Education: How Nazis Are Trained

The Nazi educational system had a hangdog look last week. Reports trickling out of Germany told of widespread dissatisfaction, of open grumbling by high Nazi officials:

> Dr. Bernhard Rust, Minister of Science, Education and Popular Instruction, complained publicly that university teaching and scholarship are growing steadily worse.

> There is a plague of atrocious handwriting among Nazi youth, who have come to consider a neat hand the mark of a sissy, illegible writing a sign of fighting spirit and recklessness.

> The shortage of teachers is acute (reason: teachers are the most spied-on group in Germany).

> The shortage of doctors is even worse. New physicians are licensed after only two years of professional training, and the Army complains bitterly of their incompetence.

>Worst of all, the Army finds that Nazi-educated boys, supposedly trained in soldierly virtues from childhood, often are unfit for soldiering. When they are put through the stiff tests for officers given by the Army’s Psychological Laboratory (TIME, July 21), they are found impertinent, undisciplined, lazy, unreliable. Reason: the Nazi Party code had brought them up to be disrespectful of their parents and teachers.

But one branch of Nazi education, in the Nazi mind the most important, is proceeding according to plan: the training of governors for conquered provinces. At the University of Berlin 600 were enrolled in a new “Faculty for the Study of Foreign Countries and Foreign Languages,” where each man specialized in a foreign country of his choice. Professor for America: Dr. Friedrich Schonemann, a onetime Harvard teacher. At Marburg University there is a special department for training future bureaucrats for Britain.

Berlin and Marburg are for underlings. If & when Hitler conquers the world, the top dogs will be graduates of the elite Nazi leadership schools, whose founder was Naziism’s High Priest Alfred Rosenberg. How they work was recently described in a report on Nazi education by Dr. Reinhold Schairer, onetime coordinator of student aid in German universities, now leader of the U.S. Committee on Educational Reconstruction (TIME, July 21).

Education of a future Nazi big shot begins at age 8, when he enters one of the junior leadership schools called Napoli (National Political Institutes). The boys are supposedly chosen with extreme care; actually they are usually relatives of the Schutzstaffel or Gestapo men who pick candidates. In the Napoli, handsomely equipped boarding schools, boys live like young Etonians, go in for sports, “political instruction,” Nazi race theories. Each boy gets his assignment early, thereafter concentrates on special studies for his role as Gauleiter of California, Texas, Argentina or Odessa, as the case may be.

He leaves the Napoli at 19, works in a labor camp, does two years of military service, then goes to his “province” (e.g., California) for four or five years’ work in the Nazi consular service or a Nazi corporation. At about 25, if he has passed all these tests, he enters the most exalted of all Nazi schools, the Ordensburgen (Castles of the Order).

There are five such castles in Germany; a student spends a year in each one. He must study Nazi ideology, languages, history, skiing, riding, golf, other social graces, must learn to fly. Near each castle is a girls’ center whose sole function is to entertain the boys.

Said Schairer: “If Naziism should win this war, the next step would be to send out . . . those boys to their prospective posts, together with equipment and unlimited money to begin their work. . . .”