ABSTRACT
The ultimate goal of Nazi education policy was the creation of 'the political, National Socialist human being'. Education was not to be training towards free, independent activity, but was to develop the abilities of young Germans so that they fulfilled the aims and desires of the Nazi state. The reorganisation of the education system on Nazi lines had a number of distinctive dimensions. It involved an extensive revision of the curriculum. It involved the progressive removal of political and racial undesirables from the profession of teachers. It embraced the establishment of a stream of specialist schools where the future Nazi elite was to be trained. Finally, it applied the Fuhrerprinzip to the whole structure of educational administration and brought the professional teaching organisations firmly within the Nazi orbit. Certain of these aims were more quickly achieved than others: the purge of teachers, as well as the co-ordination of administration in accordance with the Fuhrerprinzip. By the close of 1933, for instance, most Jewish teachers had been dismissed. The nazification of the curriculum was more protracted and initially fell prey to some of the rivalries of the Hitler state, notably between the Education Ministry and Hess's Central Party Office. Curriculum consolidation was hampered, anyway, by a declining supply of teachers and money, a feature which grew more serious after the outbreak of war. The enormous stress that the Nazis laid on physical education also slowed the learning process, regardless of the burdens that may have been imposed by a novel ideology. Pupils could
spend up to five hours a day engaged in sports. There was also a latent conflict with the Hitler Youth, which set a rival focus for children's energies and loyalties. After 1933, pupils of non-Aryan origin attended Gennan schools only by privilege. Where they did so, many were subjected to discrimination and ridicule. Jewish communities sought to expand the number of specifically Jewish schools, but such responses were to become irrelevancies in the face of policies of liquidation: by June 1942, for instance, Jewish children were prohibited from school attendance altogether.
