Cruel World (13 page)

And, of course, her offspring would be taken care of should the father, legal or otherwise, succumb. Despite the protests, the genie was out of the bottle, and the number of illegitimate births rose immediately. The SS, having launched its campaign, was not deterred by controversy. Quite the opposite. As the war expanded into the vast reaches of the Soviet Union and tens of thousands died, its exhortations only increased:

Indeed, the Nazi press declared, “A girl who shirks her highest duty is a traitor, just as much as the soldier who abandons his post.” American diplomats monitoring the German press from Switzerland reported numerous ads such as the following in the
Süd-deutscher Sonntagspost:

By January 1944 the German mothers did indeed stand beside the generals, not in victory, but in the horror of loss. Despite all the incentives, total war had caused the birthrate to plunge once again to its 1933 low. But Hitler was not deterred in his population planning. In thoughts recorded previously by Martin Bormann at the Führer’s Eastern Front headquarters in a remote area of East Prussia, as some 73,000 of his troops, which by now included thousands of teenaged German boys, faced imminent death in the Ukraine, the beleaguered Nazi leader had said that although he was sure that the war would still be won on the battlefield, it was clear that it would be lost on the population front. Estimating that three to four million women would have been widowed or remain unmarried after the war, Hitler proposed that, despite this, they be persuaded to have as many children as possible. Convincing them would require a great deal of “education,” as women often became “fanatical in their virtue” once they were married. The “education” would have to await victory, since “not every soldier forthwith would desire that in the event of his death his wife or his betrothed should beget children by another man.” But once the war was over, and the husbands and lovers safely dead, the negative-sounding word “illegitimate” would have to be eliminated from the German language. The fact that many famous men had been illegitimate should be emphasized. Monogamous marriages based on love and compatibility should, of course, be encouraged, and children should bear their father’s names, but the state should also encourage “marriage-like relationships” and provide shelter and food for illegitimate children. The number of boarding schools run by the NSV should be greatly increased to “help” the mothers of such children, especially as “the best and ablest ones” were for the most part “wild boys and cannot be controlled by their mothers alone.” It was not until paragraph 28 of this document that Hitler went completely beyond anything previously proposed by declaring that “by special application a man should be able to enter a marriage relationship not only with one woman but also with a second, the second woman as well as her children also taking his name.” This arrangement too would be supported by the state, if necessary: the funds would come in part from an extra tax on bachelors.
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All this, declared the man who had decimated his nation, must be done so that the lives of the dead would not have been given in vain.

In Nazi ideology, as in all extremist thought, indoctrination of the rising generation was crucial. The hours spent at school were captive hours that, ideally, would be controlled by the state. Here the child could be weaned from his family and fed National Socialist principles. The Nazification of the German schools did not happen overnight, and would, in fact, never succeed entirely, because the process was not limited to racial purification, but aimed at a complete reorganization of the school system and a transformation of the intellectual standards of the nation, efforts that were tacitly resisted by a considerable number of educators.

Purging the schools of racially and physically undesirable students and teachers and instilling racial awareness was only one part of the Nazi plan for education. Once convinced of the superiority of his race, the young German must be prepared not only to increase and defend it, but to provide it with new territories by conquest. It would not be enough to hate domestic enemies. The countries that had punished Germany in World War I must in turn be punished. Enclaves of Germans all over the world must be made aware of their racial origins and rescued by their brethren in the Reich. Hitler had discussed such a struggle at great length in his aptly named
Mein Kampf
, which is a call to battle for German youth. In Hitler’s view, education must, above all, provide a physically strong citizenry able to respond to a “really great spirit” (which, one presumes, refers to Hitler himself) as opposed to “physical degenerates,” too weak in will to “follow the lofty flight of such an eagle.” The development of mental abilities and scientific schooling was secondary to the “promotion of will power and determination, combined with the training of joy in responsibility.” Further, the proper formation of children was “not an affair of the individual, and not even a matter which primarily regards the parents,” but “a requirement for the self-preservation of the nationality, represented and protected by the state.” The German people, which in Hitler’s view lay “broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world,” needed to imbue its “young national comrades” with the conviction that they were “absolutely superior” to others.

Nazi education would not end with secondary school, but would continue
in the “post-school period” and be “a preparation for future military service,” which, when successfully fulfilled, would allow the child to receive two documents: “his citizen’s diploma, a legal document which admits him to public activity, and his health certificate, confirming his physical health for marriage.”
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What the exact fate of Aryans unable or unwilling to complete this process might be was not yet explained.

In practical terms, Hitler’s proposals were a clear blueprint for the creation of a self-renewing reservoir of youth pre-indoctrinated and physically trained for military service. Intellectual pursuits and long-term study, especially in the humanities, did not fit into this program. In order to get the young into government-controlled service as soon as possible, it would be desirable to shorten the time spent in secondary school and severely limit the number of students admitted to universities. Such a program would also benefit the German economy, devastated like so many others in the Depression, by reducing the number of “unemployable” university graduates, who represented a “dangerous intellectual proletariat.” Students would be forced to enter the workforce and become wage earners at a younger age, and, it was thought, would marry earlier and begin producing more little Aryans for the Fatherland.
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Implementing these reforms would be an enormous undertaking. Although admiration of the military and resentment at the nation’s treatment after World War I was strong in Germany, and its teacher force was conservatively inclined, the complete transformation of educational standards in Germany’s traditionally rigorous schools was a delicate subject. Even the most ardent Nazis were often also alumni of proud institutions and were dedicated, as alumni always are, to preserving their traditions.

The German school system, like that of most European countries, was made up of a complex array of class-based and denominational schools controlled in 1933 by private interests, local governments, and religious entities. Religion was taught in all schools, whether they were run by churches or not. In the secular schools, each denomination, including Judaism, had its own religion class. In 1926, a law had been passed requiring students of all backgrounds to be grouped together for the first four years of school. There the standardization ended. From then on the children were divided into two tracks: those who would leave school for the workforce at age fourteen, having completed eight years of school, and those who would continue on for five more years to finish secondary schools. These were in no way uniform, and parents could send their children to more than sixteen types of schools, from Catholic to Jewish to vocational to highly intellectual and classical. Such diversity did not please
the Nazis, who particularly disliked the denominational schools, which would become one of the first elements to succumb in the Party’s slow but relentless drive to eliminate the churches altogether.

Hitler was well aware of the power of the churches and of their hold on the populace. Like the Jewish community, the Christian church hierarchies could not at first comprehend that their destruction was the Nazi aim, and they not only cooperated with the new regime but, in the early years, supported it strongly, often rivaling their new government in their fervid patriotism, anti-Communism, and anti-Semitism. Yet it soon became apparent that there was to be only one religion in the future Reich and that it would not be Christian. Belated and courageous resistance in the fatally divided Protestant denominations was ruthlessly suppressed. Hitler’s 1933 Concordat with the Vatican was soon violated, and in March 1937, the repressions in Germany led Pope Pius XI to issue a cryptic encyclical entitled
With Burning Sorrow
, which warned of “destructive religious wars … which have no other aim than … extermination.”

Hitler could not with impunity take all the churches away from the millions of committed worshippers, especially in heavily Catholic Bavaria, but he could begin to take their children away from the churches by gradually closing the parochial schools and phasing out the traditionally required religion courses and activities in the secular schools. Teaching staff was reduced and religion grades were put at the bottom, instead of the top, of report cards before being deleted altogether. School prayer was made optional in 1935. Soon crucifixes were banned from classrooms, and in 1938 even that old standby the Christmas Pageant was forbidden.
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After strong protests in some jurisdictions, the crucifixes were put back, but by 1941 religious instruction for children over fourteen had vanished from all but the Jewish schools. In the same year the Catholic kindergartens, the last remnant of the parochial system, were closed.

There were belated protests from the German pulpits. Catholic bishops, gathered at a meeting in Fulda in 1941, exhorted parents to become the religious teachers of their children for “the home of any Christian family must become a small house of God.” And Bishop Clemens, Graf von Galen of Münster, warned parents of the possible subversion of their children at school:

The bishops’ fears were well founded. In the fall of 1941, the American representative to the Holy See noted that the Vatican Secretary of State, referring to Poland and Russia, where the Church had virtually ceased to exist, had “drawn a very gloomy picture of the present situation of the Church in occupied territory and felt that it would only grow worse in future.”
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That the same fate awaited the German Church was made clear in almost simultaneous cables to Washington from Berlin and Zurich. The Berlin embassy reported that the Papal Nuncio had received copies of a manuscript by Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg entitled “Culture and Religion in the Third Reich,” which proposed that all priests be athletic Nazi officials. They would be required to marry, as celibacy “robs the population of new blood.” The document also advocated “the complete abolition of Papal power in domestic politics” and indicated that the new “Reich Church” would be headed by the Führer.
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These ideas were augmented in the Zurich cable, which reported on a radical thirty-point program for the “National Reich Church.” The new entity would have only one doctrine, “race and nation,” and was determined to “exterminate irrevocably … the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the illomened year of 800.” All church property would be taken over by the state, and the present clergy, “who only lie … to the German nation, goaded by their love of the position they hold and the sweet bread they eat,” should be removed. The Bible would be burned and replaced by
Mein Kampf
, and every German should “live and complete his life according to this book,” which would also be the only adornment on the altars. The altars, oddly enough, would be retained in the old churches. God could be acknowledged, but there was not to be any “unworthy” kneeling or Communion. The new religion would not be forgiving: “The National Reich church does not acknowledge the forgiveness of sins.… A sin once committed will be ruthlessly punished by the honorable and indestructible laws of nature and punishment will follow during the sinner’s lifetime.” Last but not least,
Point 30 required that on the day of foundation of the new church, “the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels within the Reich and its colonies” and must be “superseded by the only unconquerable symbol of Germany,” the swastika.
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