by Heath, Tim
Jung Madel meeting sessions were held on weekday evenings and weekends – the schedule deliberately prevented many of the young girls from completing homework set by their schools. Important Nazis were often present at these meetings to give lectures on National Socialism and answer questions on Hitler, who, in every case, was spoken of as some kind of hero of the German people. Education for young girls in Hitler’s Germany was deliberately narrow and directionless. Hitler often made comments that highlighted his general loathing for female success. On one occasion, Hitler said, ‘The female should be beautiful, caring, sweet and very, very stupid.’
Dora Brunninghausen reflects upon her education as a ten-year-old in Nazi Germany:
Of course we had been introduced to politics at an earlier age, as Hitler’s name was everywhere, especially during the years just prior to his seizure of power in Germany. In Berlin you couldn’t escape Hitler because he was everywhere you looked, on posters, in school and sometimes at home. At school all of our concepts and thoughts that we had all become accustomed to had to be adjusted. We had not been born as Nazis, so the Nazis had to convert us within school via its new education system. Making the transition was not that difficult at all, as it never is with young children. Children are more ready and able to deal with changes than are adults.
I remember vividly how in class we talked about what was termed the ‘Jewish Problem’ and how it would be solved by forcing the Jews out of Germany. The teachers reasoned that Jews were not permissible to German society as they did not contribute to its social fabric, besides the teachers, especially the ones who taught science, referred to Jews as a vastly impure, greedy and unworthy race; ‘a race of vermin’ one called them.
The hatred Hitler possessed for anything Jewish was reflected directly into the classroom. In 1933 there were no books by Jewish authors in school and Jewish art was also excluded. Germany was becoming a dangerous place for Jews, and Jews were always ridiculed in the classroom. The teachers often abused them and paid little to no attention to them or their work, and certainly did not attempt to help them in any way. It was clear that they were not wanted. While one by one the Jewish girls were ostracized, the education became predominantly more racist in its content. There was frequent violence in the playground and German girls were encouraged to fight the Jewish girls. Many would leave school battered and bruised, until their parents withdrew them altogether. We were also taught about the menace of Slavs and Gypsies. We also had to study Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in and outside of school. We would be questioned by our teachers and expected to answer and put forward our explanations.
As ten-year-olds, we also had to study what they call Home Economics these days. This subject dealt with needlecraft, cooking and keeping the home. It was a most important subject second to that of physical education. I remember that our physical exercise often took place inside in the gymnasium, as there was a great deal of equipment in there for us to develop our bodily strength. The usual kit consisted of a pair of black shorts, a white sports vest, and we often had to go bare footed. We would firstly have to warm our muscles and perform stretching routines, and the teacher would come around us all one by one to ensure we had done this properly. I did not really like the physical exercise, but we were told this was important for us, as we had to develop and strengthen our bodies in preparation for motherhood and for bearing healthy children. When we were outside on the sports field, we participated in many strength-developing team games that involved medicine balls and throwing. As a ten-year-old though, the thought of having babies horrified me. I did not want to have any babies, in fact I was not sure what I wanted to do in life. But everything came down to preparing for children and cooking and housekeeping and things, it was something we were constantly reminded of.
Helga Stroh, another young girl who joined the Jung Madel, remembers the stories that they were told both at school and with the Jung Madel, stories which seemed to promote and glorify warfare. She recalls one particular story:
They used to read us stories, many of which it seemed were preparing us for war. One such story still remains very clear in my mind. A group of soldiers are advancing into enemy held territory. The path they are taking leads them through a swamp. It is nighttime, pitch black and everyone has been ordered to remain completely silent. Suddenly one of the soldiers falls and is in danger of drowning. None of his comrades notice his predicament. Rather than shout for help and put his comrades’ lives in danger, he buries his face in the water and slowly drowns himself. It was a reflection of the kind of loyalty that the Third Reich required of everyone, even small girls.
Anita von Schoener has some relatively happy memories from her school days:
I grew up and associated with most of the girls at my school, many became members of the Jung Madel. When we were at normal school all we talked about was the next Jung Madel meeting, and I always looked forward to putting on my uniform and going to the meetings that took place after normal school twice a week.
I didn’t care too much about my home studies or homework if you like, and I don’t remember ever being told off for not doing it. Though my parents tried hard to ensure I did homework, the teachers at school were not too strict about it, I suppose now we understand why that was.
Most of us eagerly absorbed what we were being taught and we were sometimes shown films about Adolf Hitler’s life and how he had saved our nation from total economic collapse. We believed in everything we were taught passionately and looked upon Hitler as a kind of god, as we knew our parents had suffered hardships like not being able to work at times. Such things were blamed entirely on the old regime through Hitler’s ‘new history’ that blamed everything else for Germany’s troubles. In school, much of the truth was cleverly avoided or disguised. Much emphasis was placed upon the failings of the old government in our everyday lessons. We were told that we must be proud of ourselves as Germans as the German race would one day inherit the whole world. Can you imagine how that felt for a ten-year-old?
I remember that many important political figures in Hitler’s government often visited our schools and Jung Madel meetings, and gave lectures – people like Baldur von Schirach, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. All stressed the reasons for not tolerating Jews anymore and the changes being made in Germany by the Nazis that would be of great benefit to us all. They would say that Germany was becoming strong again on its foundation of a loyal breed of German girls and boys who would serve their Führer and inherit his ideology and thinking, and apply it to all future generations. They also stressed that Germany would take back everything that it was robbed of by the Versailles Treaty, though they did not make particular references as to how this would be achieved.
I of course knew some girls who were Jews and it was very sad in the way that I could no longer talk to them or have any association with them at all. It was forbidden and was the one thing that I could not fully grasp, why do the Nazis hate Jews so much? What had they ever done to me personally? Was it true what the Nazis were saying? I had no answers to those questions, yet had to fall in line with everyone else and do as I was told to do. As a youngster I did not possess sufficient maturity or knowledge to challenge what I was being taught, yet I understood perfectly the differences between right and wrong, but school and the Jung Madel were saying things to the contrary and were adjusting our moral sense. It became very confusing in the end, besides, those who refused to conform, faced social isolation. Look what happened to Sophie Scholl, she was a BDM who began to challenge the Nazis and disagree with what they were doing, and they killed her by cutting off her head, yet she was German, a German citizen. Gypsies and Slavs were treated with even more contempt, and were termed as a separate sub-human species.
Anna Dann says of her education in fifth grade:
I found it very difficult to maintain my concentration for long periods of time. I had very little understanding of National Socialist politics and what it was all about. It was not the fact that I w
as not interested or anything, as we were all interested in being a part of what was happening in Germany at the time in a kind of sub-conscious manner. But I found that there were many subjects that I found boring. I didn’t like music and was not particularly good at art either, and as for the politics, well, I once fell asleep during a talk only to be caught by the teacher, Frau Mohnicke. She had a vicious temper and roared like a lion when she shouted. She dragged me to the front of the class, and although she did not hit me, I was forced to remain standing throughout the whole of the lesson, she would not even let me sit down to do my writing, yes, it could be very strict for those who failed to conform to the exact expectations of the new teachers. My friend Kristina helped me with my work, she was a very clever girl and could recite whole passages of Mein Kampf. Kristina spent much time with me helping me to read and understand what Hitler was about, and with time I was able to contribute more in political discussions in class, though you were ill advised to ever criticize Nazi policy. My father did not like the political teaching, as he believed that a woman’s place was in the home and not the political stage, but he approved of me learning to cook and do first aid and childcare and things. I liked doing those things at school and my results were pretty good in all. Many of the girls enjoyed art as a subject very much, but even art had become Nazified and we had to draw upon Nazi influences for the creation of our work, and were not really allowed any freedom of self-expression. We had to conform to the Nazi ethic and interpretations of art, which is why I did not like it, we could not use our imaginations and paint or draw what we wanted.
Certainly art did figure quite highly in the Nazi school curriculum, as art had been Hitler’s great passion, along with architecture, and would remain so until his death. German artists glorified the German citizens, soldiers and Hitler’s ideals, and Hitler, in particular, was always painted in a people’s hero-like status. He was always portrayed as a kind of a visionary figure and the core element for the cure of all of Germany’s ills. Germany’s people were portrayed in a way that made them appear as one huge united community with no class divides. The artists of the Third Reich went to great pains to portray the Jew as an inhuman and inferior subject. The artists often used grotesquely distorted facial images that had claw-like hands and wore dirty, long black coats.
Anna Dann:
Yes, the Jews, Slavs and Gypsies in particular were always painted to appear as the classic ‘Bogeyman’ style characters. The images that appeared on much of the propaganda material of the time clearly illustrate the fact. When we were shown these kinds of images for the first time it scared us to death. We were shown this kind of material in normal schooling and within the Hitler Youth also. We were told as youngsters that the Jew was a kind of monster that would destroy us if we did not force him from our homeland. The films, posters and our basic education within school and the Hitler Youth claimed that Jews were more or less running the world of finance, and that their greed was affecting the financial stability of our nation and the world. The propaganda films shown in school contained much the same content, but were very graphic in detail. The Jews selected for the films were deliberately chosen for their unattractive and sometimes sinister appearance.
Girls also studied a whole range of anti-Semitic writings in books other than Hitler’s Mein Kampf. There were those women who did challenge the Nazi’s education and attitude to women. One such female author was Irmgard Keun, a German novelist who had all of her work banned by the Nazis after she criticized and challenged their defamation of German womanhood. She was very lucky not to have been murdered by the Nazis.
Kirsten Eckermann:
I remember the most strenuous physical activities that we had to perform. We had to move like ballet dancers in perfect synchronization with each other. Everything we seemed to do had to evolve around moving in large formations, and much of our physical routines depended on strength, balance and precision movement. It was important for us to look good at public events staged by the Nazis and we had to work very hard for hours on perfecting our routines. It was important to appear as visually impressive as was possible. Aryan physicality was in my opinion the most important part of our education from the view of those in power. Though even the not-so athletic girls could find a role to play within our exercise routines.
So, fitness and strength and beauty became obsessive qualities with Hitler and were things that were put before anything else education-wise. Hitler wanted his females to stun the crowds at his rallies and other events, always with our athleticism and precision. We were also taught how to march like soldiers in perfect unison, like soldiers without guns. Some of the very good-looking girls would be selected to perform tasks on their own with hoops and things, where they would catch the eyes of visiting press and photographers. There was also a great deal of sports-style training conducted in school time as a result of the Nazi’s obsession with young females.
Biology for the ten-year-old girls had also been completely reformatted by the Nazi education system. The subject had become under Hitler’s guidance a ‘racial science’, which is perfectly illustrated in the biology textbook for fifth graders at the time.
Lebenskunde fur Mittelschulen, (Biology for the Middle School) by Hermann Schroeder Verlag, which had been published in 1942, had been thoroughly reviewed by the Nazis prior to its publication, during which Hitler insisted that quotations from his two Mein Kampf volumes were included in the text. By modern standards of biology, and its accessibility and ease of understanding to young people, Schroeder Verlag’s work can only be best described as drivel. The book examined the principles of genetics, spring, summer, fall and winter in the forest, and the human body. The idea of using the principle of plant reproduction and then applying it to human beings was a Nazi means of avoiding certain acts considered to have been unclean in their nature.
The various types of Mein Kampf quotations selected for inclusion in the book included: ‘He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world of perpetual struggle does not deserve to live’ (page 317). The book avoids even the most basic references to human male and female sexuality, emotion and reproduction, as if it were a shameful act. It is well known that many of the top-ranking Nazis enjoyed almost every available form of sexual excess, yet they could not even face up to the responsibility of educating their females into what were subjects of fundamental importance to their everyday lives. Young girls were basically taught nothing on the facts of human sexuality and reproduction. Many ten-year-olds were often only taught the very basic rudiments of the ‘facts of life’.
After joining the BDM at fourteen, some of the older BDM girls would discuss sex when together during summer camp, but only when out of the earshot of their teachers and leaders. The older girls were taught that sexual activity was something one only engaged in with a male specifically for the production of offspring. The Nazis taught the BDM that sex was indeed shameful and dirty and belonged only in the realm of the Jew, and was not something to be used for the pursuit of pleasure. Yet many leading Nazis who were supposedly happily married, were in fact often sleeping with other women – such as propaganda minister Goebbels – until Hitler, fearful of scandal, intervened and stopped them.
Dora Brunninghausen agrees that the biology textbook was a waste of time:
It puzzled me, and I can remember trying to work out in my mind just how the reproductive cycle began, what caused it between a man and a woman? And how exactly were babies made? All the rubbish about plants and forests and things only confused the reality. They just did not want to explain sex and reproduction in the human sense, and so tried I think in an unsuccessful way to apply it via nature, to make it read more cleaner and less lustful to us young girls. Anything to do with lust was considered in the realm of the Jew, Slav and the gypsy and was a dirty subject. Sex was not spoken about at school, in the Jung Madel or at home. It was a completely taboo subject, and that is perfectly reflected in the biology textbook of the da
y. There were no diagrams showing how a man fertilized the woman or anything, and if we questioned in class they always did their best to avoid any directness. I only learned about having sex when a BDM girl told me what her brother had been doing with his girlfriend. We were very inquisitive and we laughed about it an awful lot. I remember the girl drawing a picture of a woman’s vagina and she then drew a penis going inside of it.
I was shocked and said, ‘Does that thing really have to go in there?’
‘Of course it does silly, how else are you going to have a baby. The one hole is to pee through, the other is for schiesse, and the most important one is for having babies,’ she replied, and we laughed.
The thought of it really shocked me at first, but how we laughed. I learned more about sex in the BDM than anywhere else in those days. The older girls also educated me as to what periods were; mothers were quite embarrassed to have to explain this to their daughters. Why the Nazis did not teach this in school I don’t know, they were insane not to have done so.
There were other distractions to a girl’s education beside that provided by the Hitler Youth outside of school hours. Girls in 1930s Germany were expected to help their mothers around the home. Many even had to take time off from school to help their mothers with such mundane tasks as doing the family washing and laundry. This was deemed as acceptable, as girls had to be taught from an early age as to where their place was in the home. Anita Von Schoener:
I hated washing day, it was very hard work and I was expected to help my mother with this weekly task. It was not just a case of throwing all of the washing into a tub then hanging it out on a line to dry. Washing our family’s clothes and things was a job that could take up to three days to complete. My mother would soon tire and then I would have to take over from her. The combination of the hot water and the coarse soap made your hands very sore and tender indeed. In winter it was a cold and miserable task that still had to be done. My mother would check all of the clothes for any leftover dirt. Eventually she would hang them out to dry. If it was raining the clothes would have to be hung up in the kitchen where the heat from the stove would dry them. I didn’t like doing it, but it was something we had to do, we had no choice. It was very difficult to catch up with schoolwork and attend the Hitler Youth meetings in the twice-weekly evening sessions, though I tried very hard to do both. I can remember many times staying up quite late and reading books by the light of the moon. My parents would never have allowed me to stay up late, even to catch up on my studies – back then it was not the done thing, especially for girls. It did seem unfair to me even then that boys appeared to have more freedom and more time at school, and as a result they received a better education than we girls. Parents those days were not like the ones of the current generation. They could be very hard and strict and this was why so many girls joined the Hitler Youth. It was a means of escaping from and rebelling against their elders in some cases, and also a means of gaining some degree of equality. There were just so many barriers being placed before us as girls and when you get older you begin to question and examine these things more closely, then you realize, I know I realized after a few years, I thought to myself, what future do I have?