The essence of the role of the teacher in the Third Reich was eloquently captured by Nazi educator Hermann Klaus in an essay describing proper grammar school festivities. “The teacher is not just an instructor and a transmitter of knowledge,” wrote Klaus. “He is more than that. He is a soldier, serving on the cultural-political front of National Socialism.” This duty, he explains, is to “form human souls.
Adolf Hitler
Scholastic integrity in Nazi Germany didn’t revolve around honest intellectual inquiries, but was instead supposed to serve the cause of National Socialism. Adolf Hitler described this mentality in a 1923 speech in Munich. “A change in education is a further necessity: today we suffer from over-education,” said Hitler. “Only knowledge is prized. The know-it-alls are the enemies of action. What is needed is instinct and will.”
To Hitler, intellectualism was correlated with a lack of patriotism, racial mixing and, most ominously, Jewry. Thus, the role of education would be not to encourage creative inquiry, which leads to unpredictable results, but to mold the mind to unquestionably accept the core tenets of Nazism as articles of faith.
But Hitler was not Germany's only advocate of such heavy-handed bottom-down education, nor were his words necessarily the most articulate. To truly understand education in Nazi Germany, we must examine the words of Nazi Germany's less significant actors.
Martin Heidegger
The mentality of Nazi academia can also be captured in the rector address of legendary philosopher (as well as Nazi Party member) Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg, where he lays out the students’ three obligations, both as members of the university and as citizens of the Third Reich. “The first obligation is to the community of the people,” he said, with the second obligation “to the honor and fate of the nation in the midst of other peoples,” which primarily encompasses military service.
The third obligation, which Heidegger defined as “the spiritual mission of the German nation,” is the most telling to where he placed the priorities of Nazi German academia. The causes he listed for this obligation tend to reflect a thoroughly Nazi view of Germany’s place in the world, with particular emphasis on the metaphysical national “spirit” : “Our nation realizes its own fate by risking its history in the arena of world power in which all human existence is affected and by continually fighting for its own spiritual world.” Knowledge is essential to fulfill this mission, but Heideggar explains that the servicing of knowledge by the state is vital.“The professions create and administer that highest and most essential knowledge of the nation concerned with its total existence,” explained Heidegger. “But to us this knowledge is not a merely quietistic cognizance of spirit and values itself, but an awareness of that greatest danger for our own existence, posed by the superior powers of being.”
The implications of his words seem to encourage an academic environment that doesn’t support the liberal ideal of free, transparent accumulation of knowledge, but instead supports the aim of creating a scholarly record that, first and foremost, serves the purposes of the state.
Anti-Liberalism
Gerhard Kruger (a prominent Nazi student leader and future neo-Nazi organizer) spelled out the ideal Nazi educational philosophy in a 1933 article. While viewing classical liberal education as over-focused upon the advancement of the intellectual class, he insisted that education should instead be for the benefit of the Volk and state. Classical liberal education in particular was cited by Kruger as the primary antithesis of Nazi educational philosophy. “During the nineteenth century, the ideal of the harmonious man, as classic liberalism viewed it, gradually degenerated into the onesidedness of specialists who no longer had any true connection with the community,” claimed Kruger.
This attitude was common amongst German conservatives even before the rise of the Third Reich, with former Freikorps member Ernst Von Salomon making a similar argument in 1930: “The intellectual speaks and writes ‘I.’ He feels no connectedness,” claimed Salomon. “He causes disintegration, the disintegration of the mass of individual beings into the particularized individual beings, who henceforth stands not under and not over the people, but at their side.”
Such educational philosophy was intended to appeal to the people’s sense of community, but National Socialism frequently failed to live up to its socialist pretensions. The Nazi educators’ attempt to vitalize the Volk, which was frequently anti-intellectual in nature, stemmed from an attempt to consolidate the Volk in a national will to power. Whereas individual intellects were shunned, individual racial characteristics took the former’s place as the predominant factor to be considered. For example, the 1941 admission regulations to the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin contained extensive racial requirements and national service requirements for prospective students, but there is little mention of expected academic standards.This is primarily because the Nazis converted the Nietzschean übermensch from an intellectual idol into a racial idol, and this was reflected in the schooling system.
Sources:
- Mosse, George L. 1966. Nazi culture : Intellectual, cultural and social life in the third reich. New York, NY: Grosset and Dunlap.
- Farias, Victor. 1989. Heidegger and nazism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Bennett Murray - Bennett Murray wrote for his first publication in 2006, and has been writing ever since. Murray most recently worked for the Phnom Penh ...
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