ABSTRACT
The Central Department of the Foreign Office, in charge of post-war planning in conjunction with the Reconstruction Department, shared the academic planners’ deep-rooted scepticism as to the likely success of any educational reforms imposed from outside. The term ‘re-education’ and what it implies have become so controversial over the years that it might be assumed that it must have figured prominently in British war-time planning for post-war Germany. Since most of the members of the Foreign Research and Press Service were academics, it is not surprising that German secondary and higher education received particular attention. In Washington, the Post-War Committee of the State Department was developing plans which strongly emphasised the more positive objects of ‘re-education’, ‘as a first step in the revival of self-government’. Once the war was over and the Germans had turned out to be much more manageable than anticipated, efforts like these towards achieving a more positive approach to the German problem were not lacking.
