The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  In every school there were likely to be two or three fanatical Nazis amongst the teachers, willing at any point to report colleagues if they expressed unorthodox views. The more considerate ones even warned their colleagues openly that they would be obliged to inform on them if they said anything out of line. The common room became a place to avoid instead of a place for lively intellectual debate. When one head teacher, as was reported in Bremen, ‘criticizes in sharp terms the breach of confidentiality of decisions and the writing of anonymous letters that are even sent to the political police’, and called for a stop to ‘this attack on our honour and these reprehensible denunciations’, he was painting a grim picture of the changed atmosphere in the nation’s school common rooms; he was also a rare exception to the norm.173 School management committees and parents’ associations were turned from democratic institutions into agencies of control; from 1936, head teachers were no longer allowed to be appointed from the school’s own staff but had to be brought in from outside.174 This further reinforced the leadership principle that had already been introduced in 1934, with the head now the ‘Leader’ of the school and the teachers his ‘retinue’, who no longer had any input into the running of the school, but simply had to accept orders from above.175 In many schools, teachers also had to put up with the presence of old brownshirts who were found jobs as caretakers or even in positions of authority over them.176 Two or three ‘school assistants’ were appointed to help the teachers in each school; their continual presence in the classroom was resented by many teachers, who saw them, correctly, as political spies. Most of them were untrained and many were not even particularly well educated. Their ideological interventions became notorious. ‘The school assistants’, teachers joked amongst themselves, ‘are like the appendix: useless and easily inflamed!’177

  III

  As time went on, the Nazi Party, impatient with the inbuilt inertia of the state educational system, began to bypass it altogether in its search for new means of indoctrinating the young. Chief among these was the Hitler Youth, a relatively unsuccessful branch of the Nazi movement before 1933 when compared to, for example, the National Socialist German Students’ League. At that time, the Hitler Youth could not compete with the massive numbers of youth groups gathered together in Protestant or Catholic youth organizations, the youth wings of the other political parties, and above all the free youth movement that carried on the tradition of the Wandervogel and similar, loosely organized groups from before the First World War. Non-Nazi youth organizations simply dwarfed the Hitler Youth, a mere 18,000-strong in 1930 and still numbering no more than 20,000 two years later. By the summer of 1933, however, as in other areas of social life, the Nazis had dissolved almost all the rival organizations, with the exception of the Catholic youth organizations, which, as we have seen, took rather longer to close down. Boys and girls came under massive pressure to join the Hitler Youth and its affiliated organizations. Teachers were obliged to set selected pupils essays with titles such as ‘Why am I not in the Hitler Youth?’ and students who did not join had to endure continual taunting from their teachers in the classroom and their fellow students in the playground; as a last resort, they could even be refused the school-leaving certificate when they graduated, if they had not become members by this time. Employers increasingly restricted their apprenticeships to members of the Hitler Youth, thus bringing a particularly powerful material pressure to bear on school students nearing graduation.178

  From July 1936 the Hitler Youth had an official monopoly on the provision of sports facilities and activities for all children below the age of fourteen; before long, sports for 14-18-year-olds were subjected to the same monopoly; in effect, sports facilities were no longer available to non-members. Hitler Youth members were given special days off school for their activities. The results of such pressure soon became apparent. By the end of 1933 there were 2.3 million boys and girls between the ages of ten and eighteen in the Hitler Youth organization. By the end of 1935 this figure was approaching four million, and by the beginning of 1939 it had reached 8.7 million. With a total population of 8.87 million Germans aged ten to eighteen by this time, this gave the Hitler Youth and its associated groups a near-total claim on the allegiance of the younger generation, especially when the fact that Jewish children were barred from joining is taken into account. From 1 December 1936 the Hitler Youth was given the status of an official educational institution and taken away from its previous subordination to the Reich Interior Ministry. From this point on it was an autonomous organization directly accountable through its leader Baldur von Schirach to the Leader alone. After 25 March 1939, membership was legally binding from the age of ten, and parents could be fined if they failed to enrol their children, or even imprisoned if they actively tried to stop them joining.179

  It was above all through the Hitler Youth and its associated affiliates that the Nazis sought to build the new Germans of the future. Already in My Struggle, Hitler devoted a considerable amount of space to outlining his views on the nature and purpose of education in the racial state he wanted to build in Germany.180 ‘The folkish state’, he proclaimed, ‘must not adjust its entire educational work primarily to the inoculation of mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies. The training of mental abilities is only secondary.’ Character-building came next, then the promotion of will-power, then the training of joy in responsibility. ‘A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens.’ An academic education was useless. ‘The youthful brain should in general not be burdened with things ninety-five per cent of which it cannot use.’ Academic subjects would be taught only through ‘an abridgement of the material’, and they should be geared to the interests of the race: history teaching for example should cut out pointless detail and concentrate on encouraging patriotism. Physical education and character-building would culminate in military service, the last stage of education. The overriding purpose of the school was ‘to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it’.181

  These nostrums were applied to the German schools, as we have already seen, after the Nazis came to power, backed by the pedagogic doctrines of Nazi educational theorists like Ernst Krieck, now standard fare in the teacher training institutions.182 But even when it had been centralized and taken completely under state control, the traditional primary and secondary education system was still only of limited use in achieving these ends. As Hitler proclaimed at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1935:In our eyes the German boy of the future must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather and hard as Krupp steel. We must bring up a new type of human being, men and girls who are disciplined and healthy to the core. We have undertaken to give the German people an education that begins already in youth and will never come to an end. It starts with the child and will end with the ‘old fighter’. Nobody will be able to say that he has a time in which he is left entirely alone to himself.183

  Members of the Hitler Youth were required to learn this speech by heart and proclaim it when the swastika flag was raised.184

  The indoctrination which young Germans received through the Hitler Youth was ceaseless. Although it borrowed the style of existing youth organizations, with hikes, camping, songs, rituals, ceremonies, sports and games, it was emphatically a top-down organization, run not by young people themselves, as the old youth movement had been, but according to the leadership principle, by the Reich Youth Leadership under Schirach. The organization issued strict guidelines on the activities to be carried out. All those who joined had to swear a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler. Their training was compulsory and legally binding. Every age-cohort of the Hitler Youth had a set syllabus to get through each year, covering topics such as ‘Germanic gods and heroes’, ‘20 Years’ fight for Germany’, ‘Adolf Hitler and his fellow-fighters’, or ‘The people and its blood-heritage’. The songs th
ey sang were Nazi songs, the books they read were Nazi books. Specially prepared information packs told the leaders what to say to the assembled children and young people and provided further material for their indoctrination.185 As time went on, military training increasingly came to the fore. Candidates for admission even to its most junior levels had to pass a medical and fitness test and only then could they become full members. On 20 February 1938 Hitler’s listing of its key divisions claimed:The Naval-Hitler-Youth comprises 45,000 boys. The Motor-Hitler-Youth comprises 60,000 boys. 55,000 members of the Junior Hitler Youth are serving in aerial training through learning gliding. 74,000 Hitler Youths are organized in the Flying Units of the Hitler Youth. In 1937 alone, 15,000 boys passed their gliding tests. Today 1,200,000 Hitler Youths are receiving regular instruction in small-calibre shooting, led by 7,000 shooting instructors.186

  By this time, training sessions were concentrating on parade-ground marching, learning the morse code, map-reading, and similar activities for boys, while girls focused on military nursing and air-raid protection.187

  The result was that, as agents reporting secretly to the exiled Social Democratic Party leadership in Prague noted, even if the older boys retained something of the beliefs their Social Democratic, Communist or Catholic parents had passed on to them, the younger ones were ‘from the beginning onwards fed exclusively on the National Socialist spirit’.188 The possibility of holiday trips with the Hitler Youth, the sporting facilities, and much else, could make the organization attractive to children from poor working-class families who had not previously had the opportunity to enjoy these things. Some could find excitement and a sense of self-worth in the Hitler Youth.189 Idealism undoubtedly played a role in committing many young people to the cause in defiance of their parents’ wishes. Melita Maschmann joined the League of German Girls on 1 March 1933, secretly, because she knew her conservative parents would disapprove. Her attempts to read through ideological tomes such as Hitler’s My Struggle or Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century came to nothing.190 She later claimed that, like many of her upper-middle-class friends, she discounted the violence and antisemitism of the National Socialists as passing excesses which would soon disappear. The League of German Girls offered her a sense of purpose and belonging, and she devoted herself to it night and day, to the neglect of her schooling and the distress of her parents. Yet, she wrote later, she was ‘only secondarily interested in politics, and even then often only under duress’.191 For boys, the constant emphasis on competition and struggle, heroism and leadership, in sport as in other things, had its effect. There must have been many incidents like this one reported by a Social Democratic agent in the autumn of 1934:The son of a comrade in my house is 13 years old and in the Hitler Youth. Recently he came home from a training evening and asked his father: ‘Why didn’t you defend yourselves then? I despise you because you didn’t possess a shred of heroism. Your Social Democracy is worthy of nothing more than to be beaten to a pulp because you didn’t have a single hero!’ His father said to him: ‘You don’t understand any of that.’ But the boy laughed and believed what his leader had told him.192

  Old Social Democrats despaired. A whole generation was growing up, as one of them said, ‘that has no concept of the labour movement, that hears nothing all the time but “heroes and heroism”. This generation of young people doesn’t want to hear anything from us any more.’193

  Yet despite this massive programme of military training and ideological indoctrination, the effect of the Hitler Youth on the younger generation was mixed. The more it evolved from a self-mobilizing movement fighting for a cause into a compulsory institution serving the interests of the state, the less attractive it became to the younger generation. Ideological indoctrination was often superficial, since the leaders of the Hitler Youth groups were more often men in the brutal, anti-intellectual tradition of the brownshirts than educated thinkers along the lines of the leaders of the old youth movement.194 Thus the majority of their charges had no very firm grasp of ‘the idea of National Socialism’. If there was a regime change, one of the more reflective youth leaders thought, for example through defeat in a war, then most of them ‘would adjust themselves to the new situation without particular inner complications’. 195 The emphasis on sporting activities that was such an attraction to many to join the Hitler Youth also hindered a full-scale indoctrination, since the interest of many boys and girls went no further than using the facilities to play games. Physical exercise was not to every child’s taste. Particularly unpopular was the obligation to go round with a collecting-box for donations, especially since this was increasingly a feature of school life too. With hikes sometimes beginning at 7.30 in the morning on a Sunday and lasting all day (not coincidentally obliging the religious amongst the participants to miss church) or compulsory gymnastics at eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening, it was not surprising that some young people began to long for time to spend on their own private pursuits. Yet unorganized hiking and spontaneous activities organized by the young people themselves, notable features of the pre-1933 youth movement, were expressly forbidden.196

  In September 1934 the Hitler Youth leadership in a working-class district of Hamburg sent a lengthy memorandum to Hitler Youth members, with copies to their parents, complaining:You are not turning up to do your duty and are not even giving any excuses for your absence. Instead you are pursuing private pleasures. The ‘liberal Marxist I’ counts amongst you once more, you are denying the National Socialist ‘we’. You are sinning against the interests of the nation. You are excusing yourselves from service because you want to go to an acquaintance’s wedding feast, you are excusing yourselves because you are overburdened with school homework and want to go for a spin on your bicycle. When you get to school you use your Hitler Youth service as an excuse for not finishing your homework.197

  Most hated of all was the military discipline, which became more pronounced as time wore on.198 Schirach proclaimed that ‘the principle of self-leadership’ would apply as it had in the old youth movement,199 but in practice the organization was effectively run by grown-ups. Hitler Youth members were drilled by adult brownshirts, plunged into ice-cold water to toughen them up, forced to go on lengthy exercises in winter with inadequate clothing to teach them physical endurance and subjected to increasingly brutal punishments if they disobeyed orders. There were reports of boys being forced to run the gauntlet for minor misdemeanours, or even being beaten with spring-hooks. Doctors complained that long hours of drill, night marches with full packs and military exercises without proper nourishment were ruining young people’s mental and physical health.200

  Social Democratic agents reported that young people absented themselves from training evenings, or failed to pay their dues, so that they were excluded from the organization, rejoining only when they needed to show their membership card to get a job or enter university. One agent in Saxony reported in 1938: ‘The boys are past-masters in telling the latest jokes about Nazi institutions. They fritter away their hours of service whenever they can. In their spare time, when they meet to play in a school-friend’s home, they talk contemptuously of “the plan of service”.’201 Children quickly got bored with long evenings sitting around a camp fire singing patriotic songs: ‘Most of them’, reported one Social Democratic agent, ‘want to go home already after the first song.’202 Weekly parades lasting from 7.30 to 9.30 in the evening were notable for their poor attendance. There was little that the organization could do to punish those who stayed away. As long as they paid their dues, they could not be expelled, and many a young person was, as one member of the League of German Girls noted, ‘more or less only a paying member’, since a fifteen-year-old ‘had all kinds of other interests’. Young people who were already at work in their teens found the hours of training particularly wearisome.203 Camping, once a favourite activity in the youth movement, became increasingly unpopular as it became more militarized. As one young man returning from a camp complained:W
e hardly had any free time. Everything was done in a totally military way, from reveille, first parade, raising the flag, morning sport and ablutions through breakfast to the ‘scouting games’, lunch and so on to the evening. Several participants left the camp because the whole slog was too stupid for them. There was no kind of fellow-feeling between the camp inmates. Comradeship was very poor, and everything was done in terms of command and obedience . . . The camp leader was an older Hitler Youth functionary of the drill sergeant type. His entire educational effort amounted to barking orders, holding scouting exercises, and general slogging . . . The whole camp was more hyperactivity and an exaggerated cult of the muscular than a spiritual experience or even an active and co-operatively shaped leisure time.204

  Another, remembering his time in the Hitler Youth some years later, confessed that he had been ‘enthusiastic’ when he had joined at the age of ten - ‘for what boy is not roused to enthusiasm when ideals, high ideals like comradeship, loyalty and honour, are held up before him?’ - but soon he was finding the ‘compulsion and the unconditional obedience . . . exaggerated’.205 The ‘endless square-bashing’ was boring and the punishments for the tiniest infringements could lead to bitterness, remembered another, but nobody complained, since proving your toughness was the only way to get on, and it had its effects too: ‘Toughness and blind obedience were drilled into us from the moment we could walk.’206