GERMANY: Rift over Ribbons

Because the swank, sword-handy youths of socialite German university Studenten Korps have always been Jew-haters and fierce nationalists, they championed Adolf Hitler from the start. When his Munich beer hall Putsch fizzled in 1923 and Leader Hitler was clapped into a fortress, loyal “Nazi cells” in seven German universities were among the few brownshirt organizations to carry on. Last week came the first open rift between Korpstudenten and a Chancellor who, as one of his first acts, legalized their gory duels.

Though only rich students can afford to belong to the Korps, all German university students have been mustered into a student organization under rigid Nazi control. In one case last April when a Nazi order transferred 5,000 students from Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University to the universities of Breslau and Königsberg, student discipline held fast. At Bonn and Heidelberg, however, young aristocrats began to have their doubts. They took to roaring student songs about Liberty and Freedom, songs they had voluntarily ceased to sing a few months before out of respect for the Nazi “Total State.” Korps spirit boiled when Dr. Oskar Staebel, official Nazi student mentor, came out against student caps and the wearing of Korps colors on a narrow ribbon stretched like an ambassador’s cordon across the breast.

“Such distinctions clash with our ideal of equality among students,” declared Dr. Staebel. “Let the students burn their caps to show their trueNazi spirit.”

This was too much for student aristocrats. The explosion came last week when a fresh Nazi decree ordered abolished all the student fraternities at Göttingen. including the aristocratic Korps. Promptly more than 1,000 capped and beribboned student nabobs met in mass protest. While they vowed defiance to Adolf Hitler’s minions, capless and unribboned students approached, jeering the Korps, shouting “Heil Hitler!” At this the nabobs attacked, starting the bloodiest riot seen in years at Gottingen. To stop it shocked professors called the police who called firemen who rushed to the scene with all Gottingen’s fire engines and restored order by heroic squirting.

Three days later Education Minister Bernhard Rust, who had been rumored about to dissolve all the Fatherland’s student fraternities, abruptly dismissed Dr. Staebel, thus cracking down on their bitterest foe. But a spokesman for Minister Rust announced that all student activities would be brought more closely under the Ministry of Education’s control. In a circular sent out by the Ministry of Education schools and universities were warned last week that every German instructor must be “an exponent of National Socialist [Nazi] ideology.”

Steadily the Nazi State is encroaching not only upon German student life but upon German scholarship. History, psychology, philosophy and biology, subjects in which German pedagogs have long excelled, are now warped in the teaching to square with the notions of Nazi “pure race” preachers. Said Dr. George S. Counts, Columbia Professor of Education, last week: “In the eyes of the world graduation from German universities no longer carries with it the honor that it did prior to the rise of Hitler.”