The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  II

  Thus the Nazi Students’ League had achieved supremacy in the student body by the mid-1930s, effectively pushing other institutions of student representation aside. But it had done so in the context of a rapid decline in student numbers overall. One of the many factors that had fuelled student dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic had been the drastic overcrowding that the universities had experienced as a result of the large birth-cohorts of the pre-1914 years entering the higher education system. Under the Third Reich, however, the number of students in universities plummeted, from a high of almost 104,000 in 1931 to a low of just under 41,000 in 1939. In the Technical Universities, numbers underwent a similar if slightly less precipitous decline, from just over 22,000 in 1931 to slightly more than 12,000 eight years later.259 Within this overall decline, some subjects fared worse than others. Law was particularly badly affected. Law students, making up 19 per cent of the total student body in 1932, only constituted 11 per cent by 1939. A similar decline was experienced by the humanities, where 19 per cent of students were enrolled in 1932 but only 11 per cent seven years later. The natural sciences suffered a decline too, though of less dramatic proportions, from 12 per cent to 8 per cent of the student body over the same period. Theology, perhaps surprisingly, held its own in proportional terms, at around 8 to 10 per cent, and economics even experienced a modest rise, from 6 to 8 per cent. But the real winner was medicine, which already accounted for a third of the student body in 1932 and reached nearly half, at 49 per cent, by 1939. The true dimensions of these changes become apparent when it is recalled that the total numbers of university students fell by more than half during these years, so that it is reasonable to speak of a genuine crisis above all in the humanities and law by the eve of the Second World War. There were a number of reasons for this. Both the humanities and the law were the object of continual criticism by the regime, reducing their attractiveness to applicants. Similarly, the civil service, a traditional destination of law graduates, was under heavy fire from 1933 onwards, and its influence and prestige sharply declined as those of the Party grew. Teaching, the main source of employment for humanities graduates, similarly declined in attractiveness in the mid-1930s, as we have seen. By contrast, the social and political standing of the medical profession rocketed during these years, as the regime placed racial hygiene at the centre of its domestic policy, and the removal of Jewish doctors from the profession created a large number of vacancies for Aryan graduates to fill.260

  Map 8. The Decline of German Universities, 1930-39

  The decline of the humanities, by far the most popular choice of female students, was in part a consequence of the restrictions placed on women entering university by the regime in these years. Hitler took the view that the main purpose of educating girls should be to train them to be mothers. On 12 January 1934, the Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick ordered on the basis of the Law against the Overcrowding of German Higher Education Institutions and Schools (25 April 1933) that the proportion of female grammar school graduates allowed to proceed to university should be no more than 10 per cent of that of the male graduates. In Easter the same year, roughly 10,000 female grammar-school students passed the university entrance examination; as a result of this directive, only 1,500 were allowed to go on to university, and by 1936 the number of female university students had been halved as a consequence. The Nazi elite educational institutions, the Adolf Hitler Schools and the Order Castles, did not admit female students, though a small number of the state elite schools, the Napolas, did. Moreover, the reorganization of German secondary schools ordered in 1937 abolished grammar-school education for girls altogether. Girls were banned from learning Latin, a requirement for university entrance, and the Education Ministry did its best instead to steer them into domestic education, for which a whole type of girls’ school existed; the only other secondary education available to girls was a language-based girls’ school, where domestic science was also now compulsory. From April 1938, all girls who still managed to graduate with the university entrance examination despite all these obstacles were obliged to have a ‘domestic year’; only after this would they be given the school-leaving certificate and allowed to proceed to university, provided the quota had not already been exceeded.261 The number of female students in higher education fell from just over 17,000 in 1932-3 to well under 6,000 in 1939, faster than that of male students: the proportion of female students fell from just under 16 per cent to just over 11 per cent over the same period. Attempts to reverse this trend in order to satisfy growing demand for skilled and qualified female professionals as rearmament took a grip on the economy had no discernible effect, since they ran counter to all the other measures taken to push women out of the universities since 1933.262

  The Law against the Overcrowding of German Higher Education Institutions and Schools of 25 April 1933 affected only Jewish students at first, but in December 1933 the Reich Interior Ministry announced that only 15,000 of the 40,000 grammar-school students who were expected to pass the school graduation examination in 1934 would find places at Germany’s universities. Unemployment was still at seriously high levels, and it would be wrong for students to go to university if they had no prospect of a job at the end. However, this measure only lasted for two semesters, since the Reich Interior Ministry lost its competence over universities when the Education Ministry was founded in May 1934, and the new Ministry quickly abandoned the restrictions, even allowing those denied entry in that year to reapply, provided that they were unemployed and counted as politically reliable.263 More influential than such measures was perhaps the oft-expressed contempt of the Nazi leadership for the universities and those who taught and studied in them. In November 1938 Hitler launched a furious attack on intellectuals, amongst whom there was little doubt that he included university teachers and professors. He declared that intellectuals were fundamentally unreliable, useless and even dangerous, and contrasted their irreducible individualism and their constant critical carping with the instinctive and unquestioning solidarity of the masses. ‘When I take a look at the intellectual classes we have - unfortunately, I suppose, they are necessary; otherwise one could one day, I don’t know, exterminate them or something - but unfortunately they’re necessary.’264 How long for, he did not say. Anyone who had read My Struggle would be aware of his contempt for intellectuals, whom he blamed in large part for the disaster of 1918. This inevitably had the effect of producing disillusion amongst academics and a reluctance to enrol amongst potential students. In Germany before 1933, a university degree had been the way to social prestige and professional success. Now, for many, it was no longer. Under the Third Reich, there could be no doubt that Germany’s universities were in decline. Student numbers were falling, leading scientists and scholars had been dismissed and in many cases replaced by the second-rate. Chairs and teaching positions remained unfilled.265

  The decline had already begun before Hitler came to power, as mass unemployment had deterred young people and especially young women from entering university when the prospects of obtaining a job afterwards were minimal. In addition to this, the very small birth-cohort of the First World War years, when the birth rate had plunged to half its prewar level, began in 1934 to reach the age at which university entrance was an option. Far from acting to counter the effects of this demographic decline on student numbers, the regime did everything to magnify them. Finally, the huge expansion of the professional army with the introduction of conscription in 1935 opened up a very large number of prestigious and well-paid posts in the officer corps, so that while fewer than 2 per cent of male high-school graduates joined the army in 1933, no fewer than 20 per cent did in 1935, and 28 per cent in 1937. By this time, too, prospective students were having to wait for two years and more after graduating from high school before they could enter university, since much of the intervening time was now taken up with obligatory military service. By their mid-twenties, many young men had no stomach for yet more years withou
t a job. The banning of Jews from universities, it has been calculated, reduced student numbers by another 3 to 4 per cent, while, as we have been, Nazi measures against women students also had the effect of reducing numbers overall.266

  The attractiveness of university study was further undermined by the decision of the Nazi Students’ League that all high-school graduates should carry out a period of labour service for the Reich before being allowed to begin their studies at university. From Easter 1934, six months’ labour service was obligatory for all successful university applicants, while first- and second-year students already at university were forced to serve a ten-week period in a labour camp. The purpose was to instil into university students the kind of character-building was also becoming so important in the schools: as Bernhard Rust told Berlin students in June 1933: ‘Anyone who fails in labour camp has forfeited the right to seek to lead Germany as a university graduate.’ Students were the first in the Third Reich to be subjected to these measures. Not only were they intended to give practical expression to their commitment to building the new Germany, they were also meant to help overcome the class snobbery and intellectual arrogance of the highly educated; in order to bring this about, the organizers of the Labour Service made sure that students did not make up more than 20 per cent of the inmate population of any labour camp into which they were drafted.267

  Yet the policy signally failed to achieve its aim of helping to build a new, classless racial community. The vast majority of students who served in the camps hated the way in which, as a memorandum of the student organization itself complained in November 1933, ‘the bawling NCO type’ of the old army, ‘always putting on airs’, who ran the camps offloaded their social resentments on the young inmates. Strict military discipline, verbal abuse and bullying were common tactics employed by the uneducated camp leaders to humiliate the students. One inmate later remembered of these men that

  They get bored, drink themselves silly every evening and then play tricks on us ... We were hauled out of bed three, four hours after the Last Post, and had to parade outside in our night-clothes, then run round the barracks, and back in the barracks crawl under our beds and then climb up onto the cupboards and sing ditties that seemed appropriate to our actions.268

  Long hours of unskilled physical labour, building roads or draining marshes, carried out on meagre rations, exhausted many of the largely middle-class students. They were also the butt of continual practical jokes, tricks and verbal abuse from the majority of camp inmates, who were mainly from a rural or working-class background and were far more accustomed to tough and unskilled manual work than they were. For the students this was a world turned upside down, which created not solidarity with other social classes but hatred, bitterness and resentment towards them.269

  Nor was pre-university labour service the end of such activities for students. Once they had entered university, they came under increasing pressure to spend several weeks every year, in the vacation, working without pay in a factory or on the land. This was not popular with university students, and participation rates remained low - only 5 per cent of the student body in 1936. Himmler also ordered that 25,000 students should help with the harvest in 1939, because the tense international situation at the time meant that the Polish seasonal labourers who usually performed this function were unavailable. This measure caused widespread unrest and open protests at several universities. The Gestapo were called in and a number of students were arrested. All the same, only 12,000 students actually materialized for the harvest; the others had found one way or another of avoiding it. Other attempts to carry the spirit of the labour camp life into the universities were equally unsuccessful. The Nazified student unions wanted to establish ‘comradeship houses’ in which students would live collectively instead of lodging in private accommodation as they had done up to 1933. This was intended not least as a takeover bid for the duelling and other fraternities, whose premises were to be used for the comradeship houses. The fraternities used their influence in the Ministries, many of whose senior civil servants were old members, to block this initiative, and the Nazi Students’ League also opposed the move. Finally, Hitler himself also intervened, declaring in November 1934 that the comradeship houses would encourage homosexuality.270 The collapse of the fraternities in 1936 gave the idea a second chance, however, this time under the aegis of the Nazi Students’ League, and by 1939 there were no fewer than 232 comradeship houses, which made themselves more attractive to students by abandoning their earlier insistence on waking their inmates at 6.15 a.m. for a vigorous bout of gymnastics. At the same time, however, the equally unpopular institution of three evenings a week spent on political indoctrination had not been abolished. Many students had been pressured to join a comradeship house in one way or another, and saw them mainly as social institutions. After going through years of incessantly repeated and intellectually vapid indoctrination at school and in the Hitler Youth, the last thing they wanted when they got to university was more of the same. Those responsible for the comradeship houses in Hamburg, for instance, complained in 1937 of ‘fatigue with every kind of political education’, while a keen Nazi student in Marburg declared his disappointment in 1939 ‘that in the comradeship houses of the

  National Socialist German Students’ League, basically it is only the way of life of the former student fraternities that continues to be cultivated’. ‘Nowadays,’ concluded the Nazi student leader in Würzburg in 1938, ‘there are very few politically fanatical people in the university. They are either hardened or satiated.’271

  III

  The Nazi Students’ League was not content with attempting to change the student experience through the institution of compulsory work camps, labour service and comradeship houses. It also tried to influence what was taught in the universities themselves. It made clear in 1936 that we . . . will intervene where the National Socialist view of the world is not made into the basis and the starting-point of scientific and scholarly research and the professor does not of his own initiative lead his students to these ideological points of departure within his scientific or scholarly material.272

  Nazi Party bosses never tired of repeating this view with varying degrees of emphasis - brutally open in the speeches of a rhetorical thug like Hans Frank, seemingly moderate and flexible in the addresses of a vacillating character like Bernhard Rust. The universities, it was clear, had to pursue the same aims as the schools and put Nazi ideology at the centre of their teaching and research. New chairs and institutes were founded at a number of universities in racial studies and racial hygiene, military history and prehistory, while additional chairs in German Folklore were founded at half of all German universities between 1933 and 1945. Most of these new positions were the result of initiatives from the university rectors rather than the Education Ministry. In 1939, Institutes for Racial Studies existed at twelve out of the twenty-three universities of Germany (in its boundaries of 1937). The new foundations involved a considerable investment of money and prestige in subjects that had not been well represented at the top level in German universities before 1933.273

  These new areas of teaching and research were backed up in many universities by special lecture courses in these subjects, and in the political ideas of National Socialism, which in some universities were made compulsory for all students before they took their exams. In Heidelberg, the leading Nazi professor, Ernst Krieck, who became Rector in 1937, lectured on the National Socialist world-view. Similar lectures were held elsewhere. After the first flush of enthusiasm, however, most of the special lecture courses on Nazi ideology were dropped from university teaching, and by the mid-1930s, fewer than 5 per cent of lectures at German universities were overtly Nazi in their title and contents. Most professors and lecturers who had not been purged in 1933 - the great majority - continued to teach their subjects as before, with only marginal concessions to Nazi ideology, leading to repeated complaints by the Nazi students. These were echoed on many occasions by Nazi Party offi
cials: the accusation levelled in 1936 by Walter Gross, head of the Racial Policy Office of the Nazi Party, of the ‘often extremely embarrassing efforts of notable scientists and scholars to play at National Socialism’, was far from untypical. After 1945, many former students of this period recalled that their teachers had overwhelmingly been professors of the old school, who had adapted to Nazi ideology only superficially.274 The Nazi Students’ League had attempted to force changes by creating an alternative to the existing teaching syllabus in the form of student-run, subject-specific groups (Fachschaften) that would provide a thoroughly Nazi education outside regular academic lectures and classes. But these had not been popular with students, not least since they could not really afford to miss regular classes and so had to work twice as hard as before if they went along. They aroused the antagonism of lecturers and had been largely neutralized by the need to incorporate the teaching staff into their work, since the students mostly lacked the necessary knowledge. 275 In many regular classes, too, relatively open discussion was still possible, and the lecturers were able to avoid Nazi ideology easily enough when they dealt with highly technical subjects, even in subjects like philosophy, where discussion of Aristotle or Plato allowed basic questions of morality and existence to be debated without recourse to the concepts and terminology of National Socialism.276

  The success of the Nazis in turning the universities to their own ideological purposes was thus surprisingly limited.277 Teaching continued with only relatively superficial changes in most areas. Studies of doctoral dissertations completed during the Nazi era have shown that no more than 15 per cent of them could be said to be Nazi in their language and approach.278 Snobbish and elitist professors of the traditional sort openly despised the carpetbaggers brought into the universities by the regime, while most of the latter were so taken up with university administration that they had little time for the propagation of their own ideas to the students. On the other hand, the anti-intellectualism of the Nazi movement made sure that many senior figures in the Party, from Hitler down, ridiculed many of these ideas and thought them too abstruse to have any real political relevance. Neither Bernhard Rust nor Alfred Rosenberg, the two leading senior Nazis in the field of education and ideology, was politically skilled or determined enough to outmanoeuvre wily professors whose abilities to intrigue and dissemble had been honed in decades of in-fighting on university committees. The foundation of a new institute dedicated to the pursuit of a favourite obsession of the Nazis could be welcomed by conservative professors as a way of shunting off an unpopular colleague into an academic byway, as it was for example when the cantankerous far-right historian Martin Spahn was given his own Institute for Spatial Politics at the University of Cologne in 1934. This killed two birds with one stone, since it got Spahn out of the History Department, where he was deeply unpopular, into an area where he did not have to come into contact with his colleagues, and demonstrated at the same time the university’s commitment to the geopolitical ideas of the new regime.279