and interchangeable. At morning chapel, the platform is decorated with the swastika. Hitler’s photograph hangs under the crucifix. Choirs of children sing the heroic deeds of the Nazis: the glorious explosion of a bridge by Leo Schlageter; the death of Horst Wessel. Even such Christian festivals as confirmation are utilized. “Just after dark,” a report begins, “the school was lined up on the parade ground with lit torches; a central flame was kindled, and the boys to be confirmed were admitted into the first hundred, or upper school. The headmaster made an address in which he stressed their new obligations in pursuing those personal ideals of Honor, Cleanliness, and Courage, which their country demanded. He then presented each boy with a side-arm, which his new status in the first hundred requires him to wear, and with a text. These texts closely resembled the ‘Graces’ said occasionally before meals; for example: ‘One does not beg for justice, one must fight for justice.’”

Pagan festivals, too, are given the same rank and importance, and are celebrated everywhere. The Sonnenwendfeiern (solstice festivals) are in particular favor. Participants leap the bonfires, swearing eternal faithfulness to National Socialism, which “continues in its course like the sun.” And the Nazis rejoice over the “lovely custom.” Political Education, the organ of the Saxon N.S. Teachers’ Union, writes: “What has suffered most in the course of the last thousand years of our history has been the connection with the religious treasure of our ancestors, which, however, could not be entirely done away with. That is easy to understand — in spite of the methods of force used in Christianizing our ancestors — which resulted in the conscious and stubborn derogation of the so-called heathen worship of idols, the memories of whose festivals, however, could not be entirely obliterated from the memory of the people….”

To retain the respect of the outer world, the Nazis have taken the easiest way out, placed the “so-called” before the “heathen,” and referred to “the religious property of our ancestors.”

The ensuing confusion is great. The faithful of all religions in Germany fight passionately for their beliefs, and, because of outside pressure, have the only organizations in the country which could not be suppressed or driven underground. A few members of these groups do still protest — and our wholehearted respect and sympathy goes to them. They are the relatively small number who, because of their moral qualities “and their fear of God,” are not qualified to take part in the “conquest of the world by the Nazis.” They are persecuted, like the Jews, with every kind of slander, pseudo-science, and open pornography. And the Nazis see to it that school-children learn what evil-doers the clergy are — the clergymen who are imprisoned for the sake of their faith, these “moral criminals” and “seducers of the young.” Care is taken to “enlighten and inform” German children on this point.

A newspaper, chosen haphazardly, lies before me. It is the Freiburger Zeitung of June, 1937, and two closely-printed pages deal exclusively with reports of “immorality” trials throughout the Reich. Even if the material disgusts the editors, they have no choice; it is an official report, and must be printed. “A sequence of horrors…. Monks trespass against cripples…. The lunatic asylum as a place of refuge…. With dragging steps and trembling limbs, physically deformed, these poor victims stood stuttering and weeping before the judge in order to repeat, with horrible gestures, their despairing accusation against the bestial criminal…. All kinds of unnatural lechery…. Debauches of greatest magnitude…. Horrible homosexual crimes…. Thirteen poor crippled children subjected to abominable misdemeanors in the cell of a cloister…. The child raped, and a bunch of roses given to the mother!… Disgusting shamelessness of a criminal in a priest’s cassock….” Page after page, in three thousand other German papers as well as in Freiburg; day by day, for weeks. And the verdicts of “Not guilty,” which the judges are again and again compelled to hand down, are, by decree, printed in a corner, in small type.

A credible report from the Rhineland states that pupils have become possessed by pathological sexual aberrations, as a result of reading newspaper accounts of criminal actions. Usually the school does nothing to cure this disease; on the contrary, it promotes it. The children swarm in front of the Stürmer stands, discussing these things excitedly. Sexual psychosis is already so widespread that trust is failing; the doctors in the public schools are, even now, not permitted to examine girl pupils except in the presence of the teacher. A true incubus has taken possession of large sections of the population. Its political use is clear: the Catholic Church “is to be made impossible and to be destroyed.”

The campaign fought on a sexual basis has assisted this attempt of Hitler’s. Shortly after the “immorality” trials, Catholic priests were forbidden to teach Religion in German schools, losing one of the oldest privileges of the Church, and giving the Nazis a final sphere of influence.

But what had happened, actually? Where were the “thousand sexual crimes” referred to by Goebbels in the Sport Palast and in his attack on Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago? Out of 30,719 Catholic priests and monks in Germany, the Nazis themselves have accused 120, found 68 guilty, and left 52 still awaiting trial. In the Nazis’ own balance, 0.39 per cent of the priests have been accused; and, whether just or unjust, the important fact is that, with tremendous pressure from those in power, and after a scarifying public denunciation, the Nazis were able to accuse only one-third of one per cent of the priesthood, and condemn no more than one-sixth of one per cent.

In Rome, the Church recognizes this war against it. The Vatican knows how undeclared wars can break in all their violence, and an editorial in the Osservatore Romano of September 14, 1937, says: “Proofs of this hidden and open war against the Church and against the rights guaranteed to the Church by the solemn concordat, are the continuous campaigns on the part of the immoderate and, to say the least, indecorous press, and the recent ordinances tending to take religious teachings out of the hands of competent authorities — that is to say, the clergy — or demanding that the clergy reform the catechism in the National Socialist sense, which implies a negation of the fundamental truths of the Christian faith. The Nuremberg Congress, moreover, showed that the penetration of Nordic paganism into the Nazi movement is constantly progressing, and the official representatives of the Nazi Party, far from opposing this penetration, are encouraging: it. Formerly the Holy See received repeated assurances in writing, and orally, that Rosenberg’s works were his private affairs, for which the Reich Government assumed no responsibility. But the official propaganda of Rosenberg’s ideology is assuming even greater proportions. His ideas have become the basis of all courses for teachers depending on the State and the Nazi Party, and have entered the schools, with the result that the German Government’s declarations and assurances have lost their value.”

The fanatic war of National Socialism against the Church is being fought on so large a field that the history of any one battle is a broken epic of victories that are not victories at all, apparent retreats, offers of peace, agreements made to be withdrawn. One thing is clear: the stake of the war is the souls of the children. Both sides are battling for their future.

“If there are still individuals in our generation who believe they cannot change any more, then we shall take their children and educate them to be what is necessary for the German people.” — Adolf Hitler.

SECONDARY EDUCATION

The lessons continue as they began. Arithmetic examples in population develop, as we have seen, into the algebra of bombing planes. History, Geo-politics, German, and Racial Instruction, follow the same line of development. “The epoch of ‘pure reason,’ of ‘objective and free science,’ is at an end,” writes Dr. Ernst Krieck, leader of the Sturmbann and Rector of the University of Heidelberg, surrounding the terms with quotation marks in an effort to prove they never really existed.

At the moment, that epoch is over in Germany. The primary schools do all they can toward shaping the generation; and, as soon as the children are out of the grades, they pass to the outside organizations, Hitler Youth and Jungvolk, German Girls and National Socialist Order Castles. In high school, they encounter complications, or, rather, extensions, of axioms they have learned before — the fabulous axioms of Nazi Germany.

LANGUAGE

“The teaching seemed inefficient,” an English public school pupil, who had spent several weeks in Germany as an exchange student, writes in the Manchester Evening Chronicle. “French lessons consisted merely of translating the Leader’s speeches, as reported in the French papers, back into German. Since most of the pupils knew all the Leader’s speeches by heart, it cannot have been very difficult.”

But this teaching is not “inefficient”; it serves its purpose. The pupils are not learning French; they are being taught the National Socialist language.

More attention is given to English, principally because it will be useful in carrying out the great aim of world conquest by the Nazis. The teaching of English is begun early in the life of the school-child; the subject has been making headway, and is now one of the major courses, for Nazi propaganda in Anglo-Saxon countries is being given its due.

PHYSICS

Since all instruction is Nazi instruction, all science is Nazi science. Physics is Nazi physics, Wehrphysik — the “physics of weapons.” Professor Lenard, a Nobel Prize winner, an old Heidelberg scholar, and one of the few of whose achievements the Nazis may be proud, has written a new German Physics, dedicated to Dr. Frick, Prussian Minister of the Interior, and opening: “German Physics? These words will raise a question, and it is true that I might as well have said Aryan physics — or the physics of the Nordic man, or the physics of those who have fathomed the depths of reality. ‘But,’ I shall hear, ‘science is and remains international.’ That is an error. Science is and remains, like everything else created by the human mind, racially bound and a result of blood.”

There it is, with the familiar ring, leaving no doubts as to the success of their totalitarian co-ordination, the Gleichschaltung they all profess.

“The physics of weapons will naturally play an important part in the education of German Youth to bear arms,” says Oberstudiendirektor Erich Günther, in the preface to his textbook on Wehrphysik. The transformation of physics into the teaching of National Socialism has the purpose “of awakening not only the ability to bear arms but the will to do so, and beyond that, to show the ways and technical means to carry out the decision to bear arms.” In the first chapter, “to see, to measure distances, and to carry into execution,” are all physical laws, having to do with the gauging of distance, sighting the line of fire, and calculating military aims. An example: “A coast artillery gun is firing at a ship steaming at a speed of thirty knots diagonally toward the point where the cannon is. How great is the approach? The average speed of the projectile is to be assumed as 600 meters per second.”

It continues: “Sound and the measurement of sound” are treated in their relation to aerial defense. “Weather” and “Pioneer Mechanics” each include a section about war, and transmission techniques are tested for usefulness in case of war.

A ministerial edict of February 17, 1934, made it obligatory for all schools “further to accustom the young to the idea of aerial maneuvers,” and has had great influence on the teaching of physics. To supplement the regular textbooks, two copy-books by Professor K. Schütt have appeared. One is entitled Elements of Aeronautics, and the other Aeronautics in the Period for New German Language. The study, indeed, plays a highly important part in almost every subject: instruction in mathematics is almost entirely given over to “Aeronautics” in the higher classes — that is, when it is not superseded by statistical studies in the interest of racial education or of Nazi colonial ambitions.

“What is really important,” says Dr. Rudolf Krieger in the April, 1937, N.S. Bildungswesen, after a statement about weapons, “is that the educator must, objectively, through stories having to do with weapons, and articles written about weapons, treat of the National Socialist point of view and make this attractive to his pupils with historical or contemporary facts which will open his (the pupil’s) eyes to such questions and form his opinion in a healthy attitude toward the politics of weapons.”

CHEMISTRY

All the sciences offer opportunities to the teacher who desires to make “the science of weapons” attractive to his pupils. School Experiments in the Chemistry of Fighting Materials — A Book of Experiments in Protection against Poison Gas and Air Raids, “informs youth as to the use of, and defense against, chemical warfare.” Its author, Dr. Walter Kintoff, explains in great detail that the defense of the country, in case of war, would have to be taken over by those between fifteen and eighteen, not yet old enough to bear arms. It is therefore essential to teach these children the problems of defense. Nothing could be more important for this than instruction in the practical side of chemical warfare. The Doctor regrets that this careful instruction is not entirely without difficulties, since the “creation of one or another situation in the lessons is bound to meet with this or that conflict not entirely free from danger.” Nevertheless he sets, in his first chapter, experiments with “incendiary materials,” such as the thermite (igniter) used to fill explosive bombs. And he reflects: “Fire has a double mission in matters pertaining to war: on the one hand, it is supposed to cause considerable damage, and, on the other, to wear the population out morally, that is, to break its power of resistance…. It is modem chemistry which puts arson on a new footing.”

Other chapters deal with “Gas Weapons”: “Eye Irritants,” “Lung Poisons,” or “Choking Weapons” (green cross), “Skin Poisons” (yellow cross), and “Nose and Throat Irritants” (blue cross).

Laboratories all over Germany, filled with school-children, playing cheerfully with death and suffering!

DRAWING

Endless repetition, for the Nazis repeat endlessly in their drive to one goal, shouting their slogans with all the inflections, teaching their mottoes in every class. Even the lesson in drawing, which used to be the gayest and most relaxed hour — what has happened to it?

Any issue of Art and Youth offers a lively picture of a Nazi drawing lesson. The May, 1937, issue begins with a “Family Tree of Instructors,” and a “Pedigree of Residences”!). The leading editorial is a long illustrated essay entitled Aerial Defense in the Drawing Class. Joseph Stuchler says: “The first thing we must demand of a task is its value in terms of national preparedness. It is characteristic of our epoch that the defense instincts ( Wehrhaftsinne ) of our youth are stimulated through the awakening of its will to bear weapons. In this sense, lessons of aerial defense in the drawing class meet with our educational objective!”

He goes on to describe classes in grammar school, keeping to his theme of “Aerial Defense.” He begins with the sixth grade (the German schools have nine classes, numbered Nine to One), and here he is referring to children of ten:

“Everything that moves, that is unusual, may be the object of portrayal. Thus, for example, an air-raid, the activity of weapons of defense, the searchlight, parachute jumping, explosions, burning houses, the fire department in action, helping the medical officers, the strange appearance of men in gas masks, to which, of course, we add the element of color. All this belongs to the life and experience of a ten-year-old boy. Motionless forms, such as, for example, the houses of a city, are no more than meaningless scenery, and as such can often be omitted altogether.”

For the fifth grade, more ambitious tasks!

“We proceed in our study of movement, and we portray the act of ‘falling out,’ with both arms stretched upward… also, we can depict the act of ‘falling backward unconscious,’ with the marked declivity of the whole body and of the arms in a backward motion: that is easy to reproduce. And now we observe the medical officers at work. The simple walk of the doctors and their aides as they transport a wounded man on his stretcher, as well as the simple pose of kneeling, ought not to be too difficult even for those pupils less gifted in drawing.”

The fourth grade is to draw a bomb-proof cellar; but to stress the dramatic impact of a bomb hitting near the cellar rather than the passive distress of the people huddled inside. “In this manner the teacher can awaken the imagination dormant in the child and make use of it in a manner helpful to our theme.”

The third grade is to draw an aerial attack upon a factory…. “In order to link this to the subject matter of the chemistry course, let us dwell upon the Haber-Bosch process” (forgetting that Haber was a Jew who died in exile) “in the greatest of all chemical factories the Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik…. This factory is a monument to German industry and German intelligence, startling lo the rest of the world, and of enormous material benefit to German industry. The envy of our enemies will be aroused by it as long as the factory continues to exist. To destroy it would be easy for the powerful aerial armaments of our enemies: it would take only a very few minutes! We leave it to each individual to picture for himself the misery, suffering, and cruel destruction which would result.”

This is the instruction of a country at war, in the grip of terror, surrounded by atrocity and a delusive enemy.

The bombproof cellar is set before the second grade in far more detail: “It is night. There is only a dim light, just sufficient to carry out the measures necessary for defense, but not sufficient to make it possible to read. A wounded man has just been brought in on a stretcher. His nose and mouth are bandaged and he seems to be asleep. A physician is doing his utmost for him. Beside him, on another stretcher, is another wounded man. There is a sheet thrown over his body. Perhaps he is sleeping forever. Another man is attempting to calm the women, who are always trying to meddle in the affairs of the busy men. There is no end to their everlasting questions as to how things stand…. In the corner there is a child asleep, with his wooden horse under his arm. Perhaps he is the happiest of them all.”

The highest class is to concentrate on gas masks. They are “eminently suitable for portrayal, since they simplify the more difficult form of the human head. Naturally the form of the skull is clearly recognizable as an ellipsoid. Then we concentrate our attention upon the interchangeable filters and the oxygen mask. Here the part meant to protect the nose is even more visible than in the case of the S. Mask. The entire suit of the volunteer, so made that he is protected against corroding gases, is very good for our purposes, being so very simple…. The sensitive mind of the young man is given a remarkable opportunity to set down the entire scale of possible movements, beginning with the nervous haste of those offering aid; through the weak collapse of some poor victim, in whose limbs a faint stream of life still trickles; and, finally, the rigor of death. We cannot and do not desire to train artists, just as we do not desire or attempt to train poets in our German classes. There is one thing rightfully demanded of a German composition: an avowal of the spiritual forces of reason, will, and emotion latent in man; and it is exactly the same thing that we demand of the instruction in drawing. Namely: the training of imitative power, the cultivation of the sense of beauty, and a single-minded point of view toward all that is false — these are the permanent values given Youth on its way through life.”

This close hardly seems possible, even to a person familiar with the methods of National Socialism. This twist, this whiplash, at the end of a corridor of bombproof cellars and scenes of torture! Things stand like this in Germany. And the “people” in their obedience have been assimilated by this machine.

THE PUPILS

The school bases its power on endless, hypnotizing propaganda, and the radio and movies are in the service of the same machine. The voices of the teachers are relieved by the School Radio, with its themes: “Germany, Land of Beauty,” “A People Without Territory,” “The Art of a People Grows From Its Soil,” “The German Spirit of Unity and Will to Sacrifice,” “The Miracle of Faith That Saved Germany,” “Party Day in Nuremberg,” “The Reich, the German Idea of a State,” “Unity of Blood in the German People,” “Keeping Watch Over Germany” — nine of the themes issued for the school year 1937-38 by the Leipzig Reich Radio (with the Reich Administration of the N.S.L.B. and the Reich Radio Administration). The tenth theme is “Life Is Work — Work Is Happiness.”

But the work of the children is a tragedy for their minds and spirits — a threatening tragedy that darkens the future.

The schools, with their rules and formulas, their new texts and missions, are the shell. The lives of the pupils are in reality the school. At present, in 1938, the pupils are almost exclusively “Aryan.” Enrollment of new “non-Aryans” is an impossibility; and a little ghetto of Jewish schools has sprung into being for new pupils, while the Jewish children already in Nazi schools are permitted to remain in a life of humiliating torture and painful isolation.

Dr. Rust declared on Party Day in 1937: “The establishment of a National Socialist school community, based on the foundation of the educational ideas derived from the concept of German nationhood, is possible only if a clear-cut division in accordance with the racial origin of the children is brought about. I, therefore, intend to carry out this complete division in accordance with the racial origin of the children for all pupils in all types of schools in Germany. The so-called ‘quarter-Jews,’ who have only one Jewish grandparent, will not be included in the separate schools. A separate Jewish elementary school is to be established wherever a sufficient number of Jewish children are to be found in one community or within the area of one urban or rural educational district. It will be necessary, in this case, to put children of different school ages in one classroom, because, for the establishment of these separate Jewish schools, twenty schoolchildren are to be considered as a sufficient number.”

The Nazis, of course, place no funds whatever at the disposal of such schools, and it is often as a result of this lack of money that “children of foreign blood” are subjected to the martyrdom of Nazi instruction. In the Nazi schools, they are used to the same end as everything else. They are living examples in “Racial Science.” The Jewish child is called forward by the teacher; she stands on the platform, defenseless and trembling before her schoolmates (who are not allowed to be her playmates) while the teacher demonstrates the “distinctive marks of the Jewish race.” “What do you see in this face?” the pupils are asked; and, whatever the face shows, the children answer what they have learned from the Stürmer: “A gigantic nose, negroid lips, inferior frizzy hair.” And the tears in those dark eyes, the scarred spirit! —the scar that can never be explained or atoned for! “What else do you see?” asks the teacher; and when the pupils are silent, feeling that there is a boundary to cruelty, the teacher adds at last: “You see, besides, a cowardly and disloyal facial expression.”

“Aryan” pupils learn from living examples, and are taught not only “racial characteristics” but how to treat these types.

The great Italian man of letters and statesman, Count Carlo Sforza, tells this story in a Swiss newspaper:

“A cousin of mine spent last summer at a castle near Wurttemberg, and since she is a member of the nobility and was a guest, she was above suspicion; she was able to visit the schools that interested her. This is what she saw: During the morning recess, all the children lined up at the door of the canteen for a cup of milk and a piece of bread. Whenever a little Jewish girl reached her turn, the teacher in charge held up the cup, and cried: ‘Run along, Jewess! Next, please!’ And this was repeated daily. The little Jewish children were never spared the necessity of standing in line and reaching for the cup they were never given. The Christian children had to witness this scene daily, to learn how to treat a hungry Jewish child.”

The mark of this treatment on the lives of the Jewish children is frightful, of course; but the results are terrible also for the “German,” the “Aryan” children — for while the Jews are only tortured, they are corrupted, deeply corrupted. Some of the strongest of the “non-Aryans” may come through, and leave childhood with toughened nerves. But the “Aryans” are in peril, for their sense of justice and humanity is being stolen from them. And unless they meet other influences, they will lose all sense of truth — the sense which balances us and allows us to walk through the world.

* * *

If we have focused our attention on the education of boys, it is because of the secondary and minor role of girls in Hitlerland. “In the case of female education,” Hitler says in Mein Kampf (p. 169), “the main stress should be laid on bodily training, and after that on development of character, and, last of all, of the intellect. But the one absolute aim of female education must be with a view to the future mother.”

The sequence is applied to boys, too; but they are permitted the sciences, as far as they lead to war; the girls are refused even these. They are to become mothers, and nothing else.

“For, in the last analysis,” Gauleiterin Dr. Tschernig writes in the German Educator for June 5, 1937, “the concept of National Socialism is synonymous with motherhood. Motherhood, however, is nothing sentimental, nothing soft. Motherhood is something hard as steel. The National Socialist woman is mütterlich und wehrhaft” (ready to bear arms and children)…. “There are women who are already realizing this weapon-bearing motherliness in their lives. But by far the greater number has not yet found its way through to this. It is a question for us educators whether such women are going to live in Germany.”

Will Germany be populated by men who know nothing but war, and by steel women who can do nothing but bring new warriors into the world? What will you be like, you little German girls — you minor characters, admiring uniforms, putting your dolls in uniform, ignored, neglected? What will you be like? Will it be your voice that protests? Will you be far enough outside the struggle, ignored enough, to realize what it is to be wehrhaft in the service of tyrants?

The Nazi leaders have not finished with their alterations of the German methods of education. But their vague fear, that the high schools and universities may still produce ghosts of what the Nazis are working to destroy, is causing the creation of a new type of school, a new “course of training” for the “elite of the German people.”

Dr. Georg Mollowitz writes, in the National Socialist Educator: “The enemy still believes that he has one last possibility of influence, namely, in the domain of the spirit. For here National Socialism has not yet officially sounded its call to arms. Here the old Liberal spirit still continues to spread its influence. And our opponents attempt to keep this condition alive by all possible means, indeed to proclaim it necessary; they say that matters of the spirit, sciences, are in their very essence ‘unpolitical’ and must be handled in an ‘objective’ manner; that they stand on a superior level, above the ‘merely political,’ economic social, etc., matters of everyday life…. And so there are still those who hope by this circuitous route to influence the mighty change that has taken place in Germany…. But that is a mistaken idea. True, National Socialism has not yet given the signal for attack on this plane. But the first battlers have for a long time been ready for such a call, and the General Staff is working feverishly; as a matter of fact, all that is wanting is the signal, and then here too, as with other undertakings of National Socialism, there will be the usual thorough radical purge, and the establishment of a new order. May our opponents hear this warning: here, too, they stand on territory that is already absolutely lost for them!”

Dr. Mollowitz may well know that his prophecies will come true, for they are founded on an edict “On the Unification of the Higher Institutes of Learning,” of March 20, 1937. The edict is crammed with “transitional measures” of secondary importance, all with the object of eradicating the humanistic ideal of education. But the edict also determines, in a passing phrase, that the Gymnasien (approximating the American high school and two first years of college) “may remain as subordinate units of the general school plan… ”

What, then, is the school structure to be? Where will the elite get their education? Hitler outlined it, concisely enough, on January 18, 1937: “Following a report by the Reich Organization Director of the National Socialist Party and the Youth Leader of the German Reich, I approve that the National Socialist Schools under construction, which are also to be preparatory schools for National Socialist Order Castles, shall bear my name.”

The edict was complemented by a statement by Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, and another by Dr. Robert Ley, Leader of the Workers’ Front, both of which announced that boys who have made their mark either in the Jungvolk or in the Hitler Youth will be enrolled, beginning at twelve, in one of the “Adolf-Hitler Schools.” After six years, they must fulfill their “Voluntary Labor Service” and then serve in the army. Immediately after that, the best of them — and we know what the word means among the Nazis —enter a National Socialist Order Castle.

The Order Castles of the Middle Ages are the spiritual parents of the new schools; and the characteristic atavism is openly admitted here. “Knights of an Order” were pious, it is true, in principle, although their customs were brutal and they lived for war. Their piety was what set them apart in their Castles; everything else, brutality and lack of culture, ran parallel to their century. But today, the “Junkers” — they are called “Junkers,” of course — live in castles expropriated from their owners; they do not steal, of course, like the “Robber Barons” — they make “changes” and “new creations.” Their “Order” is National Socialism, and their “Order Castles,” beautifully situated in the mountains and forest country, were “changed” by the State which now supplies them with funds. The pupils pay tuition in proportion to their parents’ incomes; and even the poorest of them enjoys “Junkers’” privileges. Hitler has decreed that no social shortcomings are to stand in the way of a leader, whose qualifications depend on other virtues.

There is no lack of weapons or equipment. “Schulpforta,” one of the most respectable seats of learning in Germany, famous for four hundred years for its strictness and discipline in educating young men to the highest type of spiritual responsibility, has been altered and “newly created.” Ownership was transferred, teachers dismissed, pupils forced to leave; and in moved an army of “the very best prospective National Socialist Führers.” This army was supplied with uniforms at the expense of the State; and we cannot help suspecting that General Goering himself had a hand in the matter, for each boy has to possess at least nine uniforms. To every pair of boys is given a motorcycle, and the older ones even have automobiles. There are twelve National Socialist Order Castles in Germany now, but of course this is only the beginning.

J. W. Tate writes in the London Morning Post: “Life in these schools is characterized by a strongly marked political motif and an extensive use of military forms. There is a special uniform, the various schools being distinguished only by the color of the shoulder-strap. This uniform, worn by boys over fifteen — and by their teachers — consists of a peaked khaki cap, tunic, and breeches, with field boots and a side-arm. The younger boys wear open khaki shirts, shorts, and a forage cap.

“School work, including gymnastics, is confined to the morning, and, except for an hour-and-a-half’s preparation, the afternoon and evening are devoted to a fixed program of sport, in which swimming, boxing, shooting, and handball are the chief items, with instruction in riding, motorcycling and driving for the senior boys. Important competitive games are few and far between, and everything is carried out with a view to producing the physically efficient National Socialist.

“Marching is not merely a means of moving boys from one activity to another, but is one of the school games. At least twice a week, a period is allotted for Geländesport. This ‘game’ perhaps had its origin in the efforts of patriots to keep up some form of military training during the period of complete disarmament under the Treaty of Versailles. It might be described in army phraseology as ‘tactical exercises without arms.’

“One Zug after another marches out into the country…”

“Two or three times a year, there are ‘maneuvers’ lasting about a week, when the school marches from place to place (the senior boys sometimes cover well over twenty miles a day), and set up their tents from tent sheets carried by each boy. A lorry and field kitchens accompany them. In September of last year, all the twelve schools were engaged together in operations for the first time….”

We cannot inquire how far the parents of the “Junkers” are in accord with their education; for the boys, too, are “expropriated,” and the parents have no chance to object, or to show anything but silent acquiescence.

Reports of protests about the schools have found their way into the outer world from various districts of Germany, and especially from the Catholic districts. The population has been aroused again and again when the Nazis have removed the crucifixes from the religious schools to replace them with photographs of Hitler and with the swastika. In the Bishopric of Minister, there was a historic peasant demonstration, terrifying in its complete monotony and insistence. No one spoke for hours, there was no shouting of slogans during this demonstration; there was nothing but the continual murmur of one word coming from all the people gathered. The crowd stood there, murmuring the word: “Crosses, crosses, crosses…” without interruption, for hours, “…crosses, crosses…” In this single instance, the Nazis surrendered. They returned the crosses to the diocese. In almost every other place, they were victorious, for almost nowhere else did they meet with opposition.

* * *

The German schools, then, highly respected throughout the world, until 1933, for their thoroughness, their responsibility, and their progressiveness — the schools that held so much hope for the future cannot now be compared with any other educational institutions. Graduates of Gymnasien used to receive an education which brought them to the level of the sophomore or junior year of an American college; today they are beneath the intellectual standard of the young Americans who have just passed College Entrance Examinations. Graduates of French Lycées or Swiss Grammar Schools are justified in their contempt for German students who can do nothing but march.

The astonishing thing now is that there are occasional deploring voices, no matter how careful and ambiguous. A Studienrat named Nasshofen openly expresses his disillusion in the N. S. Educator: “It is a matter for deep regret that the school material, especially in graduate and high school work… in no wise coincides with the demands made upon the education received by those open to future choice as Führers. In the interest of our people, this must not continue…. In many cases, no one dares to proceed with the necessary energy and to draw the obvious conclusions.”

We know why no one dares; any bad pupil reprimanded by a conscientious teacher might denounce him for some fantastic crime, merely for “injuring the National Socialist spirit,” or, indeed, for belittling the Führer. No one dares, because the risk is loss of livelihood and even of life.

“Let us have the courage,” the Studienrat demands, in a manner that can only be described as foolhardy, “to go ahead and dismiss a number of ‘definitely inept’ pupils!”

Before the Nazi regime, we could not have pictured a school that simply did not dare to require a scholastic standard from its pupils, and that did not have the courage to dismiss failures, but that substituted for courage the audacity to lie and ignore, to preach inhumanity as prime virtue, and to send out soldiers instead of human beings and citizens. Even today, these schools are unthinkable as permanent sources of German education. Five years are a short time in the history of a country; even ten years are not very much. The wounds that the Führer has inflicted upon the German people are very terrible, their scars may long be visible, worn on every forehead like a mark of Cain — but some day all those gifts of character and spirit which have won sympathy for the German people in the past must come again into their own.

THE STATE YOUTH

A T THE CENTER OF THREE concentric circles stands the German child, with no escape, surrounded by the Men in Power. The closest circle is the family; but it has weakened and disintegrated to slight importance. The child can break this circle early in his life, and, as it breaks, take his stance as a soldier.

But he is enclosed by the second circle: school. All trace of privacy — there was some privacy at home, no matter how little — disappears here, giving way to serious matters of official importance. The authority of the state stands in the classroom; in the corner is the Führer’s bust; his words are spoken by teachers every day; and the child receives his praise and punishment alike in the Führer’s name.

The only loophole conceivable in school is an hour spent with some old-fashioned geography teacher, a traveler who has seen China and Africa, who speaks strange languages and tells stories of foreign people as though they were good friends. With him, time passes well, nobody thinks of the Führer, and if, at the close of the hour, before they leave for their chemistry class, the old man murmurs his “Heil Hitler,” and lifts his arm in a casual salute, it cannot cancel the hour they have spent as individuals, learning and being enchanted. This leaves its mark, even when the warlike young chemistry instructor brings them back to reality, to totalitarianism, blood and the race, submission and fanatical obedience.

The school is certainly a Nazi circle, and nothing within its boundary is at cross-purposes with the Nazi spirit. However, in spite of the violence done to scientists as well as science, there are still men at work within the structure who knew Germany before Hitler changed it. And some truths cannot be warped before the instincts of children, even though the Führer should be pleased to declare tomorrow that two and two equal five.

But the Hitler Youth organization, that third circle around the child, is the most expansive, most important, and by far the most comprehensive of his influences. Nothing is left of privacy, as at home; nothing “pre-” or “extra-Hitler,” as at school. There is nothing differing in the slightest degree from what Hitler has decreed. He permits family and school to continue as necessary evils, but his heart is with the youth unions, it is they that he visits and honors. They are called on to take part in the Nuremberg party days, he addresses them in his speeches, and their leader, the Reichsjugendführer (Leader of the Reich Youth), Baldur von Schirach, is responsible directly and solely to the Reich Chancellor himself.

This is the farthest circle; outside of the State Youth, there is no life possible for the German child in the Third Reich.

Who rules here, according to what laws? What goes on in the third circle?

Adolf Hitler, to whom the German child belongs, is himself neither adept nor courageous. Uneducated, given to unpredictable vacillation, with a body untrained in sport and naturally weak, he has required of the country’s youth education of body first, and education of character and mind as subordinate second and third. As for himself, his shoulders are narrow and his hips broad; he will never be able to distinguish himself physically. As a boy he was nervous. His mother described him as “moonstruck,” and in Mein Kampf, he admits that he was difficult to handle. He had pneumonia at the age of thirteen, and during the War he suffered from temporary blindness, probably of hysterical origin. He was only slightly wounded; a more important injury was suffered in 1923, during his Putsch, when he dashed his shoulder against the pavement near the Feldherrnhalle. He threw himself to the ground the minute he heard bullets; and later, although he had sworn to kill himself if the Putsch failed, he escaped quietly. Mussolini drives, pilots his own plane, and is an exceptionally fine rider; Hitler is not even able to sit his horse long enough to review a parade. It is eminently logical that he should desire “his” youth to be adroit and courageous, even though he himself is neither. He is giving them the “advantages” he missed, and they are to conquer the world.

Two kinds of training, then, must be given by the leaders of the State Youth. Their younger subordinates must learn the physical background of war, for which they prepare by marching, shootings riding, flying; and psychic readiness for it, in the apotheosis of the Führer, glorification of the holy ground of Germany, and worship of the one, the only, Nordic race.

Youth is to be ruled by youth — that principle assures the State Youth that no older person, with a memory of things as they were, shall have a say. The twelve-year-old Pimpfe (the clumsy new word of unknown origin which names little German boys in uniform) endure any brutality or injustice at the hands of their fourteen-year-old superior, since in two years they will be bullying a new set of subordinates.

There is a widespread belief that everyone eligible must join the German youth organizations, that membership is enforced by law; children and parents believe this. As a matter of fact, there is such a decree, which commands;

I. Law governing Hitler Youth, December 1, 1936. The future of the German people depends on its youth. All German youth must, therefore, be prepared for its future duties. The Reich Government has decided upon the following law, which is hereby made known. 1. The entire youth of Germany within the confines of the Reich is united in the Hitler Youth. 2. All German youth is to be educated — aside from the education within the home and in school — physically, mentally, and morally in the spirit of National Socialism, to serve the people and to become part of the people…. 3. The task of educating the entire German youth in the Hitler Youth Association is committed to the Reichsjugendführer of the National Socialist Party, who thereby becomes “Youth Leader of the German Reich.” His position is that of a primary official whose seat is in Berlin; he is directly and solely responsible to the Führer and Chancellor. 4. The edicts necessary for the carrying out and completion of this law as well as the general instructions for its administrations will be enacted by the Chancellor.

But these instructions have never been enacted, and with good reason: the law itself stands in direct opposition to the concordat with the Holy See, according to which German youth is allowed to choose between Catholic and State organizations. It has been part of Nazi tactics to break such a concordat with a law, which subsequently is not administered — which never, in fact, becomes a law, but serves its purpose through the psychological effect its pronouncement creates. Later, the statement is made that the concordat holds good; but in the meantime, Catholic associations are done away with, one by one. Their goods are confiscated, and they are attacked by lawsuits and scandal. German youth and its parents are given the impression that it is damaging and actually against the law to remain outside the State Youth. The fiction of voluntary membership remains, however.

On March 4, 1937, Baldur von Schirach published this edict: “All the Youth for the Führer!”

Enrollment of the Jungvolk for 1937. Summons of the Leader of the Reich Youth Baldur von Schirach:

The Youth Leader of the German Reich, Baldur von Schirach, has issued the following summons for the enrollment of

Jungvolk:

German Parents, German Youth!

The day is again approaching upon which a new year-generation ( Jahrgang ) is to enter the service of the Führer. As I do each year, this year I call again upon the youth of the land, on the occasion of Adolf Hitler’s birthday, to enter the ranks of the great organizations of German youth and to take part in the unselfish service and work of the Führer and to do their duty. Last year the result of my summons was that nearly one hundred per cent of all German boys and girls who had reached their tenth year voluntarily joined our ranks. I am certain that the generation now called upon will answer this call equally as a matter of course and will follow this call of youth. The strength and good fortune of the German Reich lies in the fact that its youth numbers millions. No one must stand aside when the issue of making Germany stronger and happier is at stake. There is no greater honor than to serve this Reich. German parents, German youth, recognize the importance of the appeal that is being addressed to you. ALL THE YOUTH FOR THE FÜHRER! ( Völkischer Beobachter, March 4, 1937)

The refrain, “All the Youth for the Führer,” at the end and beginning of the appeal, is in all of von Schirach’s statements. Children know the formula in all its variations: “You, too, belong to the Führer” — “German Youth Belongs to the Führer” — “German Youth, Your Life Belongs to the Führer!” And since Party Day, 1937, there is a new oath, written by Schirach himself: “I swear this holy oath by God. I will always be true and obedient to my Führer, Adolf Hitler. As a member of the Party, I desire to fulfill my duty for the common weal of the German people, with a clear conscience and ready for any sacrifice, for the greatness and honor of the German nation: So help me God.”

The name of “God” serves as a foil, here and everywhere in the Third Reich, for the name of the “Führer.” The author of the oath led the tens of thousands of young people assembled for Party Day in the speaking of this statement of fealty, which commits their souls to the Führer, dignified always by the name of God.

ORGANIZATION OF THE STATE YOUTH

The State Youth is organized like an army. It has its corps, divisions, battalions, brigades, regiments, companies, and squadrons, with their officers. The Hitler Youth is divided into five super-divisions, twenty-two divisions, eighty-two Oberbanne and three hundred and twenty-eight Banne.

The B.D.M. ( Bund Deutscher Mädel ) is made up of five GauVerbände, twenty-two Obergaue and three hundred and thirty Untergaue.

The Jungvolk, finally, is divided into five hundred and eighty Jungbanne and the same number of Jungmädel-Untergaue.

The Jungvolk (including the Jungmädel ) is made up of children between ten and fourteen; the Hitler Youth of boys from fourteen to eighteen; and the B.D.M. of girls from fourteen to twenty-one.

Any number of titles are created for these children — altogether, there are thirty-two officers with distinct titles in the State Youth, aside from its leader.

Schirach himself, commander of this enormous and well-organized army, is a large, flabby young man, with a mixture of brutality and fondness for the fine arts which has been characteristic of his Führer, Horst Wessel the procurer hero, and the German State Youth. As Leader, he is not only prince of night marches and maneuvers; he also composes poems, recites them to his subordinates, and has them printed in the youth periodicals. The titles are bombastic: “Young Germany,” “The Drums of German Youth,” “Will and Power,” “The Jungvolk,” “Tomorrow,” “Help the Good Work Along.” “The H.J., Fighting Organ of German Youth.”

Some of these works, graced with illustrations, appear under the auspices of the N.S. Teachers’ Union, who publish comparatively readable poems such as “Help the Good Work Along.” Most of them, however, are sponsored by the “Youth” department of the Jugendverlag — the German Youth Publishers, which is attached to the Department of Schools, Cultural Work, Propaganda and Press, of Schirach’s “State Youth.”

Special divisions of the State Youth include, in addition, the “Division for Registration, Organization, and Education,” the “Personnel Office,” the “Division for Youth Outside the Reich and for Colonial Work” (under the “Central Portion of German Youth in Europe”); and, as other small parts of the imposing organization, “Preparatory Schools for Fliers,” and divisions for “Aerial Fitness” and training for “Gliding, Motoring, Riding.”

There are thirty-four special schools for the education of Hitler Youth leaders, and four Reich Schools, in Potsdam and Mehlen for boys, and in Potsdam and Gotesburg, for girls.

From their tenth year on, German children are subjected to courses in physical training, which have been described by the leaders as “peaceful” and “sportsmanlike,” but which carry the name of Wehrsport (Defensive Sport).

John W. Taylor writes about “Defensive Sport” in a book which makes acknowledgment to the German authorities for “much valuable assistance” given him in the compiling of a thorough and objective work. He says that the Hitler Youth organization “has never issued an official handbook for this type of training. The writer has spent many hours in conference with members of the Reich Youth Leadership [he names Richter, councilor in the Ministry of Education; Senn, Bannführer of the Reich Youth directors; and others] and has spent many hours visiting the training schools of the Hitler Youth. Various publications in the nature of handbooks for open country and defense sport training are found in the book-shops of Germany, and one finds that the directors of the various training schools choose their own textbooks.”

Here, again, we find the lack of official government material — not accidentally, but in the interest of tactics, and to make Germany presentable to the outside world — supplemented by other publications. The booklets of instruction, which have become of more importance than textbooks to the schools, fill this gap in the same way that the “various publications” meet the needs of the State Youth.

John W. Taylor continues:

During a visit in such a camp, the author met Police Lieutenant J. Remold, in charge of this encampment. The following outline of what was taught in this camp is for the most part taken from a pamphlet written by the Lieutenant and is entitled Handbook for Hitler Youth (Munich ’33): A. Maneuver Sport. 1. Drill in closed formation. 2. Reading of maps to scale (scale 1:25,000 and 1:100,-000). Direction finding with and without compass. 3. Description of the various types of land (topography cover, and judgment of landscapes). 4. Vision tests. Estimating of distances. 5. Taking cover, camouflaging, and laying of false trails. 6. Scouting, making reports, and sketching. 7. Drilling in open formation. 8. Protection of a marching column. 9. Pitching tents and the use of spades. 10. Orientation and direction finding, at night as well as by day. 11. Simple open country games. B. Physical Education. 1. Exercises without apparatus. 2. Tumbling and floor gymnastics. 3. Boxing. 4. Games without apparatus. 5. Games with the medicine ball. 6. Gymnastics with apparatus. 7. Swimming. 8. Cross-country and endurance running. 9. Indian Club throwing for accuracy. 10. Formation games. 11. Marching with full equipment. C. Small Caliber Rifle Practice. 1. Study of firearms: parts and care of the weapon. 2. Shooting instruction. 3. Behavior on shooting stand. 4. Activity as recorder and as munition-passer. 5. Activity as supervisor of rifle practice. 6. Pulling the trigger, practice at triangular targets. Positions before, during and after firing. 7. Firing positions: prone, sitting, kneeling and standing.

John W. Taylor makes no comments on this “survey” and indeed any comment would be superfluous. Both groups A and C are as obviously related to “peaceful sport” as the throwing of bombs. And these directions for marching in full outfit complete the martial picture:

Taylor continues:

“Hitler Youth enjoys special training in riding, driving automobiles, driving carriages, use of signals, path-finding, first aid and music. It also receives special training in Luftschutz and flying with or without motors.”

“Special training in giving first aid and in music.” Is that quoted from some Nazi table or is Mr. Taylor responsible for the sequence? It is the sequence of Hitler, who could listen to Lohengrin, rapt, as his bombs ruined Paris; and it is in the spirit of the State Youth.

The survey goes on to inform us that thirteen-year-olds must march eleven miles a day; fifteen-year-olds march thirteen-and-a-half miles, carrying an eleven-pound load. That is hard training, and of doubtful benefit; its effect on the bodies of children has been testified to by the Nazis themselves, in the Frankfurter Zeitung of May 27, 1937, which says editorially:

“The latest conscriptions have brought to light the surprising fact that there is above all an abnormal increase of that disease known as “flat feet.” For example, out of every hundred conscripts for the year 1936, thirty-seven or thirty-eight are described as suffering from this ailment.”

Thirty-seven to thirty-eight per cent of young Aryans ready for military service are afflicted with flat feet, the trait which, apart from large noses and full lips, is most often used in their anti-Semitic caricatures. The Frankfurter Zeitung is not alone in its mention of this “surprising” observation. The Munich Medical Journal (No. 14, April 2, 1937) reports an address given by the Magdeburg orthopedist, Professor A. Blenke, on “Flatfoot among our national comrades, and its relation to their capacity for work and military defense”:

“…He further indicates the fact that such inflammatory conditions, which were formerly found principally among apprentices and in the years of adolescence, now often appear among school-children, at an age when they never used to appear. According to the lecturer, the reason for this is that too much is demanded of the feet of these boys and girls through marches on hard roads, carrying heavy burdens besides — in other words, exerting them to tasks beyond their strength. The importance of prophylactic measures against this is shown by our military examinations, which indicated that an alarming number of conscripts were incapable of service in the army because of flat feet.”

Professor Schede of Leipzig reported, on the occasion of a “Cripples’ Welfare Day,” that in his examination of the Jungvolk, more than 50 per cent of those on workers’ duty and liable to military service suffer from lessened capacity of the foot; and the majority of these have consequently weakened spines.

But Professor Schede, the editorial-writer, and the lecturer on “Flatfoot” may be fault-finders. What is really demanded of these children? What do they say about all of this in their own propaganda? This is a story, in full, from the Jungvolk of June 1934 — from a periodical issued for and by children from ten to fourteen years old!

THE LAST THREE MILES

We are sitting at the side of the road. Some of us complain about the food, others object to the hardships of life and this eternal marching. We have been underway for several days now. At first, we ate so much that we could hardly move. Now that we have reached the end of our money and so of our food, most of us have some fault to find. All the Pimpfe are complaining except Heini, who chews away cheerfully all day at a bit of cracker. “All you fools can beef, but let’s see you do any better!” Heini draws down the corners of his mouth and spits. Nobody talks, except someone who growls about “not wanting to find fault” but “you simply gag on this food.” Our Juschafu ( fugendschaftsführer ) Hans rises and says, curtly, “Let’s get on!” We start off: 12 — 15—18 miles. Our feet are worn out and stink. Three miles more. Heini is swaying oddly. One of us begs: “Let it go at nine, this once!” “No, let’s get on,” repeats Hans. Beads of sweat drip from Peter’s chin in a steady stream. Hans takes his monkey (knapsack) from him. “Who will carry Heini’s monkey?” he asks. No one volunteers. Heini is biting his lips. “Oh, well, give it to me,” I offer, “for one mile, then let someone else take it.” Immediately a number of the fellows mumble: “But not me.” After a mile Hans takes the monkey from me and hands it to one of the complainers. He doesn’t wish to take it. “So that’s your idea of comradeship!” Hans’ voice is acrid. Nuegg takes the monkey. A quarter-mile more. Then the one who refused it before takes the monkey, and while he drags along both monkeys he whistles softly. Some song about comradeship. Again a quarter-mile. “Let it go,” he says. “I’m used to it now.” We have to take the monkey from him by force. The next one who gets it doesn’t complain at all. The last three miles seem much longer to us than the first twelve. Finally we reach the village by the sea. We drop into the hay as though we were dead. The first thing in the morning, Nuegg opens his first-aid kit for those who have trouble with their feet. Heini was the first to be ready. The fact that he had kept going the day before had made him popular. Curiously enough, there was a good mood among the entire Jungschaft. No quarrels, no fault-finding. Everyone pretended that the food was fine (but the food was, as a matter of fact, the worst part of the march). After a day of rest the trip went on. Slowly, of course, for now we were at the seashore. The Stimmung remained good during the rest of the two weeks. And if anyone so much as opened his mouth, Heini gave him a poke, or even a sock in the jaw. Three weeks have passed since then. Evening at home. We talked about Socialism. And about comradeship. One of us said: “We learned what comradeship is, on that great journey!” Hans Blohm, Altona.

The story was written to prejudice everyone in favor of the organization and its “great journeys.” By contrast, any statistics would pale; and this is the most attractive side, emphasized in fiction! Was it an exaggerated emotion — the fear that too much strain was being put on these children? “Gag on the food,” and “a poke, or even a sock on the jaw!”—how the leaders are feared, how they represent power, even though they are only two years older than the rest! Hans, the Juschafu, simply takes the heavy knapsack from the little boy, and gives it to the one who had already complained of his own load. In the end, the boy takes both loads anyway, for the Juschafu has grown “acrid.”

After all of this, it seems extraordinary even to the writer that a good mood should prevail. And the conversation at home in the evening, the idyllic note that closes the sketch, is a sharp reminder of the scenes of soldiers assembled to talk and remember in the post-war years. “It was a fine time,” they say, in their amnesia, “… the old days… facing the enemy, together!” The “State Youth” has evenings of patriotic music, tall stories, warrior poetry, and crude harsh jokes. What else are the evenings of these grim and fatal children than time spent resting in the hinterland?

WHERE IS THE ENEMY?

The Literature of War

Hitler has been able to spread, as an important factor toward his internal policy, the feeling that war is near. The German people find war present. It is possible to force a nation to endure hunger, lack of freedom, arbitrary power, sacrifices of all sorts; to rouse them to superhuman performance by making them believe that they are living in exceptional circumstances; to confiscate their property, and enforce martial law — but only if and when the people are convinced that a state of war exists and that life depends on their will to fight, to conquer, and to die. The Men in Power have been artists, creating this atmosphere in Germany, and convincing the half-grown young, especially, that the battle exists in deadly seriousness.

But where is the enemy? These are people who have come over a rise of ground, in fog, fighting fog.

Where is the enemy?

Never mind. The Führer commands, and they follow.

He is well endowed to be the lord of such an army, in a fantastic war, without a palpable enemy. Hitler, to whom Germany and Austria surrendered without a show of struggle, is an uneducated Wagnerian, a lover of blood-red flags, and of the secret midnight oath. On a certain thirtieth of June — the day he had his best friends murdered — he spent the evening listening to music, which so moved him that he became quite tender at the thought of so much bloodshed. He is the ideal captain for such a non-existent “wish-war.” Two sides meet and act together in him: the romantic, obsessed by a mystic blood fantasy; and the calculating, plotting, wary, possessed of an animal tenacity which locks its teeth in its object. But if ever the dream-war becomes a reality, and Hitler needs to defend himself against the visible enemy, the decisive issue may he which side of him survives, the recluse or the sly, hardheaded man. In the meantime, he bolsters himself for that defense.

Periodicals have been valuable to Hitler. They have helped to harden his State Youth against hunger, forced marches, and the hardships and fiction of the Führer’s war. One of the most important of the youth magazines is H.J. — Battling Organ of the Hitler Youth. “Hitler Youth! You are standing in the midst of battle! Arm yourself by reading the H.J. ” is the canvassing slogan of the magazine, almost all of whose contents — essays, poems, short stories, memoirs — accent the thought of “battle.”

But the State Youth is the official organization of an all-powerful government at peace with itself. What battle is possible within the state? What battles can they praise?

The years of struggle before the Machtergreifung — the Nazi word for Hitler’s seizure of power — are featured in these magazines. Editors must clutch at this straw, the detail of history in which the State Youth of today did actually “battle” for something. There were “battles in halls” when young Nazis broke into pacifist meetings, and “street battles” during which Republican police arrested or warned Hitler toughs for their misdemeanors. But at least there was fighting! Those were great days, when some stood watch while others painted signs or put up illegal placards; the democratic government could be deceived in a hundred ways. The “illegal placarding” haunts almost every issue of the Nazi youth magazines; even the more reticent Hilf ’ Mit! cannot give enough space to this phase of the “Years of Battle.”

A certain Herr Peter Osten, who tells of past experiences, “grave and gay,” is a specialist on this theme. He writes: “We were just a small troop of Hitler boys and helped prepare placards and newspaper propaganda. Angriffe and Signale[Nazi papers] were folded from early morning to late at night. Shortly after one o’clock we had finally completed our task. But since the greater number of us could not very well go home so late, as our parents thought we were out with some harmless bunch of Boy Scouts, we decided just to go on with the propaganda. We wanted to paint placards. It was an excellent time for it. Only one thing was missing: paint and two brushes. Suddenly, somehow, these too appeared. Lulu, one of our best and most active members, had ‘organized’ them from somewhere. Then we explored the neighborhood. The placard-painters followed and behind them, as further protection against the police, a few ‘harmless passers-by.’”

A little earlier in the same text, describing an enrollment expedition in cars which a large number of “Hitler Youths” made throughout the country, he says: “At first everything took its normal course and some of us were a little disappointed that nothing at all new was going to happen. A few communistic day-laborers passed us and defiantly cried their greeting — Red Front — to us. Normally, we would have laughed at them. But since we had decided to have an adventure, they became our victims. The car stopped and a few of us finished the work promptly and neatly.”

That is the “period of struggle,” even when the Nazis tell the story: lying to parents, making fools of officials, stealing tools — and, when they met “some communistic day-laborers” (some workmen, who dared express disapproval of young men who did not work but went out on hoodlum enrollment excursions), since they had decided “to have some adventure,” the workmen “became victims,” and were “finished promptly and neatly.”

Peter Osten, story-teller, tells another bit of the lives of the “illegal placarders.”

“…Hans pulled his cap over his face, pressed the portfolio tightly under his arm, and went off with mighty strides toward the place appointed. A blue coffee-can stuck out of his right pocket, which gave him the appearance of a young worker. With mad haste, Gerhardt rushed to the scene on his bicycle. They greeted each other joyfully, and both agreed that they really had succeded in disguising themselves. They now proceeded on their way together and finally rejoined the others behind a colony of gardens on the outskirts of the city. All of them almost burst into loud laughter. In the center of the group was a girl flirting outrageously with Werner, the trumpeter. ‘Just for practice,’ she said; or rather, he said, for it was no other than Traugott, whose smooth skin fitted him best for the part…. ‘Silence!’ commanded Gerhardt, ‘Now we will first of all take inventory.’ Two large new pots of paint, two brand-new brushes and some glue, made their appearance. ‘You have my talent for organization to thank for the paint and the brushes,’ Werner announced proudly. Soon everything was ready. ‘If one of us really is caught by the police, he is on no account to give any information concerning the others,’ said Gerhardt, leader of the group ( Kameradschaftsführer ), as a last warning. Two boys on bicycles started off, and investigated the neighborhood, so as to save the group any unpleasant surprise. In front of the boys who were to do the actual placarding, a pair of lovers ran to and fro. In their little valise were all the tools…. Now the painters put on gloves… and chose a nice black fence as their first field of activity. The lovers did not stand about inactive, but took hold of one of the paint-pots and began to smear the asphalt shamelessly….”

When the police finally did come, the childish gangsters had no difficulty in heading them off: “And unsuspectingly the police proceeded on their search for the criminals who disturbed the peace of the night. ‘Luck, that time,’ said Hans. ‘Those make-believe lovers were a good idea.’ At daybreak the boys went home, still talking excitedly.”

This noble tale has all the decoration of the “time of battle”: we have the sentinels, the stolen tools, the trick played on the police by Traugott’s masquerade. This last, the story of the boy with the smooth skin, dressed as a girl, flirting “outrageously with Werner,” is a piquant added bit that is not untypical. Captain Roehm was not the only man of his type among the Nazi ranks, and Baldur von Schirach’s organization is still faithful to Roehm’s tradition.

Schirach himself is the editor of the German Girl, a magazine which gives him an opportunity to interest himself, in a brotherly manner and with great sensitivity, in such subjects as “the spiritual position of woman in Germany,” and “her great mission,” as well as in “all specifically feminine aims.” The Hitler Youth, in contrast, “is a corporation emphatically masculine in style of uniform; manly, too, as regards its unconditional point of view: brutality, and harshness of outlook.” The word “brutality” is used here, it will be noted, in a completely laudatory sense, giving all desirability to the quality. There is now a whole group of words which are used with a derogatory meaning everywhere else in the world, but which the Nazis have invested with favorable meanings: words like “fanaticism,” “harshness,” and others, “merciless,” “blind,” and even “barbarous.”

The songs, choruses and playlets of the Nazi youth are barbarous, in the sense of the word outside Germany. Their texts are to be found in the magazines and in any number of special publications recommended, and sometimes distributed by the Reichsjugendleitung and its subdivisions. In one of these booklets, you will find the song “Mögen sie nur kommen” (Let them come!):

Oh Herr, schick uns den Moses wieder,

Auf dass er seine Glaubensbrüder

Heimführe ins gelobte Land.

Lass auch das Meer sich wieder teilen

Wohl in zwei hohe Wassersäulen,

Feststehen wie eine Felsenwand.

Wenn dann das Judenpack darinne

Wohl in der festen Wasserrinne

Dann mach, o Herr, die Klappe zu.

Und alle Völker haben Ruh.

Send Moses to us, Lord, again,

That he may lead his fellow-men

Once more into the Promised Land.

Let the Red Sea on either hand

Be into two great pillars made

Solid as a barricade.

And when the packs of Jews begin

To file between them and run in,

Then, Lord, fill up that gap again:

Peace will descend upon all men.

Another songbook, Trum Trum — Songs for the Jungvolk, is, as its title shows, meant for boys between ten and fourteen. But the songs go like this:

Ihr Sturmsoldaten, jung und alt, nehmt eure Waff en in die Hand,

Denn Juden hausen fürchterlich im deutschen Vaterland.

You Storm-troopers, young and old, take your weapons in your hand,

For the Jews have launched confusion in the German fatherland.

Or else:

Hundertzehn Patronen umgehängt

Scharf geladen das Gewehr,

Und die Handgranaten in der Faust,

Bolschewist, nun komm mal her!

A hundred bullets and ten to our aid,

A loaded rifle does the trick,

And in our fist a hand-grenade —

Come on then, you Bolshevik!

They are all songs of war; these songs, filled with hatred, are taught to the children; they are characterized by that emotional sloppiness by which we recognize Hitler and his followers — a combination of brutality and all the clichés of romanticism.

Du kleiner Tambour, schlage ein!

Nach Moskau wollen wir marschieren!

Nach Moskau wollen wir hinein!

Der Bolschewik soil unsre Kräfte spüren.

Am Wege wilde Rosen blühn,

Wenn Hitlerleut’ nach Russland ziehn!

Little drummer, beat your drum!

Off to Moscow will we march,

Into Moscow will we come!

The Bolsheviks will feel our force

And on the road wild roses bloom

When Hitler’s men to Russia come.

Or

Entrollt die Fahnen blutgetränkt,

Ein Feigling, wer an sich noch denkt…

Und naht dereinst der Rachetag,

Dann führen wir aus Not und Schmach

Das Hakenkreuz von Sieg zu Sieg.

Dann ziehen wir beim Morgenrot, ja rot,

Fur Hitlers Fahne in den Tod.

Unfurl the banners steeped in blood,

Cowards think of their own good…

And when the day of vengeance comes

We’ll lead the swastika from need

To victory on victory.

Follow, in morning’s red, red, red,

The flag of Hitler, till we’re dead.

The wild roses and the morning’s red are old images in Germany’s war songs. But not in its children’s songs. And then there was the flag of the Fatherland, in all the songs; not Hitler’s flag, for whose glory the march on Russia will be made.

These song-books are, row on row, identical; even their covers are alike, with, their Hitler-boys, their flags, drums, swastikas. The songs for girls are similar, as similar as this:

Feinde ringsum, greife zur Wehr, greife zur Wehr ,

Steh fest im Westen und Osten

Lass Deinen Ernst sie kosten,

Viel Feind, viel Ehr’!

Braun Heer voran! Heil Hitler Dir!

Treu willst den Frieden Du halten

Gegen der Feinde Gewalten

Folgen wir Dir!

Foes all around us, get your gun, get your gun,

Stand fast in the west and east,

Let them feel your zeal increased,

Many foes, much glory!

Brown Army, march! Hitler, to Thee!

You will keep peace faithfully

Against the hated enemy

We follow thee!

They are all like that: songs, recitations, almanacs, and “children’s games.” If you ask how evenings are spent at home, any little boy will tell you what good times he has (with his face drawn down dutifully), how he has just been in a play called, say, The Freemason Circus; he won’t know what a Freemason is, but he’ll tell about the unpleasant magician, and the fearful Jew, Amschel Rothschild, the circus director. There is a “black brother” too; very wicked, very funny, dressed in clerical clothes; a “red bear” with a Russian accent and a meek fool with “English’* traits. “I played a good part myself,” the little boy says, “in costume. I was made up as Marianne — they sprinkled perfume all over me. I was supposed to be France, you know: it was a political play.”

Oh, a political play! Well, what happens?

“You know perfectly well what happens!” he says in a mocking voice, laughing uncertainly and not believing that the question was honest. He speaks his punch line, timing it slowly, like a good actor reaching his climax: “The German, Michel, licks them all.”

Of course he does….

“Want to see how it goes?” he is asking. “We rehearsed for ages before we gave the real performance at the Gau meeting. I know every part by heart, backward and forward.”

All right, then, what does Marianne say to the red bear?

He takes his place as Marianne, giving her the loose loping walk and rotating hips of a street-walker, and doing it well, too. For the bear, he keeps his paw up in threat. “O, you lovely creature,” he says, deep in his throat, “O, sweet red bear!” he chirps in answer, falsetto, swinging his hips; and then, with his fist up too (a duet, he explains), “Let’s have a marriage pact.”

“Against Michel, a strong contract,” Marianne puts in calculatingly; but the bear knows what he’s after, and goes on roughly and covetously: “You’re my object, my delight, I’ll eat you up, love, in one bite!”

But that’s charming, and the little boy is so obliging, and such a good actor! And what does Michel say to this?

He frowns, pulls himself up tall, and begins to speak in a hoarse, monotonous, and familiar voice, barking: “On Lake Geneva stands a house, and many men go in and out, and talk and talk and talk!”

“Ow!” he interrupts himself. “Ow! Disarmament’s got me in the stomach. I’ll have to leave the room. Clean up your own mess!” He makes a face, shakes his head in disgust and rage, sticks his tongue out, and spits. The play’s over; he steps back, out of character. He has acted gracefully and rather well, but without the slightest emotion or real concern. “That’s what they’re like,” he says, offhandedly, “all of them.”

He knows other plays, too, and where to find them. That one was published in Spiele der Deutschen Jugend, which the Department of Culture of the Reich Youth Führung publishes, and there is a pamphlet called Camp Circus, which has games and charades — questions and answers. “Do you know this one?” he asks. “What’s this?” He opens his mouth as far as possible, holding his head with its soft blond shock of hair far back. “Give up? That’s French lockjaw, that they got when they noticed that the Rhineland was occupied again.”

Not bad at all! Any more?

He pulls out one of the fair hairs, and dangles it before you. “See that? That’s the hair the League of Nations hangs by!” Then, in the game, another boy comes up and says, “Thinking about the League will give you a toothache. We’ll fix that; we’ll pull it out.”

The tooth? you ask.

“I don’t know — the tooth or the League,” he says indifferently. “It’s all the same to me….”

It’s the only opinion he has given, and he has gone through the routines with complete lack of emotion. He does not care about the games. They are what he is compelled to play, and have become a habit to which indifference is the best reaction.

But he has to go now. He has an examination tomorrow.

Of course, go home now, you tell him, and get to work at your books….

“Books!” he repeats, in his young, hard-boiled way, surprise in his face. “I don’t have to crack a book. This is an exam in defense — Wehrsport — but it’s a big one, this time; I just can’t flunk it. It’s the most important one of the whole twenty-two. Gotta go,” he says, “and I hurt all over as it is. I’ve got another hour of training… Heil Hitler!”

TESTS AND UNIFORMS

There are countless tests; one might ask the little boy, for instance, whether he intended to take the tests in the sick-nursing course. An examination beyond that will give one the title of Krankenträger (stretcher bearer), and a still further degree is Feldscher (field surgeon, from one of the many medieval terms long out of usage, which have been resurrected by the Nazis). These last are permitted to wear the Red Cross badge, and during meetings, exercises or marches, they may administer first-aid to those who happen to have had bad luck while flying, or during target practice, or when they were mountain-climbing in full uniform.

The uniform itself is watched over by the guardians of the law, and regulations have made it very difficult for some of these boys, whose families have not enough money for food and food substitutes. In the Pirmasenser Zeitung of May 18, 1937, the District Leaders wrote: “A circular has informed the Hitler Youth as to the precise appearance of their summer service uniforms. But it has proved necessary to call general attention to the fact that the entire H.J., including its subdivisions, the D.J., B.D.M. and J.M. must wear the appointed laced half-shoe and not the Bundschuh (a peasant’s boot that can be slipped on; the term was current during the Peasants’ Wars) that can still be seen here and there. It is forbidden for any member of the H.J. to wear a Bundschuh. The summer uniform is to be accompanied in the case of all Hitler Boys by the summer service cap, known as camp cap. Furthermore, it must be repeated that only black trousers may be worn, so that the brown trousers now on hand must by dyed. We especially ask the parents to attend to these matters and to see that the service uniforms of their boys are absolutely according to regulations. The Scout Service will watch over the wearing of the proper summer service uniform on the part of all Hitler Boys in our district.”

If this is extravagance, it is counteracted on the next page of the same paper, by an official notice:

“It has repeatedly been observed during inquests that the dead are buried in valuable clothing, sometimes even newly bought. I consider it the duty of a citizen to omit all unnecessary pomp as regards funerals. — The Mayor.”

THE GERMAN GIRLS

The B.D.M. — Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) — brackets all German girls between fourteen and twenty-one; those from ten to fourteen belong to the Jungmädels (Young Girls). Both organizations have set out to prepare the girls for their two future professions, National Socialist motherhood and war-machines, either as nurses in the field or as “defenders of the homeland.” Everything about race and motherhood is taught them, as well as everything about Eintopfgerichte (one-pot dishes), Ersatz fat, the uses of slops, how to risk one’s life for the cause, and first aid.

“Maidens, practice sport!”

That is Herr von Schirach addressing The German Girl. On May 9, 1937, he issued an appeal typical of the confusion about voluntary membership. “German youth,” it goes on, “belongs to the Führer! The law according to which the H.J. and the B.D.M. once were constituted has now become the law governing all of German youth. The will to stake one’s life, accomplishment and restraint today inspires all German boys and girls. And so we count upon you, German maidens between seventeen and twenty-one years of age, upon those of you who do not belong to the B.D.M. We are eager to bring up a young and healthy people. And so the duty of the B.D.M. for physical efficiency is valid for you, too. Practice sport; train your bodies, grow healthy and fortify your powers of resistance and so grow up to be healthy women, conscious of yourselves, ready to stake your lives and with strong powers of resistance. Report at once in the building of the daily paper of the above-named Reichsbund for physical exercise and fulfill your sports duties!

“Youth Leader of the German Reich “Signed: Schirach “Representative of the Youth Leader for Physical Education of German Youth “Signed: von Tschammer, “ Obergebietsführer ”

This was published in the Völkischer Beobachter; and the Reich News Service added the following:

“Hereby the final step is taken to include all German youth in the service of the common weal. Any male youths not included in the Hitler Youth are compelled to take part either in the Workers’ Service or the Military Service ( Wehrmacht ). But there was no arrangement for female youth of this age, so far as they were not included in the B.D.M. There was no organization to prepare them for their future duties toward the people and the state or to educate them to the will to stake their lives. “The first thing necessary for this practical ability to stake one’s life is the physical efficiency of the girls, and besides this, a thorough knowledge of service in case of accidents, sick-nursing, protection against air raids and poison gases and, last but not least, housekeeping. This is taught in courses given under the auspices of the Red Cross, the Reich Union for Air Protection ( Reichluftschutzbund ) and the Youth Department of the D.A.F. (German Workers’ Front). The physical efficiency of girls born between 1916 and 1920 is taken over by the German Reich Union for Physical Training at the instigation of the Reichsjugendführer. “Here, too, the membership of the girls is entirely voluntary. The girls become individual members of the German Reich Union for Physical Training through any organization they may choose. Each week there are two-hour evenings spent in physical exercise, starting with the fundamentals of physical training (such as caring for the body, light athletics, gymnastics, swimming, folk dances and diving). Beyond this, especially gifted girls are united in separate groups and trained according to their aptitudes. “Of course the B.D.M., as the only German organization for girls, takes active part in the education of the young. From now on, there will be close cooperation between the D.R.F.L. and the B.D.M. As the Leader of Reich Sport emphasized, the B.D.M. should be the model organization for the physical training of German girls and women. The first aim of the members of the newly organized classes should be to win the efficiency medals (I and II) of the B.D.M., as well as the German Sport medal. Besides this, the Gau and District Service offices of the D.R.F.L. will appoint a B.D.M. Führerin to accomplish this new task. She will be nominated by the Obergau of the district in question. “And so the line of activity which has always been decisive for the B.D.M. sport department will, from now on, be decisive for the entire generation of German girls. The object of all sport-work in the B.D.M., to bring up healthy women, conscious of their bodies, ready to stake their lives, and with strong powers of resistance, is now completely attained, through the inclusion of all girls from seventeen to twenty-one.”

At last, in this masterpiece of verbal confusion (the reference is always to Mädel, a pre-Nazi vulgarism for Mädchen, which is never used now), a fairly exact statement of the B.D.M. and its aims is made. But the girls know the B.D.M.’s first object, which is not mentioned here with the necessary precision. They learn it in all their courses in biology, racial science, and heredity, and they continually read about it in all of their books and magazines. They are, above all, future mothers; and they know that it is impossible to begin this function too early in life, and unnecessary to be married to perform this important service to the Führer and the State. In the periodical Rasse (Race) of March, 1937, appeared the statement: “Every healthy child of every German Mother means one more battle won in the fight for existence of the German people. And so, in an ethical sense, it is impossible to deny to the unmarried German woman the right to become a mother.”

And Alfred Rosenberg, in his Mythus des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, hammers the real point home: “And so the German Reich of the future will have to regard the childless woman — regardless of whether or not she is married — as an incomplete member of the National Commonwealth.”

This demand to bear children is repeated, in all its variations, with more and more of its implications becoming clear. The Führer has demanded this, and nothing else, of the German women; his gospel word must be carried out, in any manner at all. It is a matter of complete indifference to the authorities, for instance, whether the woman loves the man or not, or whether there is a different man each year, if only they are “racially pure” and “satisfactory in point of health.” Love and faithfulness lose their rights, along with freedom, justice, and reason. This need not be mentioned by von Schirach and von Tschammer. There are supplementary publications….

Professor Ernst Bergmann of Leipzig says, in an essay called Knowledge and the Spirit of Motherhood:

“Life-long monogamy is perverse and would prove harmful to our race. Were this institution ever really enforced — and fortunately this is almost never the case in reality — the race must decay. Every reasonably constructed State will have to regard a woman who has not given birth as dishonored. There are plenty of willing and qualified youths ready to unite with the girls and women on hand. Fortunately, one boy of good race suffices for twenty girls. And the girls, for their part, would gladly fulfill the demand for children, were it not for the nonsensical so-called civilized idea of the monogamous permanent marriage, an idea in complete contradiction to all natural facts.”

German girls have been fed on this tribal literature for five years, reading and memorizing it, with all other possibilities removed, with hope of profession and education cut off, working as unskilled laborers and Kriegsreserve — war reserves. Their hope? lessness is reflected in the university statistics, which read 19,400 women matriculated at German universities in 1931, 9700 in the Hitler-winter of 1935-36 (the drop is 50 per cent). More specifically, there were fourteen women studying law at Tubingen in 1933, four in 1934, and one in the winter of 1936.

As for non-German girls, left with no rights to professional life; they acquiesce under the one demand made continually and angrily of them. And the practical possibilities of becoming a mother are excellent, as early as at fourteen years of age. The “State Youth” offers encouragements and opportunities, with its feasts, its farm years, and hay-loft nights. Parents watch their daughters from a distance, helplessly; they might object, but to whom? We know the character of Baldur von Schirach, and there is only one man mightier than he. The number of illegitimate pregnancies and births among the members of the “State Youth” is tremendous.

CONVERSATION-PIECE

The girl is fifteen, and pretty, although you are not conscious of that at first. She has a good figure, but her legs are overdeveloped; her hair is light and would be wavy, if it were cared for, instead of being weathered and scraped into two heavy braids; the lines which fall heavily from the nostrils to the corners of her mouth — the stress-lines of the athlete — obscure the expression of her face, so that, as she speaks, her essential prettiness must fight its way through these marks of strain and neglect Besides, she wears the white blouse and dark-blue skirt and black stockings which are the uniform of the B.D.M., and not a very becoming one.

The foreigner is talking to her; he is young, too, and easily discouraged by her impersonal tone, her military voice, and the bitter cracks she makes when she accepts the cigarette he offers. “German women don’t smoke!” She bites the words off, and thrusts her face forward at the match he holds for her.

He is a little at a loss for conversation. “What would you like to be?” he asks, looking down at her bent head.

“A mother,” she snaps, and the inflection jangles. She straightens up, and lets the smoke go, slowly; this first cigarette tastes good. “No, but really,” she goes on, “there isn’t very much I can become. Good jobs exist for men only, and you know where woman’s place is. Or, if she isn’t in the home, but in a job, you can be sure it isn’t a good job!”

“But your father’s a professor,” the young man says, in relief, for at any rate she is talking now — “don’t you want to go to college?”

“That’s way out,” she answers, “with great difficulties before you can get in, and hardly a chance of getting anywhere afterward.”

“Or medical school — you could be a doctor, couldn’t you?”

“Well, they’ve banned women assistants in the State hospitals now, and that’s where you’d go after medical school. Anyway, 90 per cent of the medical set-up belongs to the State, and you’re officially banned if you’re married — and unofficially, if you’re not.”

“But there’s always teaching, isn’t there?” he suggests.

“Of course,” she explains, “I’d have to go to teachers’ training school. But I could do that. The regulation closing it to girls is only a provisional one, and that’s just bad luck for me….”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” the young foreigner says, breaking down a little, and trying to think of something reassuring to say. “But you have the B.D.M., haven’t you? That must be nice, you must like that — all the sports — and being with the girls — and farm life — and festivals —”

But she has stopped him with one look, a hard stare of mockery that cuts the words.

“Certainly I like the B.D.M.,” she is saying, “we have almost as good a time as the boys do — almost as much marching, and then we learn a lot about war, and we hear almost as many speeches as they do — yes, honestly, almost.”

She is starting to go, with the same look of necessity that the little boy had had when he spoke about his examinations. “I have to go to the registrar’s office,” she says. “My chum’s getting married.”

“Your chum? Is she as young as — I mean, is she fifteen, too?” the young man asks, startled.

“Sixteen,” the Hitler-girl answers, “and her fiancé is eighteen. But she’s going to have a baby, and so they’re getting married; their parents won’t give them any money unless they do, that’s about the only reason.”

The young man is embarrassed. He is not very sophisticated, and he is not talking well at all; in fact, he acts like an inexperienced young sociologist asking embarrassing questions in front of a grass hut. “But are they allowed to?” he is asking. “They’re both minors….”

“Allowed,” she repeats, “of course they’re allowed. The State wants children, and if there’s an old law, then someone makes a new one, and everything’s all right again, just like that!”

The young man has recovered a little poise. “I only meant that young men under twenty-one used to be minors, not permitted to marry.” He has been acting like a child; he must get used to changes, and not behave like an outlandish fool. I must adjust more quickly to these changes, he thinks, and holds out his hand for the paper she is giving him.

“Now they’re declared of age,” the girl says, “that makes it legal. Here, this is what they brought me from the registry — a present, they thought it was a good joke.” She watches him closely, with an appraising, laughing look, as he reads:

Umdruck Fam. 397/21. Berlin-Lichtenberg ________________ 19____ Circuit Court, Division 6. Before: A.G.R as judge there have appeared 1. -------------------- 2. --------------------(his father) 3. --------------------(his mother) all identified by papers and documents. The aforementioned I. declared: I appeal to you to declare me of age. I have been engaged since ____________ to ____________, ---- years old, who bore a child on ----------------, whose father I am. (Or, who is in the ---- month of pregnancy by me). I wish to marry my fiancée, who is a proper, industrious girl and a good housekeeper, so that I may be better able to take care of her and the child than is possible for me under present conditions. I am earning ------ a week, and can therefore provide for a family. We have a domicile (or, we will have a domicile). I understand the meaning of marriage. The aforementioned 2. and 3. declared: I -- We -- give our consent to the declaration of majority of my -- our -- son; we can but confirm his statements. Our son is a serious man and sufficiently mature to manage his affairs himself. The declaration that he is of age will be for his best. The aforementioned were informed of the decision that this request has been granted, as per this date. They declared: We renounce the right of having this judgment served on us, and we waive all rights to contest it legally. The aforementioned 1. asked for a copy of the judgment with certificate of legality attached. His birth certificate ------ family tree ------ were returned to him.

The young man hands back No. 397/21 with thanks. Here is no exception, but a common situation that requires printed forms and court orders — one of the matters common to Nazi everyday life. “‘Our son is a serious man and sufficiently mature’ to steal this stupid paper for me,” the girl remarks, and laughs like a child; but the young foreigner does not know what to answer now; he looks away.

WANTED — ENEMIES

The entire existence of the State Youth stands under the sign of battle. A defensive battle; and we must discover, in an honest search, whether there is, somewhere, in some corner, an opponent to meet this challenger.

The life of German youth is filled with hatred. Against whom?

Against the future enemies of the nation — we read that in its songs and plays—against a world of enemies; and, further, against all the weak in Germany, against the conquered. Looking for real enemies, Germany would drag the dead — Rathenau, Eisner, Erzberger — from their graves, again to be murdered, this time more decisively, “legally” at the command of the State!

The institutions which the State Youth does battle against are, as a matter of fact, half-dead, ghostly, with a shadow-life that has just enough reality to constitute a shadow-enemy without which the Nazi, and especially the youth, movement could not exist.

The Jews have a part to play, but there is not much for the State Youth to do there. They are too finished, as a group; there is hardly a twitch of life.

The State Youth knows, as sadistic children know about a caught frog, that you can pull off the frog’s legs, and watch the body try to hop; then stick a pin into the belly, and watch the shocked wrench; and hit its head until it does not move. But pretty soon after that, the frog bores the child, and he turns away to more amusing things. The Jewish enemy is locked out of schools and youth organizations. Forbidden to sleep in inns or swim in lakes, or even play in the playgrounds, he is becoming a little boring.

The Freemason, who was offered to the children as an enemy, was a failure all the way through. They may be as disgusting as “Dr. Freemason” in the play, and of course they’re enemies, but what are they like? “Have you ever seen one?” asks the German child.

The need is for vivid enemies. Above all, it is necessary to keep up the pretense of struggle, an eternal Kampf, with an antagonist who can be identified, recognized face to face, and who can offer the further stimulus of power, or at least the power of resistance. The men controlling the third circle of the German child, from which there is no escape, turn to the other two influences, which, according to them, exist only through their benevolence — the influences which surround the child, and are now to be labeled as enemies — the school and the family.

The school represents an acceptable enemy, a mild, weaponless opponent, without a place to escape to (and by connotation, the church is included here) — an enemy who is still alive and not as dull as the dead.

“Our teacher has a thin, pale nose. The end is flat because at the end of every sentence he strokes it with his right hand. He talks too much. Yesterday he talked about the summer solstice. Like this: ‘On the 21st of June, the sun has reached its apex. Apex means the highest point. Apex means culmination. Culmination is derived from the Latin culminare…. ’ At this moment, Fred who sits beside me, drew his Hitler Boy Quex[a Nazi Youth book] out of his school-bag and started looking for the place he was reading yesterday, while the fellow up in front kept talking about the ‘vocative.’… Fred must have swallowed a fly, for he suddenly began to cough terribly. But it’s just as well, or else I’d have continued thinking for at least another half hour — and it’s never any good to think for more than five minutes on end. Especially not for a boy….”

That is Jungvolk (No. 6, 1934) mocking at school, teachers, the vocative, and all thought, no matter how slight. If this were a private, boy’s magazine, brought out by boys, there would be nothing very objectionable in its tone. But this is official and absolute, edited by the leaders of the State Youth or their subordinates — and its mockery is only a skirmish in Schirach’s war against the school.

In each issue of these periodicals — and they are all official — there are at least two or three contributions with the same derisive aim. One essay is “A Fine Educator!” In the same issue of Jungvolk, the “defensive battle” is, this time, against an obviously well-meaning teacher who submitted a song to the editors.

“There is but one point at which we are sensitive,” the essay irritably begins, “and that is when people mix into our affairs; when they try to palm off their old-fashioned poems on us as though they were timely and up to the minute.”

The little song which is reprinted is hardly to be distinguished from others found in Jungvolk. The entire attitude of resentment can be explained only by this hatred of “people,” and especially teachers, who “mix into” Nazi affairs. The literary level of the publications and of the poetry is hardly one which permits the editors to criticize other authors on literary grounds.

The song is intended as a happy Wanderlied (marching song) and begins in traditional mildness.

Wenn der Kuckkuck lacht in grüner Ferne —

Kuckkuck — Ho-la-h, —

Ach, dann höre ichs lenzfroh gerne—

Kuckkuck, Ho-la-la….

When the cuckoo in the greenwood sings —

Cuckoo — Ho, lala —

I hear the voice of a thousand Springs —

Cuckoo — Ho, lala —

Probably it is the last two stanzas that are referred to as “timely.” They still refer to the cuckoo:

Auch wie Du will ich die Sorgen tragen,

Mahnt die Pflicht, dem Unmut stark entsagen.

Dein “Kuckkuck,” hell und inhaltsschwer,

Beleb mich allemal recht sehr.

Klaren Blickes will ich voll Vertrauen

Aufwärts, vor mich, wie auch um mich schauen,

Als Siegfried steigen mit empor,

Zu öffnen Deutschlands goldnes Tor.

Like you will I the burden bear,

When duty calls, my courage will be there.

Your cry of Cuckoo, beautiful and bright,

Will fortify and set me right.

Clear-eyed and full of trust I see

Ahead, around, and over me —

Like Siegfried, I will rise up straight

To open Germany’s golden gate. ^[2]

The verses are feeble, terribly feeble, and not even blood-thirsty. But look at the response! “The author calls himself a scholar,” continues Jungvolk. “He really should know that the National Socialist youth takes its duties damned seriously and has no need to be reminded of the same by a cuckoo. Our only advice to this sort of ‘educator of youth’ is this: ‘Hands off the leadership of youth!’ ”

That’s how to pick a quarrel! And hope the victim will twitch!

But it will not. School is not a good enemy: it is incapable of resistance, nor is there the chance of instigating a countermovement.

And the Church, the priests, teachers of religion, former leaders of religious unions? What about them?

That’s better, now. There’s resistance, and protest, here.

The struggle has been long, full of secret arrests, persecutions, public calumny, opinions repressed, suppression of organizations and instruments of the Church, and the wholesale incitement of youth away from it. The Apex was the trial of Pastor Niemoeller; and the protest of the army chaplains, because they were part of the army, was of special significance.

“The protest handed to the ‘Führer’ by Protestant military chaplains in November, 1937 [wrote one correspondent], which showed them in the light of true ‘Protestants,’ was an expression of rebellious contradiction. It was imposing in its keen directness and showed more vivid signs of life than the Nazis ever expected from this ‘enemy.’ The chaplains objected to the naming of three enemies of National Socialism and consequently of Germany in Nazi camps. The three main enemies were designated repeatedly as Judaism, Freemasonry and Christianity. Since 1934, some thirteen hundred of the entire eighteen thousand pastors of the Reich had been brought into prison or into concentration camps. One high functionary of the Party, on the occasion of a recent Party meeting in Halle, referred to Jesus Christ as ‘this swine.’ School teachers had repeatedly called Jesus a ‘Jewish tramp’ in the classroom. Young teachers had asked their pastors for help because they had not been permitted to speak of Jesus in the sense of the Holy Scriptures, even when they were supposed to be instructing in religion. The military priests went so far as to express doubt as to the Nazi holy of holies — namely, success in the coming war — in case, of course, that they persisted in their anti-Christian campaign. It was impossible for true Christians to be in that accord, necessary to success, for anyone systematically drilled into referring to Christ as a swine and a tramp. And the whole war propaganda would surely fall on deaf ears, since an essential part of the German people would not believe a word of what was said to them, after this battle with the Church.”

Here is an enemy whose life is left!

One little girl of the village of Niederdondeleben was to be confirmed. Her teacher, the village pastor, wrote the following words into the child’s album:

To the Fatherland, not the Party! Service to the Fatherland makes one great and free; Service to the Party, narrow and small, untruthful and unjust. The Fatherland needs strong characters; the Party fears and hinders them. By so much as the Fatherland means more to you than does the Party, so much more does your compatriot mean to you than a co-member of the Party. In remembrance of Dr. Müller, Pastor, Niederdondeleben.

The Black Corps (organ of the S.S.) in its issue of September 23, 1937, which has “by chance” glanced at the poetry album in question, quotes from it, and remarks: “At the moment, Dr. Müller is under arrest and in training to become a martyr.” It goes on to suggest that fathers look into the albums of their impressionable daughters to see if they cannot find some “snotty pastor’s verses therein!”

This is, again, the first circle, the smallest, and least attacked limit of the family. But parents who, for their part, are under the Hitler Youth, have to obey. Their wishes and justified interests are ignored; and the parents play possum, too, and cannot be called a real enemy.

The New York Times of November 30, 1937 relates a story of Draconic punishment typical of the force with which penalties are given in the Reich. The parents here were members of a society of Bible students in Waldenberg, in Silesia, and were both accused of having infected their children with pacifist ideals and of influencing them against the Nazi regime. The father declared in court that he exercised no influence whatsoever upon his children, and the answer given him was that whether or not his statement was true, the atmosphere in the home of Bible students could not be anything but poisonous for children; no one could live in it without becoming an enemy of the State. The father admitted a previous conviction for having failed to send his children to some National Socialist school festival. He assured the court that the children had not wanted to go. But the court’s opinion was that this in itself showed the harmful effect of the parents’ influence, and handed down the following verdict:

“Law, in the service of racial and national interests, confides the care of the children, only under certain circumstances to the parents-Namely: if the children are brought up as the nation and the State decree. It is above all important to enlighten the children, so that they be aware that they, too, are part of a mighty nation, whose citizens are inseparably bound together by unanimity of opinion in all decisive questions. Anyone who raises children in such views as are likely to place them in opposition to the racial and national popular unity has failed to fulfill the conditions under which the education of his children has been entrusted to him. For reasons of general weal, such people will be forbidden to continue the upbringing of their children. The only chance of rectifying this lies in the complete separation of the children from the parents.”

And so the children were taken from their parents, not for a crime proved or committed or even contemplated, nor for expressed opinions, but solely because the atmosphere of such a home could not bring these children of Bible students up to revere the State. And the one offence, an old and trival one, was raked up to stand against the family.

One thing is clear, from the angle of the men in power: an example had to be made. All parents had to be warned; surely, from now on, everyone who had children would avoid Bible groups and pacifist ideas.

The extremity of these measures indicates the extent of the real fear of the Nazis, who are striking these blind blows, in the dark, against a “hidden” opponent — afraid even of the ruins of institutions they have crushed.

* * *

The Nazis have destroyed or undermined:

1. The family, and the private life of the Germans.

2. The quality that gave the Germans the name of “the nation of poets and philosophers”: their love of truth, science, and all objective thought.

3. The power of the Church in Germany.

They have destroyed everything which for centuries was holy to German citizens.

Adolf Hitler’s regime knows that certain people cannot be other than enemies — family members, professing Catholics and Protestants, men of science, and all other groups alienated by the destruction of their rights and sacred possessions.

The regime knows that its only hope lies in the young, those unaware of denial and destruction, who cannot know the news unless somebody — one of the enemies — informs them.

The regime knows that, attached to their parents, attending school, the children are still open to those suspicious influences. They have religious training. And there is a generation of enemies who still live in the country and who, later, will provide the jobs for these children to step into, and there, perhaps, learn.

The regime, fearful in spite of pomp and celebration, is making preparations.

The Frankfurter Zeitung of June 26, 1937:

“We have recently been informed that an order has been proclaimed by the Reich Minister of Education to the effect that all reports of school graduations or diplomas are to omit any mention of the activity of the pupil in the National Socialist Party and its sub-organizations.”

This proclamation was not to be made public (according to some official correspondence), for it needed a preliminary notice to explain it. Repeatedly, the activities of pupils in organizations had been described as harmful to their academic development, and mention of these were likely to injure their future chances. Rudolf Hess, Representative of the Führer, has compelled the Minister of Education to command that no mention be made of the Party or its organizations — and that, for children of school age, means expressly the Jungvolk and the Hitler Jugend, the Jungmädels and the B.D.M. The secret order, published by mistake, overreaches itself. Wouldn’t it have been enough to issue an edict forbidding unfavorable notices (suicidal to the teachers who wrote them, considering the status of the schools)? But no notice at all! There is a good reason for it. Usually, the school rating of children stands in inverse proportion to their activity in the State Youth, because of the time the organization work requires and the emphasis it puts. And if a business man finds a boy with a good organization record and good marks, he will not believe the good marks; or he will prefer not to have an obvious government agent, perhaps even a government spy, working for him. And the boy himself, turned down at every job, will consider his report with its seductively high marks, and blame his failure on the notice that he was Gefolgschaftsführer. How many of these cases must have added up before the edict was issued, behind Herr von Schirach’s back! And how it must have confused the children, to have their proudest title, this rank that ornaments their position in the State, commanded secretly to be kept a secret!

These are policies dictated by a bad conscience, directed now, not against a world of enemies, but against the most promising members of the new State in a commonwealth of people whose boast is of complete unity.

That’s how things are. Hitler’s regime says: We have enemies in Germany, many of them, and we can only pray to Wotan that, as in the past, they will fear us more than we fear them. But we have youth on our side. That makes us strong. Also, we have the guns.

They have the guns and that makes them strong. But the youth? There are proofs to the contrary. In this force of millions, who are supposed to be truly and irrevocably Nazi, the young men, the university men, are the first to show disappointment and disgust. They protest by leaving empty benches before Storm Leaders disguised as professors and by crowding the halls for those few who have a little knowledge of the extra-Nazi world. And these men were, yesterday, the State Youth.

There are other signs. Voices find the outside world. They are voices of young workers, students, men of deep religious convictions, and their expressions are of wrath and hope. Here is the spectacle of a country — uneducated politically, seduced by romantic nationalism and a charlatan who said he was a savior — whose moral and spiritual resources as a country are now forced underground. The forces still live. In the past, they nourished all the greatness of Germany. They survive; they cannot be withheld from the soul of a people; in the end, they are the highest concepts of human life, and they triumph, they emerge in the end.

EPILOGUE

I N NEW YORK, I LIVE IN a small hotel on the East Side. It is a pleasant hotel; the management advertises it as “continental.” But I like it for its American details — closets and showers — no luxury in this country, of course, but I cannot help being pleased by them.

I have bought a tremendous quantity of cookies, candy, and some small white dice called marshmallows — sweet, tough, as elastic as rubber, and a little like Turkish delight. I tried one, and nothing could induce me to go on. But I bought the candy against the visit I am expecting, not for myself. There are going to be two guests to eat these cookies and candy: two boys who go to school in Connecticut and are spending this week-end with an aunt in New York. They are seven and eight years old, and came over alone from Germany eight weeks ago.

I saw the smaller one when he was two, in Germany; all I know about him is that he is called Till and that his mother worships him. The larger boy was good-looking and robust, a dark boy named René after a French uncle. Their mother was French, before she married a German lawyer, and both parents (who had been divorced before, around a lot, and had wide knowledge of the world) were deeply disturbed about their sons’ future. The mother said to me as I left Germany, “I wish you could take us with you — or, at least, take the boy!”

And now the boys are here. Their parents separated voluntarily from them, and at enormous sacrifice fought with the Nazi authorities for permission to send their sons to America. “It couldn’t go on any longer,” my last letter from their mother said, “it couldn’t be looked at…. Look after the kids a little — ah, Till is still so small! And let René tell you stories, he’s bright and very grown-up for his age.”

Will he like marshmallows?

The telephone rings, and a small voice asks, in English, “Can we come up?” That must be Till; and I answer in German, “Yes, of course, come up!”

The first one must be René; then, unrecognizable, little Till; and, behind him, a third boy comes forward slowly. His bare head is covered with dark curls; deep blue eyes watch from his face that is tender and sensitive, although his brown skin and his healthy appearance are not delicate; he is broad-shouldered although of course a little thin, and holds himself a little in restraint. As I look at him, Till holds out his hand, and I realize that the boy I thought was René is not he at all, but a friend of theirs. He is American, and is wearing a kind of scout’s uniform; he turns his cap in his hands — the scratched hands of the sort of boy who plays Indian; he looks like a child Lindbergh. Till is tiny for a seven-year-old; he might be five, except for the shrewdness of his look. His hair is smooth and silky, and hangs halfway over his ears in a pageboy cut. Under his bangs, his tilted, bright eyes give his face a Slavic touch, and with his broad cheekbones and wide, finely-cut mouth, he might be Russian or even Finnish — and he is the son of a North German and a Frenchwoman. He is the man of the world among us, and introduces the little American to me. “This is Bruce Findley,” he tells me, glancing at him admiringly, “and this,” he says to Bruce, “is the lady who (in English), as we hoped, is going to take us to the movies tonight.” Bruce nudges him and they look around at René, who has been wandering around the room, and has stopped in front of my desk. He is staring at the portrait of his mother, very like him except for the brown eyes, and without taking his eyes away from it, he says, “When it hooted, everyone had to get off the boat. Mother stood below in the crowd, and I hid behind a post. But we didn’t sail for a long time.” His voice is husky; this is the first time I have heard it. “I waved,” interrupts Till, “ I didn’t cry….” He has discovered the marshmallows. “Sailings are always sad,” I say to René, with my hand on his shoulder. “Here, let’s have some chocolate.” Bruce is showing his consent. He nods and rattles off, “ Schnitzelbank, Grüss Gott, Heidelberg, gemütlich, auf Wiedersehen! ”

‘That’s his German,” Till explains. “He can say five things.”

Till and Bruce concentrate on the candy while I make hot chocolate. René is looking around the room. “Nothing but American books?” he asks. “Don’t you read German books any more?”

I tell him how much I like to read German, but that it is very important for me to get to know American books now. Till agrees, with his mouth full, “I only read American books!” he says.

René laughs. “And he can’t speak German any longer!” he exclaims, with a curious mixture of contempt and envy. “Imagine forgetting so fast!”

But Till will not let that go by; he comes back defensively, “René drags his Hitler dagger around with him,” he accuses, “and he’s got his armband on, someplace, too!”

I look across at René’s lowered head. “Why do you do that?” I ask him. “Did you like the Jungvolk so much?” He shakes his head, very hard.

“Oh, it’s not his dagger,” Bruce cuts in, explaining for him, and trying to shut Till up. “It’s Gert-Felix’s dagger, and armband, too.”

“Yes.” René looks up. “And Gert-Felix was my friend.”

Till’s mouth is still full. “But he’s dead!”

“Yes,” René repeats, “he’s dead. The doctor said he must have died a minute or two after the shot.” I begin to remember a story of their mother’s about an accident during night practice. “It was really almost murder,” René is going on, “no matter what the paper said.” Bruce’s arm is around his shoulder; it is hard to believe that the little boy with his toughness and his scratches can be so solicitous. “Everyone was supposed to bring rifles or pistols,” René says, “but Gert didn’t have any, and neither did I, so we brought flashlights, they were next best. Our leader was practicing aiming in the dark. We would hold up the flashlights and he would try to hit them. He was a fine shot, and it went very well at first. Then he went off his aim, and hit August in the knee. August didn’t cry when he fell down; it was probably just a nick. We tied it up with our armbands.”

“What did the leader say?” I asked. Bruce was listening to the German version of a story he must have known by heart in English as if it were a Wild West adventure.

“Oh, he swore, of course. August was holding his light too low, anyhow. Then it was Gert’s turn. He was good and afraid, and held his light as high as he could. The leader was a little afraid, too, I guess. He shot to the left, and that was where Gert’s forehead was. The light didn’t go out. Gert didn’t move at all. But the sound was different, as if it had hit a tree. Gert started to sway a little.”

Till goes on with the story as though it were his turn. “Then he fell over,” he recites. “First they put handkerchiefs on the wound, and when they were all covered with blood, they tried sticking moss in. He didn’t speak or groan again; the army surgeon said that was a good sign.”

“You weren’t there.” René speaks as if anybody who had not seen it knows nothing at all about life, and ought never to open his mouth again. “It was a very small hole,” he says, “and there was hardly any blood, just a little at the eye. We didn’t think it was anything. But Gert was dead by that time.”

“And guess what happened to that leader!” Bruce challenges me. “He was just transferred to another group! And what do you suppose they did to Gert’s father? They locked him up, because he complained, they stuck him in one of those concentration camps!”

“The papers said it was an accident: ‘Our dear son met with an accident in the service of our fatherland.’ ” He puts the rusted knife on the table. We all look at it, at the white strip of cloth on the handle, with its red swastika.

“D’you keep that because it’s Hitler’s junk?” Till asks, with his sideward look.

“Because it’s my friend’s; and I’m going to keep it forever.” Till is satisfied with that; he puts the last marshmallow slowly into his mouth.

The skyscrapers stand against a tall, pale sky. I want them to think of something else, and I propose the movies. Snow White is around the corner. “It’s a German story,” I tell René, trying to answer his reproach about German books, “and you can see how American it is now.” But Bruce has seen it already; and Till is occupied, twirling the globe, tracing frontiers with his finger. “France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria,” he spells out.

“Austria,” repeats René. “You’ll have to buy a new one.”

“United States of America,” Till reads.

“Want to be Americans?” asks Bruce. Till travels around Mexico with his finger.

“Well, yes, I’d like to,” René answers, “but I can’t quite imagine it. After all, I’m still German — I suppose.”

Till pushes across the South Seas. “Sure I’m going to be an American!” Bruce welcomes him with a charming little bow and a smile of extraordinary nobility, as if he had the power to give citizenship. “We’ll be glad to have you!” he says.

“What do you mean, we?” René asks, leaning on the window sill next to Bruce, half a head taller than the American boy, but slighter and less firm. “Who’s we? ”

“We Americans,” he says. “We, the people.”

“What about your government?”

“The government does what we want,” says Bruce. “If it doesn’t, out it goes!”

Till is delighted. But René looks a little startled at all this audacity. Bruce is going on, enjoying himself, declaiming:

“…Our government is here to serve us. We chose it ourselves, and we obey it because we think it’s right, and not because we’re afraid. It’s there to make us a happy, rich, and peaceful people. We don’t want anyone to attack us, but we don’t want war. And we won’t stand for injustice anywhere—” he checks himself, embarrassed, and modifies, “that is, too much injustice. So if I shoot you I get punished; but I couldn’t, anyhow, because there’s no night practice, and there aren’t any leaders, and besides I haven’t got a rifle.” René doesn’t smile. He accepts the assurance.

We’ll send “the family” a line before the boys leave. “ You write,” I tell them. My long, detailed report will be made later. Till writes in English, drawing in a confused mixture of German letters and the Latin ones he is learning here. When he finishes with “Much love, from your dear son, Till,” René sits down, and fifteen minutes of phonograph-playing passes. We listen to the records while he writes, and at last I read;

“Dearest Mama, “Today was a fine day, I think I’ll get used to it here, but please come whenever you can. Everything here is very different, I can’t explain just how. We are learning a lot, not so much about world theory and less about war. I like school pretty well. I’m practically never afraid any more. I have a friend, that’s why I have to learn English fast now. It is dark outside already, you can see stars over the skyscrapers, but they are a little pale. Please come soon, “to your son “René”

There is a sudden scene before Bruce has his turn. The armband has been lying beside the dagger on the table, and the American has put it on. He throws his arm up. “Heil Hitler!” he cries, at attention.

René goes dark, then very pale. “Stop it!” he shouts. “Take it off, please, Bruce, take that off!”

Bruce rips it off without a word, and sits down at the desk. René is apologizing for his violence. “I don’t know why, but I can’t look at it,” he says, asking forgiveness. “It looked like Gert, and suddenly that night practice, and the cry Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler! ” He is terribly pale; he trembles, terribly. “I won’t see another, I don’t want to see another swastika!” With a sharp movement, he reaches for the armband and tears it to shreds. For a moment, there is nothing but the sound of ripping.

“Now, now,” I say, from across the room, “really!”

But Till is at his side, and sweeping the bits happily into the waste-paper basket. Bruce goes back to his writing. Crossing to the desk, René, quieted, lays the dagger before him on the sheets of the finished letter. “Here, it’s yours!” he says gently.

Bruce looks at it without saying thank you; he looks at the knife as if it were extraordinarily beautiful, a delicate, rare, fragile thing.

“I know,” Till laughs, and says in his little chirping voice, with its high child’s twitter, “I know what you’re writing! Schnitzelbank, Heidelberg, auf Wiedersehen! ”

But Bruce is finished. Close to the curlicues of René’s childish signature, his name stands, and below it, in brackets, to explain to the mother who is so far away and waiting for the letter, and who cannot know what “Bruce” means: “René’s American friend, forever.”