In the ruins of the French town of Falaise, Normandy, in August 1944, sixty battle-tested teenage soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) held out against advancing Canadians for three days. The only two SS soldiers captured alive were wounded.1 Other young SS soldiers – wounded and captured – revealed a similar depth of fanaticism. One Allied nurse recounted how a sixteen–year-old SS soldier had torn off his bandages and declared he wanted to die for Hitler; another flung the food she gave him in her face; a third was only silenced by the threat of giving him a transfusion of Jewish blood.2 What is particularly shocking is how young these fanatical Nazis were. When 12th SS Panzer Division was first formed in 1943, many of its Hitler Youth recruits were so young that they were supplied with sweets instead of the standard tobacco and alcohol ration. But what had created such a fanatical group of young Nazis?
At the Nuremberg Rally in 1935, Hitler outlined his aims for young people: ‘In our eyes the German youth of the future must be slim and slender, swift as the greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must educate a new type of man …’3
In 1938, he expanded this general aim with more details, chillingly explaining how they would: join the Nazi youth movement at ten years of age and at fourteen go into the full Hitler Youth; at eighteen they would graduate into the party, the Labour Front, the SA or the SS; if after two years they were not committed Nazis they would go into the Labour Service; then for two to four years in the army; and once out of that, they would go back into the SA or the SS ‘and they will not be free again for the rest of their lives’.4 However short of this controlling ideal the system actually fell, the intentions were clear: German young people would be owned by the Nazi Party. As the leader of the Nazi Teachers’ League put it: ‘Those who have youth on their side control the future.’
Since before Hitler came to power there had been a youth wing of the Nazi Party. But in the years up to 1933 it was comparatively small and faced competition from a range of other organizations in Germany. These included youth groups organized by the Protestant and Catholic churches and youth wings of the Social Democrats and the Communist Party. In 1930, there were only 18,000 in the Hitler Youth and by the end of 1932 it had grown no larger than 20,000. But all this changed after Hitler came to power in January 1933. Pressure then mounted on all young people to join the Hitler Youth and those who did so realized that they were part of the tidal wave of ‘Bringing Germany into line’, which gave them added encouragement to ostracize and bully those who refused. This spontaneous pressure soon had the force of law behind it. From July 1936, only the Hitler Youth could organize sporting activities for those under 14. This was soon extended to encompass those aged up to 18. Membership was still not compulsory but it had a tremendous impact. By early 1934, there were 2.3 million between the ages of 10 and 18 in the Hitler Youth; by 1936, this figure hit 4 million; by early 1939, it reached 8.7 million young people. This covered 98 per cent of all those aged between 10 and 18 years of age.5 From 1936, the Hitler Youth was, via its leader Baldur von Schirach, accountable directly to Hitler himself. And, after March 1939, membership was finally made compulsory for children aged 10 and above. Parents who did not register their children could be fined up to 150 Reichsmarks, or even imprisoned.
This law introduced the so-called ‘duty of youth service’. According to the details of Article 1.(2), this duty involved:
In particular,
Within each age group of the movement there was a set syllabus of indoctrination into Nazi ideas, accompanied by fitness training and, eventually, military training. The results of this ‘investment’ were seen in May 1940, as the US reporter William L. Shirer followed the victorious German army marching into Belgium. He noted ‘the contrast between the German soldiers, bronzed and clean-cut from a youth spent in the sunshine on an adequate diet, and the first British war prisoners, with their hollow chests, round shoulders, pasty complexions and bad teeth …’7
For girls, the programme included exercises and the training that was necessary to turn them into fit and healthy bearers of the next generation of German babies. In this they were part of the drive for ‘racial hygiene’ (see Chapter 10). They were being groomed for the Nazi ideal of racially pure women, just as the boys were being drilled to become the warriors who would carry out the war of Germanic conquest and territorial expansion that was at the heart of the Nazi worldview of racial struggle and German survival.
However, the impact of the Nazi youth programme had a greater effect on the mind than on the body. The Hitler Youth motto was ‘Führer command – we follow!’ and the vow sworn on joining included such quasi-religious phrases as: ‘The Reich is the object of our struggle; it is the beginning and the Amen’ and ‘You Führer, are our commander! We stand in your name’. The 1937 syllabus for a fortnight’s camp included such daily mottos as: ‘Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler’, ‘To be one nation is the religion of our time’, ‘It is not necessary for me to live, but certainly necessary for me to do my duty’, ‘Let struggle be the highest aim of youth’ and ‘Germany must live, even if we have to die’. These were the sentiments that had moulded the young minds of those who fought to the death in the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Youth in Normandy in 1944. Such indoctrination was designed to replace all family and religious loyalties and to bind children completely to the Nazi ideology and to personal devotion to Hitler. It was a factor that caused the SS to see the Hitler Youth as one of its key recruiting grounds.8 One former member of the Hitler Youth later recognized what had been the aim of this relentless propaganda: ‘We were drilled in toughness and blind obedience’.9
Concerned agents of the Social Democratic Party in exile noted in their secret Sopade reports the cases of children from socialist families who abandoned the ideals of their parents. ‘I despise you,’ taunted one such teenager to his father, ‘because you don’t possess a shred of heroism.’ And another agent reported how all the children spoke of was ‘heroes and heroism’. 10 It goes without saying that the heroes were Nazi heroes and the heroism was the racially focused defence of Germany and its new aggressive ideology. Some parents despaired: ‘It is extremely difficult for parents who are opponents of the Nazis to exercise an influence on their children.’ And another – aware of how children were encouraged to denounce anti-Nazi parents – sadly commented: ‘You’ve got to watch yourself in front of your own children.’ And yet another reported, ‘I feel as if my lad is the spy in the family.’11
But it was not only in the home that such children could feel an exhilarating sense of power over adults. At school they could threaten teachers who seemed to lack Nazi zeal; on public transport they could threaten ticket collectors who did not ‘Heil, Hitler’ every passenger. Their Hitler Youth uniforms signalled to all observers their power, their confidence and their solidarity. As a Sopade report noted in 1934, ‘The fact that school and the parental home takes a back seat compared to the community of young people – all that is marvellous’12 However, it was not only images of power and violence that captured the attention of young minds. Along with a view of a world purged of what they had been led to believe were those polluting it, was a manipulated enthusiasm that the new Germany would create lasting peace. A young Nazi activist, Melita Maschmann, would later look back on the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and those foreign young people who would return home with a new outlook because they had competed in the Third Reich: ‘In all of us there was the hope in a future of peace and friendship.’13
Despite the massive impact of the campaign to organize and influence young people, there were still those who slipped through the controlling ‘net’ of Nazi efforts. And the Nazis knew it. By the mid-1930s there were complaints from Nazi local organizers about young people failing to turn up to meetings on a regular basis. Many were more interested in the sport than the ideology. Others resented the dragooning and the boring lectures. Long hours hiking rapidly lost appeal. Brutal discipline on Hitler Youth camps14 might have been designed to make the subjects ‘tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel’ but it left many determined not to return the next summer for another brutalizing. The same Sopade reports also contain (more heartening to the Social Democrat agents) news of young people not paying their membership fees and skipping training and evening parades; telling anti-Nazi jokes and commenting on how boring they found the camp-fire singsongs; resenting the way the camping trips were being militarized; consequently, many were becoming merely paying members. This was not what was expected of the ‘new type of man’. Even a Hitler Youth leader might begin to find ‘the compulsion and the requirement of absolute obedience unpleasant’ and might begin to resent the way in which the Hitler Youth ‘was interfering everywhere in people’s private lives’.15
The constant demands of the party began to be reflected in wry humour, of the kind collected and published in a recent German study. In one example, a girl is asked about the Nazi credentials of her family by a friend. She replies: ‘My father is in the SA, my oldest brother in SS, my little brother in the HJ, my mother is part of the NS women’s organization, and I’m in the BDM.’ ‘Do you ever get to see each other?’ asks the girl’s friend. ‘Oh yes, we meet every year at the party rally in Nuremberg!’16
A German maths textbook of the late 1930s carried the following test question: ‘A modern night bomber can carry 1,800 incendiaries. How long (in kilometres) is the path along which it can distribute these bombs if it drops a bomb every second at a speed of 250 km per hour?’17
Clearly, the school and university system allowed the Nazis an opportunity to manipulate the formative learning experiences of young people. This offered them the chance of countering the influences of the home and giving young people a Nazi outlook. Even more than the provision of the youth organizations (which as we have seen were not compulsory until 1939) school gave access across the board to the children and youth of Germany.
From July 1933, the central government laid down guidelines on history textbooks, which ensured that in future they would stress the role of heroism and leadership. As a result much of German history teaching became the celebration of German cultural superiority since the Stone Age, emphasized the nature of history as being rooted in struggle and insisted that racial identity was the defining characteristic of the Germanic past. This kind of manipulation affected all ages and all subjects. The picture books used with young children portrayed Jews as evil and cunning, associated with dark places and obsessed with the corruption of Germans and Germany. The outlook of a generation was being moulded and corrupted. Secondary-school subjects were all affected by a Nazi angle. Biology became focused on matters of race; physics became occupied with military themes such as the study of ballistics; arithmetic involved calculations related to the proportion of blond-haired people in Aryan society or the cost of feeding patients at lunatic asylums or calculating the destructive capacity of a bomber; geography examined the need for Lebensraum for the German people. On graduating from school, any student wishing to attend university had to (after 1934) complete six months’ labour service. It was one more attempt to imbue young people with the Nazi doctrine of ‘blood and soil’ and to try to break down barriers of class through a comradeship based on service to the Third Reich.
In order to achieve the Nazi goals for education it was necessary to control the teaching profession and to purge it of any teachers who opposed the new Nazi state. In April 1933, the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service led to the establishment of investigative committees to drive ‘unreliable’ teachers out of the profession. These were initially set up by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Minister of Education in Prussia. This led to the dismissal of almost 16 per cent of headteachers (male and female) in Prussia but only about 2.5 per cent of teachers. Almost all Jewish teachers were sacked and those who survived in post were finally removed in 1935. In addition, about 60 per cent of lecturers in Colleges of Education were dismissed.18 The pressure on school teachers to conform to Nazi expectations was increased by a directive issued in 1934, which insisted that schools should educate their children ‘in the spirit of National Socialism’. Some teachers put up a subtle resistance to this; their Hitler salutes were clearly half-hearted or they raised questions about the material they were passing on to their students. But this was dangerous and laid them open to the threat of being denounced to the authorities with the attendant loss of their jobs. However, most teachers went along with the new mood in Germany and, in reality, there seems to have been little resistance. The membership of the Nazi Teachers’ League leapt from 12,000 in January 1933 to 220,000 by the end of the year and 300,000 by 1936. This last figure represented about 97 per cent of the teaching profession.19 The members of this professional body were expected to attend the indoctrination courses set up to mix educational training with military activities. By the start of the Second World War, 71 per cent of its members had attended these residential training camps. Within about a year of the Nazis coming to power, somewhere in the region of 25 per cent of teachers had joined the Nazi Party, compared with 10 per cent of the population as a whole by 1939.20
The way in which education was administered also changed under the Nazis. By 1935, the new Reich Ministry of Science and Education, with Rust at its head, took control of all education throughout Germany, and education ministries in the länder (states) were wound up. Education policy under the indecisive and depressive Rust soon became confused and academics joked that a new unit of measurement – ‘the Rust’ – now existed in order to express the amount of time between one initiative being set up and then countermanded by another one. By 1937, Rust’s new Reich Education Ministry became responsible for all teaching appointments and in 1939 it became responsible for all examinations in Germany. It also reorganized the structure of schools to make them uniform across the whole of the country.
In addition to these schools, a new type of institution had been established in 1933. These were the so-called ‘Napolas’ (National Political Educational Institutions) and were intended to train the new ruling elite of the Third Reich. Its graduates ended up in the military, the SS and police. The running of these schools was in the hands of the SS and SA with predictably negative consequences for their academic performance. Eventually, the SS took over full responsibility for running the Napolas. The chaotic nature of Third Reich government – with its often contradictory infighting and duplication of roles – soon surfaced in the structure of education. The Nazi Party (as distinct from the SS and the SA) complicated educational structures by also setting up its own schools. The first type were the Adolf Hitler Schools, first set up in 1937, which were run by the Hitler Youth and overseen by regional party bosses. The aim of these institutions was similar to the Napolas but educational standards were low and the initiative ground to a halt during the Second World War. The next type of party school was the Order Castle, of which three were eventually established. They were designed to take the graduates from the Adolf Hitler Schools and to train them up for the highest administrative posts of the Third Reich. But academic standards in these schools – which were more concerned with physical and ideological fitness – also proved to be low. One successful graduate of the Adolf Hitler School system was the later Hollywood actor Hardy Krüger. After fighting in an SS unit in 1945, the seventeen-year-old Krüger was captured by the US army and after the war went on to act in such films as The Wild Geese (1978) and A Bridge Too Far (1977).21
The effects of the Nazi polices on education soon revealed themselves. First, there was an increase in the use of corporal punishment as a more brutal attitude towards discipline was enforced in schools. As one headteacher commented approvingly, it meant that ‘a sharp Prussian wind’ was blowing through those classrooms most in tune with the times.22 Second, in a related trend, the führer-principle was emphasized in staffing relationships, with headteachers brought in from outside a school and teachers having little input into the decision making, since they were expected to obey their führer in all things. Third, there was an undermining of the teaching profession and the value of education. This may seem to contradict the importance that was placed on indoctrination within schools in the Third Reich. But in fact, Nazi policies actually undermined teachers and left them open to denunciation as we have seen; in addition there was a noticeable degree of contempt shown towards teachers from a government that subordinated all intellectual activity and endeavour to the crude demands of a militaristic state. As a result many teachers left the profession and entry numbers onto teacher training courses fell sharply. By the end of the 1930s the numbers of new teachers entering the profession reached only 31 per cent of the staffing needs of German schools. As a result class sizes went up. Fourth, educational standards declined. Students in the Hitler Youth were allowed to miss school in order to attend Nazi events and camps, with a predictable impact on their education. The presence of these Nazi young people further undermined teachers and threatened standards in the classroom. Confident of their role within the new Germany, they challenged teachers and teaching methods that did not meet with their ideological standards. They, like the Nazi ideology, regarded preparation for war as more important than sitting and passing examinations in a traditional school setting.
These effects spread across the German school system, which, thanks to the administrative changes of the 1930s, was more unified and centralized than it had been under the Weimar Republic. The same educational philosophy was also introduced to Austria after its incorporation into the Reich in March 1938. In Austria, in June 1940, the last legal remnant of an independent state ended when the Education Ministry was finally subsumed within the Reich government structure. By this time the main features of German schools were already apparent: race laws, Hitler’s portrait in classrooms, the Hitler salute, Nazi content in the curriculum and lessons in ‘German handwriting’.23
In contrast with the school system, the Nazi state had less control over the universities. Rust’s Reich Education Ministry found it harder to impose itself on the more independent universities than it did on schools. In addition, the appointment of lecturers became something of a turf war between the Reich Education Ministry, the university administrators and the Nazi Students’ League. By the start of the Second World War, 51 per cent of male and 71 per cent of female students had joined this last organization. In addition to these groups having an input into appointments, it was not unusual for local party bosses to intervene as well and in this complex in-fighting it was harder to impose a coherent policy overall. As late as 1938, the SD (the SS Security Service) reported on the confused situation regarding the administration of higher education and the frictions between different authorities. Between 1933 and 1934, the SA too took a leading role in attempting to ‘bring into line’ German universities. Many students joined the SA as a sign of allegiance to the new Germany. This strategy was thrown into disarray after the destruction of the SA leadership in 1934 and from this point onwards the SA were forced off campus and the central party organization took over the running of the Nazi Students’ League. As part of this increasing interference from the party, new courses in race studies and German folklore were established at a large number of German universities during the 1930s. Jewish staff were dismissed and it was this anti-Semitism that caused Albert Einstein to renounce his German citizenship in 1933 and move to the USA. Prior to this the police had raided his country house and seized control of his bank account; members of the SA had several times raided his Berlin apartment.24
Under the Third Reich, German universities experienced problems similar to those caused to schools by government policy. In fact, student numbers dropped by some 60 per cent between 1931 and 1939. This collapse was particularly apparent in law and the humanities subjects. In many ways this was a direct result of Nazi activities. Attacks on the civil service as being lacking in radical zeal and on the teaching profession made these jobs far less appealing than under the Weimar Republic. This impacted on the intake into those subjects that had traditionally provided most members of these professions. The general Nazi contempt for intellectuals, seen clearly in Hitler’s public comments, depressed public regard for higher learning as a way of gaining advancement within the Third Reich. In contrast, the expansion of the armed forces during the 1930s made that a much more appealing career path both in terms of available jobs and social prestige. However, the intake for medicine increased, almost certainly as a result of the high regard of the Nazi administration for matters of ‘racial hygiene’ and eugenics. On the other hand, Nazi discouragement of women entering higher education led to a reduction in the number of female medical students, from just over 20 per cent in 1933, to just under 16 per cent in 1939. This decline was only reversed after the start of the Second World War when the drafting of young men caused a shortage of medical students.25 This same discouragement of female students also affected the humanities. From 1934, the number of new female university students was fixed at no more than 10 per cent of that of men. From 1937, the female path to higher education was made even more difficult when female grammar schools were abolished. This was part of the Nazi aim of restricting women to domestic roles (see Chapter 12). Between Hitler coming to power in January 1933 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, the overall number of female students fell from about 16 to 11 per cent of those in higher education.
These factors aggravated relationships between the government and students. To this was added a demand for continued periods of labour service, including, in 1939, demands by the SS that students should assist in bringing in the harvest. This was so unpopular that the Gestapo was called in to deal with protests. These demands impinged enormously on study time26 as well as on student freedoms.
Nevertheless, despite these factors there was still a high level of compliance with Nazi ideology amongst those at university in the 1930s. After the initial dismissal of about 15 per cent of university staff in 1932–4 (about a third of these on grounds of race), very few university lecturers were actually purged for anti-Nazi beliefs and the content of most courses continued as before, with perhaps a veneer of Nazi ideology. Few university staff members joined the professional body set up for them but much of the nationalist outlook of the Nazi state was shared by many at the German universities, both students and lecturers. At Freiburg University in 1933, the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger approvingly declared the Führer to be the new dominating force in German society and law. That same year, 700 university professors signed a declaration of support for the new government. The Nazi views on the need for German national revival and the right of Germany to dominate Eastern Europe were shared by many intellectuals. That they were not necessarily members of the Nazi Party did not mean that they disagreed with the world outlook of the party. In 1938, the German Central Institute of Education issued the following guidelines for the teaching of history in schools, but its tone would have been appreciated by many in higher education too: ‘The German nation in its essence and greatness, in its fateful struggle for internal and external identity is the subject of the teaching of history.’ 27
In this then lies the crucial issue with regard to the Nazis and education. Despite all the reluctant students, teachers and lecturers, despite the resentment at Nazi demands and mismanagement – despite all these factors, there were in reality very few heroically protesting students or staff (such as the White Rose movement at Munich University, 1942–3). Most, as in German society as a whole in the 1930s, were broadly sympathetic with many aspects of the outlook of the new Germany, with its unifying themes and its expansionist aims. This made Nazi integration with education all the easier to achieve. This broad base of support, or acquiescence within education allowed many to look away from the brutality of Nazism and to focus instead on what was perceived as the process of national regeneration that the Nazis were bringing. In this, as in many aspects of life in the Third Reich, the willingness of ordinary people to compromise and come to terms with the new realities (though it might be denied later) was alarming.
1. Beevor, Antony, D-Day, Viking, 2009, p. 454.
2. Ibid., p. 324. From Colville, Sir John Rupert, The Fringes of Power, W.W. Norton, 1985, p. 474.
3. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. II, State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939, University of Exeter Press, 2nd edn, 2000, pp. 222–3.
4. Ibid., p. 223.
5. Figures based on Evans, Richard, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Books, 2006, p. 272.
6. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 226.
7. Shirer, William L, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Pan Books, 1964, p. 319.
8. Rempel, Gerhard, Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, analyses the way the SS recruited amongst the Hitler Youth. It offers a particularly revealing exploration of the way in which the ‘Patrol Service’ of the Hitler Youth (designed to pursue ideological and social deviants both within the Hitler Youth and amongst young people generally) became a source of SS recruits to the Gestapo and Concentration Camp guard units (the Death’s Head formations). Ralph Lewis, Brenda, Hitler Youth: The Hitlerjugend in War and Peace, 1933–1945, Zenith Press, 2000, provides an outline of the history of the Hitler Youth and includes a chapter on the military record of the infamous SS Hitler Youth Division.
9. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 234.
10. Evans, Richard, op. cit., p. 275.
11. Ibid., pp. 278–9.
12. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 233. For more on the conflict between parents and their children in Nazi youth organizations, see Burleigh, Michael, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan Books, 2001, p. 236.
13. Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis, Penguin, 2001, p. 9.
14. Hermand, Jost, Bettauer Dembo, Margot (trans.), A Hitler Youth in Poland, Northwestern University Press, 1993, recounts the brutal regime at Hitler Youth camps, in this case during the Second World War.
15. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 234.
16. Herzog, Rudolph, Heil Hitler, das Schwein ist Tot! (Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead) Eichborn-Verlag, 2006, translated and quoted in www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,434399,00.html. Also quoted in Burleigh, Michael, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan Books, 2001, p. 234.
17. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 245.
18. Ibid, p. 237.
19. Figures from Evans, Richard, op. cit, p. 267.
20. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 239.
21. For an overview of Krüger’s film career, see Bock, Hans-Michael (General Editor), Bergfelder, Tim (Associate Editor), The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema, Berghahn Books, 2009, pp. 267–8.
22. Evans, Richard, op. cit., p. 269.
23. Utgaard, Peter, Remembering and Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity, and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria, Berghahn Books, 2003, pp. 27–8.
24. Severance, John B., Einstein: Visionary Scientist, Clarion Books, 1999, pp. 94–5. See also Bendersky, Joseph W., A History of Nazi Germany: 1919–1945, Burnham, 2000, p. 138, for how this occurred in the context of the emigration of a number of German intellectuals.
25. Kater, Michael H., Doctors Under Hitler, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 98–9.
26. Panayi, Panikos, Weimar and Nazi Germany: Continuities and Discontinuities, Pearson, 2000, p. 87.
27. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 244.