Education: Education for Death

Adolf Hitler’s plans for America are no secret in his schools. Every young Nazi is taught to hate the U.S., knows that some day he will have to fight it. This week an educator who had heard Hitler’s plans from the mouths of Nazi babes told what he had heard in the most vivid factual firsthand account of Nazi education yet published outside Germany, Education for Death (Oxford; $2). Its author, whose integrity is vouched for by such authorities as William L. Shirer and Douglas Miller, is Michigan-born Gregor Athalwin Ziemer, 42, for eleven years headmaster of the American Colony School (for U.S. diplomats’ and businessmen’s children) in Berlin.

> In a Nazi school near Pastor Martin Neimöller’s old church, Ziemer heard a geography lesson for nine-year-olds. Teacher: “[The U.S. has] a low type of government, a democracy. What is a democracy?” Pupils: “… A government by rich Jews. … A government that will be defeated by the Führer.” > Excerpts from a favorite song of Berlin University students (tune: O Tannenbaum ):

America, America,

Oh, Jewish land, America.

You certainly conceited are;

A big fat pig, that’s what you are.

America. . . .

> In Hamburg, a teacher displayed to his class a pamphlet, The Jews in the U.S.A., with pictures of New York City’s Mayor LaGuardia beside a gorilla, “Jewish Judge Marcus Pecora” (presumably meaning New York Justice Ferdinand Pecora—who is a gentile), the “Jewess” Madam Secretary Frances Perkins. At lesson’s end, the teacher asked: “And what do you think of a country like that?” The class roared the Nazi Party battle cry: Judah verrecke! (“Death to the Jews!”).

Schoolmaster Ziemer managed his investigation of Nazi education by such devices as bribing Nazi officials with coffee and persuading Education Minister Bernhard Rust of his professional interest in Nazi educational “efficiency.” Ziemer quit Germany for the U.S. at war’s outbreak, smuggling out his notes and private Nazi pamphlets by hiding them under copies of Mein Kampf. His book is documented with names, places and direct quotations.

Prime aim of Nazi education, Ziemer found, is to fire Germans with zeal to give up their lives for Adolf Hitler. A German boy takes his first solemn oath to die for the Führer at six, repeats it at ten and 14.

But the Nazis’ interest in a German child begins even before it is conceived.

First stop in Investigator Ziemer’s educational tour was a women’s hospital in Berlin. There he saw six doctors hard at work in an operating room—sterilizing women. Swiftly and methodically hospital beds rolled in and out of the operating room. Their occupants were weak women, women who had borne weak children, women considered “enemies of the State.” Ziemer also visited a home for feebleminded boys near Leipzig, was led to a small, clean, white-painted hut, known by gossip as a Hitler Kammer. There boys who were still hopelessly clumsy at age ten were put to death. In Nazi homes for prospective mothers, Ziemer found girls who were about to bear State (illegitimate) children showered with admiration, learned that German women, married or unmarried, who had fewer than four children were considered slackers. Once he saw a group of twelve-year-old Jungmddel (members of the Nazi organization for girls under 14) chase and beat one of their number. Her crime: she had “insulted” a Jungmddel’s sister by saying she should not have had a baby without being married. Concluded Ziemer: “If we are to combat the spirit of German youth with our own spirit of Democracy, it will have to be … a spirit as fiery in its concentration as Naziism is in German schools. . . . Hitler is making fanatics. We should at least make believers. . . . Young Germany is awake and ready to die. Let young America and its parents, its instructors, and advisers be awake and ready to live.”