After a meeting of the Racial Office of the Party, Dr. Bernhard Rust issued an edict, which may be summarized:
Racial Instruction is to be given in all classes. (Appropriate conclusions are to be drawn from Racial Instruction in all branches of public and private life.) The spirit of National Socialism must hold first place throughout the course. It must be enforced in order to:
1. Give pupils an insight into the relationship, causes and effects of all basic facts having to do with the science of heredity and race.
2. Impress the pupils with the importance of the science of heredity and race for the future of the nation and the purposes of the government.
3. Awaken in the pupils a sense of responsibility toward the nation, as represented by both its ancestry and its posterity; imbue the pupils with pride in the fact that the German people are the most important exponent of the Nordic race, and to influence them in favor of complete Aufnordung (Nordification) of the German people.
This is to be accomplished early enough so that no child shall leave school without a conviction of the necessity of pure blood.
The German schools consider no method that may carry out this wish of the Führer too superstitious, too brutal or clumsy.
“A child is likely to have keen vision,” the periodical N. S. Bildungswesen, in an essay on “Illustrations and Pictures for Use in Racial Instruction,” says. “It will therefore be easiest to bring the unity of the German people into his consciousness if we show him, on the one hand, pictures of racially gifted beings similar in type and, on the other, different types racially foreign to it and of varying qualities. In the matter of the Jews, such types are to be chosen which, to our way of feeling, clearly have the most unpleasant characteristics — not such representatives as have already attained a certain external similarity to the people offering them hospitality ( Wirtsvolk )…. And, not the least, emphasis must be placed on the fact that mental inferiority and confusion show in the face. The Jewish-Bolshevistic politicians and criminals offer particularly varied and extraordinarily informative material.”
Another specialist in the field, Professor Ernst Dobers of the High School for the Instruction of Teachers in Elbing, writes in his book The Jewish Question — Material and its Treatment in Schools:
“How do we wish our people to look? We place two groups of pictures side by side: on the one hand, Nordically classified bodies and faces, sportsman types, Olympic athletes, soldiers, typical officers, leaders; on the other hand, we present a group of Jews, whether these are ordinary contemporaries or the ‘great’ of Judah, such as the majority of Bolshevist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg, Hilferding, Eisner, Theodor Lessing, Gumbel, Stampfer, Rathenau, Theodor Wolff, Georg Bernhard, Hirschfeld, Kestenberg, or whatever their names may be. It will naturally result that the children will feel kinship with the one side, and, quite naively, passionate rejection on the other; that is a matter of course. It is then the object of the spoken pedagogical word constantly to strengthen and to build up with knowledge and perception this consciousness of the German child’s old nature and the complete foreignness of the other.”
It is conspicuous that we are given no example of the “Olympic athletes” or “typical officers.” Possibly Professor Dobers fails to consider Goebbels a “Nordically classified body.” Possibly he remembers that the Jewish heavyweight boxer, Max Baer, defeated the “Aryan” Schmeling (and, since then, the Negro, Joe Louis, has beaten him in record time), and that there were quite a number of Jewish winners in the Olympic games. “The ‘great’ of Judah,” however, are specified; and it is typical of the lack of education of Nazi educators that they list capitalist bankers, editors of bourgeois newspapers and liberal scientists all as “Bolshevist leaders.” Rosa Luxemburg is the only Communist on the list, although she shares the fate of murder by the Nazi with Kurt Eisner, Theodor Lessing and Walther Rathenau.
Lack of education, deliberate falsification. This pair of Nazi qualities is evident in teaching everywhere — in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, notorious lies, which are recommended for use in the schools, and in such books as Herrmann Gauch’s New Elements of Racial Instruction, the standard work of this new “science,” which states baldly:
“We can advance the assertion” (after a detailed description of the Nordic and non-Nordic human being) “at the base of all Racial Science; there is no concept of ‘human being’ (‘man’) in contradistinction to animals separated by any physical or mental trait; the only existing differentiation is between Nordic man, on the one hand, and animals as a whole, including all non-Nordic human beings, or sub-men, who are transitional forms of development.”
Herrmann Gauch and his theory are no exception. They are representative— all of these statements are tragically typical — of the material fed the Nazi child. And when he continues: “…It has, however, not been proved that the non-Nordic man cannot be mated with apes…” he is repeating the deep conviction of his Führer. For it was Hitler who said: “A popular state will… in the first place, bring marriage out of its place as a permanent racial dishonor and give it the sacredness of that institution whose mission it is to create images of the Lord and not monsters between man and ape.”
A more cautious textbook, The A B C of Race (warmly recommended “for general use” by the Munich School of Racial Politics), portrays a big-nosed Jew, but protects itself this way: “Of course we must not confuse a purely external expression with Race. Race means Soul. And there are men who do, as a matter of fact, show some Nordic traits, but they are Jews in spirit.”
The ABC outlines Germany’s four great problems:
1. Germany has too little territory, because of the loss of her colonies.
2. One-third of her population lives in exile (the 35,000,000 Austrians,[1] Czechs, Swiss, Dutch, Danes, Alsatians, and Americans, who belong by blood and language to the “Greater Germany”).
3. The menace of the Jews (“a mixture of Asiatic and Negro blood, with a tiny amount of European blood”).
4. The falling birth-rate.
“A nation without territory in time becomes a nation without people…. If, however, we all fight together under our mighty-National Socialist leadership and under the protection of the new racial laws, then the glorious Nordic future of Germany is assured. Did not the Führer himself prophesy: ‘A nation that fosters only its best stock in a racially degenerate age must become master of the world’?”
A marching song has recently been produced for children, that describes how the world will look when the Germans conquer it:
Und liegt auch von Kampf in Trümmern die ganze Welt zu Hauf,
Das soll uns den Teufel nicht kümmern, wir pfeifen drauf.
Wir werden weiter marschieren, wenn alles in Scherben fällt,
Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt.
Though the whole world lie ruined around us after the day of war,
What the devil do we care — we don’t give a hoot any more,
We will go marching forward, though everything fall away,
For the world will be ours tomorrow, as Germany is today.
It is necessary for Germany to hate, passionately and ceaselessly, everything that stands in the way of world mastery. Even the innocent concepts of “Reason,” “Piety,” and “Love of Peace,” threaten it. Hatred is nurtured; and it is easier to hate a man than an idea; people you see in the flesh, than people far away; a relatively small number than a greater group. Hatred for the Jews, then, seems the best and most “productive.” Fuel of all sorts is therefore added: calumny, pseudo-science, and pornography.
One of the oldest and most intimate friends of the Führer is Julius Streicher, Gau Leader of Franconia and editor and publisher of the weekly, Der Stürmer. Although Streicher has had bitter enemies in the Party ranks, Hitler remains with him, because he regards him as a good hater. He values the smut of Streicher as a weapon in the Nazi struggle, and approves its use in teaching. Distinguished foreigners, traveling through Germany, are always assured that no sensible person ever reads the Stürmer, that Streicher himself has “good intentions,” although “sometimes he goes too far in his eagerness” — another fact to be disparaged for the outer world. As a matter of fact, the Stürmer, which writes almost exclusively about sexual outrages, bedroom gossip, and scandal, is read in the schools to children between six and fourteen; its denunciations are themes for their homework, and their “education” is based on its improprieties.
The principal of the Overbeckstrasse School in Cologne, Max Burkert, writes: “From your glorious fighting magazine, the Stürmer, I have cut the photos of a number of Jews who once were permitted to rule Germany, and have mounted them, as the accompanying photograph will show. Armed with this illustration, I lecture on the Jewish question in all the upper classes of my school…. How deeply-rooted your idea already is can be seen from the following story of an experience I had with a nine-year-old pupil. He came to school one day and said to me: ‘Sir, yesterday I went for a walk with my mother. Suddenly, as we passed the Kaufhof (a Jewish store), my mother happened to remember that she badly needed a few balls of twine. She wanted to give me some money to go into the shop and buy the twine for her. Whereupon I said to my mother, “I will not go in there. You will have to do that yourself. But I promise you that, if you do go into that shop, I’ll tell my teacher tomorrow. He will order you to come to school, and then you’ll see what happens.” ’
“If the accompanying picture pleases you, my children will be very glad, especially if you publish it in the Stürmer. I am convinced that such pictures can only set a good example.
“Wishing you nerves of steel in the furious battle, I am with best greetings and
“Heil Hitler, “Max Burkert, “Principal.”
Each week the Stürmer publishes similar letters to the editor, abundant evidence of its wide circulation in the sanctuaries of education. Erna Listing, who lives in Gelsenkirchen, writes:
“Dear Stürmer!
“Gau Leader Streicher has told us so much about the Jews that we hate them quite thoroughly. In school we wrote a composition under the title ‘The Jews are our Misfortune.’ I should like to see my composition in print.
“The Jews Are Our Misfortune
“Regrettably, there are still many people today who say: Even the Jews are creatures of God. Therefore you must respect them. But we say: Vermin are animals too, but we exterminate them just the same. The Jew is a mongrel. He has hereditary tendencies from Aryans, Asiatics, Negroes, and from the Mongolians. Evil always preponderates in the case of a mongrel. The only good thing the Jew has is his white color…. Jesus once said to the Jews, ‘Your father is not God but the Devil.’ The Jews have a wicked book of law. That is the Talmud. Furthermore, the Jews see the animal in us and treat us accordingly. They take away our property and our money with great cunning. In Gelsenkirchen, the Jew Grünberg sold us offal. They are allowed to do this, according to their book of law. The Jews instigated uprisings and urged us into War. They led Russia into misery. In Germany they gave the K.P.D. (Communist Party of Germany) money and paid all the murderers. We were standing at the edge of our grave. Then Adolf Hitler came. Now the Jews are in foreign countries and instigate everyone against us. But we are not to be led astray: we follow the Führer. We buy nothing from Jews. Every penny we give them kills one of our people.
“Heil Hitler!”
And, in a postscript, the Stürmer: “Like us, all readers of the Stürmer will rejoice at what Erna has to say in her school composition. The Stürmer has given Erna a little Christmas present.” For her “deeply Christian” composition!
Another child, nine-year-old Helga Gerbing, sends a letter dated Lenzing 29 (no one outside of Germany knows what the Nazi word for the month of May means, except that “Lenz” is a medieval word for spring). Helga encloses a composition, in the name of the Fourth Grade for girls, entitled The Cuckoo and the Jew.
“The cuckoo is the Jew among birds; for it is very like him in appearance and also in what it does. Its hooked beak reminds one of the hooked nose of the Jew. Its feet are small and weak, which is why it cannot walk easily on the ground.” (Note: As we know, the German eagle has an Aryan nose and marches like a champion!) “The same is true of the Jew, who also does not have a beautiful manner of walking. When this bird calls ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’ It makes the same gesture as the Jewish merchant trying to show his politeness, so that the German shall buy from him. Both these Jews, the bird as well as the human one, are parasites, that is, they both desire to become rich and fat at the expense of others…. But we human beings are not so stupid as the birds. We won’t stand for this and we are expelling the impertinent ‘cuckoo’ from our country. We children in Roth help as much as we can toward this end. A number of our class often keep standing by the Baer warehouse; then when buyers wish to enter, the children call: ‘Aren’t you ashamed to buy from a Jew? Yah!’ and then the woman gets red in the face and goes away again.
“Heil Hitler!”
“Well, Stürmer, that pleases you, doesn’t it?” Helga adds. And it does. “Like teacher, like pupil,” the paper comments. “If little Helga of the Fourth Class for Girls, in Roth near Nuremberg, writes such excellent compositions, then we have her teacher, Hilde Palmedo, to thank, because she knows how to educate the young in the spirit of these new times.”
And we must be grateful to countless teachers that the Stürmer can publish, again and again, classroom photographs that show copies of the paper hanging on the wall — complete unexpurgated editions, including outrages and bedroom scandals, listing the names of those who have “trespassed,” and those who have been “seduced,” and are to be spat upon. The Stürmer prints letters from teachers asking their colleagues to use it along with the textbooks, and naive letters from children which prove the success of this pedagogic instrument. And for those children whose teachers have the conspicuous courage to keep the Stürmer out of the classroom, there are the newsstands where the Stürmer is displayed at every other corner in every German town.
The front page of the New York Times guarantees daily “all the news that’s fit to print.” We might have promised that for this book; but the pornography of the Stürmer is not printable. It must suffice to mention its existence and importance, and, most significant of all, to demonstrate its use as a text in the German schools “for the better development of racial knowledge in primary near-to-life instruction,” in the language of New Germany.