rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

220 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHin a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandishassertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious thatthey were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or readin the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on suchoccasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence,as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it waseven to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and forwhom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynicaldisregard for truth, said they were.EDUCATION IN THE THIRD REICHOn April 30, 1934, Bernhard Rust, an Obergruppenfuehrer in the S.A., onetimeGauleiter of Hanover, a Nazi Party member and friend of Hitler since theearly Twenties, was named Reich Minister of Science, Education and PopularCulture. In the bizarre, topsy-turvy world of National Socialism, Rust was eminentlyfitted for his task. Since 1930 he had been an unemployed provincialschoolmaster, having been dismissed in that year by the local republican authoritiesat Hanover for certain manifestations of instability of mind, thoughhis fanatical Nazism may have been partly responsible for his ouster. For Dr.Rust preached the Nazi gospel with the zeal of a Goebbels and the fuzzinessof a Rosenberg. Named Prussian Minister of Science, Art and Education inFebruary 1933, he boasted that he had succeeded overnight in ”liquidating theschool as an institution of intellectual acrobatics.”To such a mindless man was now entrusted dictatorial control over Germanscience, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning and the youthorganizations. For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was notto be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, politicaland martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax notso much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a smallminority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and thenin service, as conscripts, in the armed forces.Hitler’s contempt for ”professors” and the intellectual academic life had pepperedthe pages of Mein Kampf, in which he had set down some of his ideas oneducation. ”The whole education by a national state,” he had written, ”mustaim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodieswhich are physically healthy to the core.” But, even more important, he hadstressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youthin the service ”of a new national state” – a subject he returned to often afterhe became the German dictator. ”When an opponent declares, ”I will not comeover to your side,’ ” he said in a speech on November 6,1933, ”I calmly say,’Your child belongs to us already . . . What are you? You will pass on. Yourdescendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short tune they willknow nothing else but this new community.’ ” And on May 1, 1937, he declared,”This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and giveto youth its own education and its own upbringing.” It was not an idle boast;that was precisely what was happening.The German schools, from first grade through the universities, were quicklyNazified. Textbooks were hastily rewritten, curricula were changed, Mein