PDF file: History - Advanced Higher - Germany - Education Scotland

Source G
A school pupil comments on life in the mid 1930s.
No one in our class ever read Mein Kampf. I myself had only used the book for
quotations. In general we didn’t know much about National Socialist ideology. Even
anti-Semitism was taught rather marginally at school, for instance through Richard
Wagner’s essay The Jews in Music – and outside school the display copies of Der
Sturmer made the idea seem questionable, if anything… Nevertheless, we were
politically programmed: programmed to obey orders, to cultivate the soldierly
‘virtue’ of standing to attention and saying ‘Yes, Sir’, and to switch our minds off
when the magic word ‘fatherland’ was uttered and Germany’s honour and greatness
were invoked.
(from Inside Nazi Germany, D Peubert, Batsford, 1987)
Source H
A Nazi publication on youth in 1938.
The education for Germany, which is organised by the Hitler Youth itself in
accordance with the Fuhrer’s will that ‘Youth must be led by youth’ … And just as
the Hitler Youth is neither a league for pre-military training, nor a sports club, so it
has no room, either, for the cultivation of a separate youth culture in musical groups
and Hitler Youth Choirs, in literary clubs and theatrical societies. Whatever is
happening within the new German youth happens exclusively in compliance with that
great and unalterable law: the commitment to the Fuhrer is the commitment to
Germany.
(from Fascism, Roger Gribbon (Ed), Oxford University Press, 1995)
Source I
On German culture in 1938.
Now, more than four years after the decisive change which German life experienced
on 30 January 1933, the criteria and principles which had to be fought for then have
penetrated the general spiritual awareness of the nation. It has long since become
self-evident to the overriding majority of the German people that the norms which
determine and shape our political life since 1933 must also, through a deep inner
necessity, affect the whole spiritual and artistic life of the present and future of our
people.
This development, for which we must thank the cleansing of German cultural life from
all distortions alien to its nature (artfremd), a process which gathered irresistible
momentum after 1933 and is now complete …
(from Fascism, Roger Gribbon (Ed), Oxford University Press, 1995)
History: Germany: Versailles to the Outbreak of World War II - 1918-1939 (AH) 81