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.