ABSTRACT
Curriculum development in the service of National Socialism presented a formidable task for Party and state officials. That progress was haphazard and the actual results often dubious is a reflection of this, especially given the regime's relatively short life-span. The censorship of school textbooks was one of the first and perhaps most readily implemented strategies, and yet this was not directed centrally until the spring of 1938; up to that time teachers performed the task of censoring. The institution of guidelines for elementary and secondary school curricula was similarly slow, even given that the task was no simple one. The brakes on more rapid progress were the desires of the various power groups within the Third Reich to influence education for their own ends. Subjects such as history and geography were variously recast to reflect Nazi racial doctrines. German history was studied largely to the exclusion of all other, and focused on Hitler and the rise of National Socialism. Vain attempts were made to interpret the Third Reich as the apotheosis of specified developments and trends in German history. German literature was sifted and categorised so that blood ties and sense of community were thrown into greater relief, and explicitly vOikisch literature was emphasised as part of this. Religious instruction was increasingly replaced by a motley collection of anti-Christian nationalist ideas, the change enhanced by the steady abolition of confessional schools. In the natural sciences, biology (predictably) was revised in accordance with Nazi racial theories, and racial science was granted an academic status which justified the establishment of new professorships in the universities. Many of the more mature among the German people held undeniable misgivings about the distortion of historical perspectives and the ascientific nature of some of the regime's teachings. In German youth, however, Nazism found an understandably more receptive constituency, one which was cultivated as much outside the schoolroom as in it. The ideological campaign in the schoolroom was complemented in the machinery of the Hitler Youth.
