Max_EE

Concerning the young German education, the German curriculums were heavily distorted and manipulated to prepare the young Germans to a pre-war situation. Questions in textbooks suddenly took a war-like dimension, inciting the youth to engage in military and political discussions. This is an example taken from a German mathematics textbook, and it clearly immediately surrounds the young with a military background. //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? How far apart are the craters from one another? How many kilometres can 10 such planes set alight if they fly 50 metres apart from one another? How many fires are caused if 1/3 of the bombs hit their targets and of theses 1/3 ignite?// This example merely shows that the sole purpose of the German educational system at the time Hitler was Führer was to create a future generation that was blindly loyal to Hitler and the Nazis. In school, young German pupils would learn about the history of Germany as well. The curriculum often distorted the information to make the young be outraged to find out how the German army had been “stabbed in the back” during WW1 by politicians who claimed they wanted peace. The Nazis also changed the books in order for the young to think that all the hardships that Germany suffered throughout the 1920’s was caused by greedy Jews extorting money out of honest German people, thus being a more ideological teaching. Guidelines for the teaching of history issued in 1938 by the German Central institute of Education dictated that “The teaching of history must bring the past alive for the young German in such a way it enables him to understand the present, makes him feel the responsibility of every individual for the nation as a whole and gives him encouragement for his own political activity.” This implies that as well as being aimed to plunge them into a pre-war mind set, the German education also aimed to help them forge a political viewpoint, which would be heavily influenced by the Nazi views. Because the youth were directly taught by the teachers, it was important for the Nazis to keep a close eye on the teachers was as vital for the correct indoctrination of the youth as much as the actual education the youth received. The Nazi party primarily tried to ensure that the teaching profession was ideologically correct, and politically reliable. “The weeks following the Nazi take-over saw a number of ad hoc measures by the various states to purge the profession of unreliable teachers, which were then superceded (replaced) by the application of the Law for re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933.”[1] Even though most teachers were pro-Nazi due to their poor salaries they received in the Weimar Era, the Nazis felt nevertheless that it was important to closely monitor and keep control over the teaching profession. To do this they used a variety of measures. Firstly, when the teachers were appointed, they would have to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League (NSLB), an organization that was only composed of Aryans. Secondly, the Nazis made teachers go to special indoctrination camps to further their professional development, where they had special physical education exercises as well as Nazi doctrine lectures. “What we look for our German youth is different from what people wanted in the past. In our eyes the German youth of the future must be slim and slender, swift as the greyhound, though as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must educate a new type of man so that our people is not ruined by the symptoms of degeneracy of our day.”[2] Hitler made it clear when he became the Führer that he wanted an athletic masculine youth. For this, it was essential that the youth undergoes extensive physical training. Under the Nazi Regime, Physical Education took up 15%of a school’s weekly timetable, obviously implying a mobilization towards war. As well as this extensive physical aspect of education, the Nazis introduced special boarding schools, which were separated into two kinds. The first kind of boarding schools, the Adolf Hitler Schools were aimed at teenage youth. The main aim of this school was to create a professional civil servants and administrators that would serve the Third Reich in a non-military way, but in others such as political and industrial. To achieve this, they exposed the teenagers to Nazi ideology training, involving many lectures and other activities. The second specialized boarding school, the Napolas (National Political and Educational Institutions), was a lot different to the lather, for there was a lot more of these schools then Adolf Hitler schools (4:1 ratio in favor of the Napolas). The Napola was aimed towards children of 10 years or older, and its purpose was to develop these children into strong professional soldiers and SS men. The methods employed by the heads of Napola were extensive military exercises and training. The education curriculum was similar to an extent in the USSR, for it presented similarities and contrasts to the German one. Similarly to Hitler’s German education system, Stalin’s Soviet curriculum aimed to produce a loyal Soviet citizen intensely proud of Russia's history, but more importantly capable of contributing to Stalin's new regime. Stalin, who came into power in 1924 after Lenin’s Death, aspired to increase the level of education and technical skills in the population. (More information here) The main difference between Hitler’s educational system and Stalin was the that Stalin mobilized is youth specifically for domestic reasons (teaching communist values), and not especially towards war, whereas on the other hand, Hitler who certainly did not overlook the ideological indoctrination of his youth, especially prepared his youth for war, having the hindsight of a war in future time.
 * Body Paragraph on Education and Indoctrination.**

[1] Noakes and Prindham, //Nazism, A documentary Reader, vol II// (1984) [2] Quote from Hitler’s speech at Nuremberg, on the 14th of September 1935.