The school bases its power on endless, hypnotizing propaganda, and the radio and movies are in the service of the same machine. The voices of the teachers are relieved by the School Radio, with its themes: “Germany, Land of Beauty,” “A People Without Territory,” “The Art of a People Grows From Its Soil,” “The German Spirit of Unity and Will to Sacrifice,” “The Miracle of Faith That Saved Germany,” “Party Day in Nuremberg,” “The Reich, the German Idea of a State,” “Unity of Blood in the German People,” “Keeping Watch Over Germany” — nine of the themes issued for the school year 1937-38 by the Leipzig Reich Radio (with the Reich Administration of the N.S.L.B. and the Reich Radio Administration). The tenth theme is “Life Is Work — Work Is Happiness.”
But the work of the children is a tragedy for their minds and spirits — a threatening tragedy that darkens the future.
The schools, with their rules and formulas, their new texts and missions, are the shell. The lives of the pupils are in reality the school. At present, in 1938, the pupils are almost exclusively “Aryan.” Enrollment of new “non-Aryans” is an impossibility; and a little ghetto of Jewish schools has sprung into being for new pupils, while the Jewish children already in Nazi schools are permitted to remain in a life of humiliating torture and painful isolation.
Dr. Rust declared on Party Day in 1937: “The establishment of a National Socialist school community, based on the foundation of the educational ideas derived from the concept of German nationhood, is possible only if a clear-cut division in accordance with the racial origin of the children is brought about. I, therefore, intend to carry out this complete division in accordance with the racial origin of the children for all pupils in all types of schools in Germany. The so-called ‘quarter-Jews,’ who have only one Jewish grandparent, will not be included in the separate schools. A separate Jewish elementary school is to be established wherever a sufficient number of Jewish children are to be found in one community or within the area of one urban or rural educational district. It will be necessary, in this case, to put children of different school ages in one classroom, because, for the establishment of these separate Jewish schools, twenty schoolchildren are to be considered as a sufficient number.”
The Nazis, of course, place no funds whatever at the disposal of such schools, and it is often as a result of this lack of money that “children of foreign blood” are subjected to the martyrdom of Nazi instruction. In the Nazi schools, they are used to the same end as everything else. They are living examples in “Racial Science.” The Jewish child is called forward by the teacher; she stands on the platform, defenseless and trembling before her schoolmates (who are not allowed to be her playmates) while the teacher demonstrates the “distinctive marks of the Jewish race.” “What do you see in this face?” the pupils are asked; and, whatever the face shows, the children answer what they have learned from the Stürmer: “A gigantic nose, negroid lips, inferior frizzy hair.” And the tears in those dark eyes, the scarred spirit! —the scar that can never be explained or atoned for! “What else do you see?” asks the teacher; and when the pupils are silent, feeling that there is a boundary to cruelty, the teacher adds at last: “You see, besides, a cowardly and disloyal facial expression.”
“Aryan” pupils learn from living examples, and are taught not only “racial characteristics” but how to treat these types.
The great Italian man of letters and statesman, Count Carlo Sforza, tells this story in a Swiss newspaper:
“A cousin of mine spent last summer at a castle near Wurttemberg, and since she is a member of the nobility and was a guest, she was above suspicion; she was able to visit the schools that interested her. This is what she saw: During the morning recess, all the children lined up at the door of the canteen for a cup of milk and a piece of bread. Whenever a little Jewish girl reached her turn, the teacher in charge held up the cup, and cried: ‘Run along, Jewess! Next, please!’ And this was repeated daily. The little Jewish children were never spared the necessity of standing in line and reaching for the cup they were never given. The Christian children had to witness this scene daily, to learn how to treat a hungry Jewish child.”
The mark of this treatment on the lives of the Jewish children is frightful, of course; but the results are terrible also for the “German,” the “Aryan” children — for while the Jews are only tortured, they are corrupted, deeply corrupted. Some of the strongest of the “non-Aryans” may come through, and leave childhood with toughened nerves. But the “Aryans” are in peril, for their sense of justice and humanity is being stolen from them. And unless they meet other influences, they will lose all sense of truth — the sense which balances us and allows us to walk through the world.
* * *
If we have focused our attention on the education of boys, it is because of the secondary and minor role of girls in Hitlerland. “In the case of female education,” Hitler says in Mein Kampf (p. 169), “the main stress should be laid on bodily training, and after that on development of character, and, last of all, of the intellect. But the one absolute aim of female education must be with a view to the future mother.”
The sequence is applied to boys, too; but they are permitted the sciences, as far as they lead to war; the girls are refused even these. They are to become mothers, and nothing else.
“For, in the last analysis,” Gauleiterin Dr. Tschernig writes in the German Educator for June 5, 1937, “the concept of National Socialism is synonymous with motherhood. Motherhood, however, is nothing sentimental, nothing soft. Motherhood is something hard as steel. The National Socialist woman is mütterlich und wehrhaft” (ready to bear arms and children)…. “There are women who are already realizing this weapon-bearing motherliness in their lives. But by far the greater number has not yet found its way through to this. It is a question for us educators whether such women are going to live in Germany.”
Will Germany be populated by men who know nothing but war, and by steel women who can do nothing but bring new warriors into the world? What will you be like, you little German girls — you minor characters, admiring uniforms, putting your dolls in uniform, ignored, neglected? What will you be like? Will it be your voice that protests? Will you be far enough outside the struggle, ignored enough, to realize what it is to be wehrhaft in the service of tyrants?
The Nazi leaders have not finished with their alterations of the German methods of education. But their vague fear, that the high schools and universities may still produce ghosts of what the Nazis are working to destroy, is causing the creation of a new type of school, a new “course of training” for the “elite of the German people.”
Dr. Georg Mollowitz writes, in the National Socialist Educator: “The enemy still believes that he has one last possibility of influence, namely, in the domain of the spirit. For here National Socialism has not yet officially sounded its call to arms. Here the old Liberal spirit still continues to spread its influence. And our opponents attempt to keep this condition alive by all possible means, indeed to proclaim it necessary; they say that matters of the spirit, sciences, are in their very essence ‘unpolitical’ and must be handled in an ‘objective’ manner; that they stand on a superior level, above the ‘merely political,’ economic social, etc., matters of everyday life…. And so there are still those who hope by this circuitous route to influence the mighty change that has taken place in Germany…. But that is a mistaken idea. True, National Socialism has not yet given the signal for attack on this plane. But the first battlers have for a long time been ready for such a call, and the General Staff is working feverishly; as a matter of fact, all that is wanting is the signal, and then here too, as with other undertakings of National Socialism, there will be the usual thorough radical purge, and the establishment of a new order. May our opponents hear this warning: here, too, they stand on territory that is already absolutely lost for them!”
Dr. Mollowitz may well know that his prophecies will come true, for they are founded on an edict “On the Unification of the Higher Institutes of Learning,” of March 20, 1937. The edict is crammed with “transitional measures” of secondary importance, all with the object of eradicating the humanistic ideal of education. But the edict also determines, in a passing phrase, that the Gymnasien (approximating the American high school and two first years of college) “may remain as subordinate units of the general school plan… ”
What, then, is the school structure to be? Where will the elite get their education? Hitler outlined it, concisely enough, on January 18, 1937: “Following a report by the Reich Organization Director of the National Socialist Party and the Youth Leader of the German Reich, I approve that the National Socialist Schools under construction, which are also to be preparatory schools for National Socialist Order Castles, shall bear my name.”
The edict was complemented by a statement by Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, and another by Dr. Robert Ley, Leader of the Workers’ Front, both of which announced that boys who have made their mark either in the Jungvolk or in the Hitler Youth will be enrolled, beginning at twelve, in one of the “Adolf-Hitler Schools.” After six years, they must fulfill their “Voluntary Labor Service” and then serve in the army. Immediately after that, the best of them — and we know what the word means among the Nazis —enter a National Socialist Order Castle.
The Order Castles of the Middle Ages are the spiritual parents of the new schools; and the characteristic atavism is openly admitted here. “Knights of an Order” were pious, it is true, in principle, although their customs were brutal and they lived for war. Their piety was what set them apart in their Castles; everything else, brutality and lack of culture, ran parallel to their century. But today, the “Junkers” — they are called “Junkers,” of course — live in castles expropriated from their owners; they do not steal, of course, like the “Robber Barons” — they make “changes” and “new creations.” Their “Order” is National Socialism, and their “Order Castles,” beautifully situated in the mountains and forest country, were “changed” by the State which now supplies them with funds. The pupils pay tuition in proportion to their parents’ incomes; and even the poorest of them enjoys “Junkers’” privileges. Hitler has decreed that no social shortcomings are to stand in the way of a leader, whose qualifications depend on other virtues.
There is no lack of weapons or equipment. “Schulpforta,” one of the most respectable seats of learning in Germany, famous for four hundred years for its strictness and discipline in educating young men to the highest type of spiritual responsibility, has been altered and “newly created.” Ownership was transferred, teachers dismissed, pupils forced to leave; and in moved an army of “the very best prospective National Socialist Führers.” This army was supplied with uniforms at the expense of the State; and we cannot help suspecting that General Goering himself had a hand in the matter, for each boy has to possess at least nine uniforms. To every pair of boys is given a motorcycle, and the older ones even have automobiles. There are twelve National Socialist Order Castles in Germany now, but of course this is only the beginning.
J. W. Tate writes in the London Morning Post: “Life in these schools is characterized by a strongly marked political motif and an extensive use of military forms. There is a special uniform, the various schools being distinguished only by the color of the shoulder-strap. This uniform, worn by boys over fifteen — and by their teachers — consists of a peaked khaki cap, tunic, and breeches, with field boots and a side-arm. The younger boys wear open khaki shirts, shorts, and a forage cap.
“School work, including gymnastics, is confined to the morning, and, except for an hour-and-a-half’s preparation, the afternoon and evening are devoted to a fixed program of sport, in which swimming, boxing, shooting, and handball are the chief items, with instruction in riding, motorcycling and driving for the senior boys. Important competitive games are few and far between, and everything is carried out with a view to producing the physically efficient National Socialist.
“Marching is not merely a means of moving boys from one activity to another, but is one of the school games. At least twice a week, a period is allotted for Geländesport. This ‘game’ perhaps had its origin in the efforts of patriots to keep up some form of military training during the period of complete disarmament under the Treaty of Versailles. It might be described in army phraseology as ‘tactical exercises without arms.’
“One Zug after another marches out into the country…”
“Two or three times a year, there are ‘maneuvers’ lasting about a week, when the school marches from place to place (the senior boys sometimes cover well over twenty miles a day), and set up their tents from tent sheets carried by each boy. A lorry and field kitchens accompany them. In September of last year, all the twelve schools were engaged together in operations for the first time….”
We cannot inquire how far the parents of the “Junkers” are in accord with their education; for the boys, too, are “expropriated,” and the parents have no chance to object, or to show anything but silent acquiescence.
Reports of protests about the schools have found their way into the outer world from various districts of Germany, and especially from the Catholic districts. The population has been aroused again and again when the Nazis have removed the crucifixes from the religious schools to replace them with photographs of Hitler and with the swastika. In the Bishopric of Minister, there was a historic peasant demonstration, terrifying in its complete monotony and insistence. No one spoke for hours, there was no shouting of slogans during this demonstration; there was nothing but the continual murmur of one word coming from all the people gathered. The crowd stood there, murmuring the word: “Crosses, crosses, crosses…” without interruption, for hours, “…crosses, crosses…” In this single instance, the Nazis surrendered. They returned the crosses to the diocese. In almost every other place, they were victorious, for almost nowhere else did they meet with opposition.
* * *
The German schools, then, highly respected throughout the world, until 1933, for their thoroughness, their responsibility, and their progressiveness — the schools that held so much hope for the future cannot now be compared with any other educational institutions. Graduates of Gymnasien used to receive an education which brought them to the level of the sophomore or junior year of an American college; today they are beneath the intellectual standard of the young Americans who have just passed College Entrance Examinations. Graduates of French Lycées or Swiss Grammar Schools are justified in their contempt for German students who can do nothing but march.
The astonishing thing now is that there are occasional deploring voices, no matter how careful and ambiguous. A Studienrat named Nasshofen openly expresses his disillusion in the N. S. Educator: “It is a matter for deep regret that the school material, especially in graduate and high school work… in no wise coincides with the demands made upon the education received by those open to future choice as Führers. In the interest of our people, this must not continue…. In many cases, no one dares to proceed with the necessary energy and to draw the obvious conclusions.”
We know why no one dares; any bad pupil reprimanded by a conscientious teacher might denounce him for some fantastic crime, merely for “injuring the National Socialist spirit,” or, indeed, for belittling the Führer. No one dares, because the risk is loss of livelihood and even of life.
“Let us have the courage,” the Studienrat demands, in a manner that can only be described as foolhardy, “to go ahead and dismiss a number of ‘definitely inept’ pupils!”
Before the Nazi regime, we could not have pictured a school that simply did not dare to require a scholastic standard from its pupils, and that did not have the courage to dismiss failures, but that substituted for courage the audacity to lie and ignore, to preach inhumanity as prime virtue, and to send out soldiers instead of human beings and citizens. Even today, these schools are unthinkable as permanent sources of German education. Five years are a short time in the history of a country; even ten years are not very much. The wounds that the Führer has inflicted upon the German people are very terrible, their scars may long be visible, worn on every forehead like a mark of Cain — but some day all those gifts of character and spirit which have won sympathy for the German people in the past must come again into their own.