Erika Mann - School for Barbarians

Another specialist in the field, Professor Ernst Dobers of the High School for the Instruction of Teachers in Elbing, writes in his book The Jewish Question — Material and its Treatment in Schools:

“How do we wish our people to look? We place two groups of pictures side by side: on the one hand, Nordically classified bodies and faces, sportsman types, Olympic athletes, soldiers, typical officers, leaders; on the other hand, we present a group of Jews, whether these are ordinary contemporaries or the ‘great’ of Judah, such as the majority of Bolshevist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg, Hilferding, Eisner, Theodor Lessing, Gumbel, Stampfer, Rathenau, Theodor Wolff, Georg Bernhard, Hirschfeld, Kestenberg, or whatever their names may be. It will naturally result that the children will feel kinship with the one side, and, quite naively, passionate rejection on the other; that is a matter of course. It is then the object of the spoken pedagogical word constantly to strengthen and to build up with knowledge and perception this consciousness of the German child’s old nature and the complete foreignness of the other.”

It is conspicuous that we are given no example of the “Olympic athletes” or “typical officers.” Possibly Professor Dobers fails to consider Goebbels a “Nordically classified body.” Possibly he remembers that the Jewish heavyweight boxer, Max Baer, defeated the “Aryan” Schmeling (and, since then, the Negro, Joe Louis, has beaten him in record time), and that there were quite a number of Jewish winners in the Olympic games. “The ‘great’ of Judah,” however, are specified; and it is typical of the lack of education of Nazi educators that they list capitalist bankers, editors of bourgeois newspapers and liberal scientists all as “Bolshevist leaders.” Rosa Luxemburg is the only Communist on the list, although she shares the fate of murder by the Nazi with Kurt Eisner, Theodor Lessing and Walther Rathenau.

Lack of education, deliberate falsification. This pair of Nazi qualities is evident in teaching everywhere — in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, notorious lies, which are recommended for use in the schools, and in such books as Herrmann Gauch’s New Elements of Racial Instruction, the standard work of this new “science,” which states baldly:

“We can advance the assertion” (after a detailed description of the Nordic and non-Nordic human being) “at the base of all Racial Science; there is no concept of ‘human being’ (‘man’) in contradistinction to animals separated by any physical or mental trait; the only existing differentiation is between Nordic man, on the one hand, and animals as a whole, including all non-Nordic human beings, or sub-men, who are transitional forms of development.”

Herrmann Gauch and his theory are no exception. They are representative— all of these statements are tragically typical — of the material fed the Nazi child. And when he continues: “…It has, however, not been proved that the non-Nordic man cannot be mated with apes…” he is repeating the deep conviction of his Führer. For it was Hitler who said: “A popular state will… in the first place, bring marriage out of its place as a permanent racial dishonor and give it the sacredness of that institution whose mission it is to create images of the Lord and not monsters between man and ape.”

A more cautious textbook, The A B C of Race (warmly recommended “for general use” by the Munich School of Racial Politics), portrays a big-nosed Jew, but protects itself this way: “Of course we must not confuse a purely external expression with Race. Race means Soul. And there are men who do, as a matter of fact, show some Nordic traits, but they are Jews in spirit.”

The ABC outlines Germany’s four great problems:

1. Germany has too little territory, because of the loss of her colonies.

2. One-third of her population lives in exile (the 35,000,000 Austrians, [1] One alteration of the figure should be made now for Austria. Tr. Czechs, Swiss, Dutch, Danes, Alsatians, and Americans, who belong by blood and language to the “Greater Germany”).

3. The menace of the Jews (“a mixture of Asiatic and Negro blood, with a tiny amount of European blood”).

4. The falling birth-rate.

“A nation without territory in time becomes a nation without people…. If, however, we all fight together under our mighty-National Socialist leadership and under the protection of the new racial laws, then the glorious Nordic future of Germany is assured. Did not the Führer himself prophesy: ‘A nation that fosters only its best stock in a racially degenerate age must become master of the world’?”

A marching song has recently been produced for children, that describes how the world will look when the Germans conquer it:

It is necessary for Germany to hate, passionately and ceaselessly, everything that stands in the way of world mastery. Even the innocent concepts of “Reason,” “Piety,” and “Love of Peace,” threaten it. Hatred is nurtured; and it is easier to hate a man than an idea; people you see in the flesh, than people far away; a relatively small number than a greater group. Hatred for the Jews, then, seems the best and most “productive.” Fuel of all sorts is therefore added: calumny, pseudo-science, and pornography.

One of the oldest and most intimate friends of the Führer is Julius Streicher, Gau Leader of Franconia and editor and publisher of the weekly, Der Stürmer. Although Streicher has had bitter enemies in the Party ranks, Hitler remains with him, because he regards him as a good hater. He values the smut of Streicher as a weapon in the Nazi struggle, and approves its use in teaching. Distinguished foreigners, traveling through Germany, are always assured that no sensible person ever reads the Stürmer, that Streicher himself has “good intentions,” although “sometimes he goes too far in his eagerness” — another fact to be disparaged for the outer world. As a matter of fact, the Stürmer, which writes almost exclusively about sexual outrages, bedroom gossip, and scandal, is read in the schools to children between six and fourteen; its denunciations are themes for their homework, and their “education” is based on its improprieties.

The principal of the Overbeckstrasse School in Cologne, Max Burkert, writes: “From your glorious fighting magazine, the Stürmer, I have cut the photos of a number of Jews who once were permitted to rule Germany, and have mounted them, as the accompanying photograph will show. Armed with this illustration, I lecture on the Jewish question in all the upper classes of my school…. How deeply-rooted your idea already is can be seen from the following story of an experience I had with a nine-year-old pupil. He came to school one day and said to me: ‘Sir, yesterday I went for a walk with my mother. Suddenly, as we passed the Kaufhof (a Jewish store), my mother happened to remember that she badly needed a few balls of twine. She wanted to give me some money to go into the shop and buy the twine for her. Whereupon I said to my mother, “I will not go in there. You will have to do that yourself. But I promise you that, if you do go into that shop, I’ll tell my teacher tomorrow. He will order you to come to school, and then you’ll see what happens.” ’