Cruel World (16 page)
Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Any ceremonial occasion could be a trap. It was hard to know what to do. In most schools, Jewish children, despite the fact that they were not considered part of the Volk, were required to give the Nazi salute at the outdoor morning assemblies. Even though their parents had often told them not to, most, not being “superhuman,” saluted anyway. Those who did not risked punishments such as having the offending hand whipped with a bamboo rod.
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Berlin pupil Klaus Scheurenberg, however, had quite a different experience when he did salute along with his classmates:
The physical education teacher saw me do this. In front of everybody he came over and gave me a murderous beating. “You Jew boy,” he screamed, “you are not allowed to give the German salute.” I started to cry. I was only eight years old. “I’m German too!” I cried back. He screamed even louder, “What, you’re a German? You’re a
Saujude!”
… That’s why I went to my religion teacher and asked her what a
Saujude
was. What was a Jew?
The teacher explained that being a Jew meant lighting the candles on Friday night and keeping the Sabbath day holy. Klaus, who had assumed that everyone did that, was amazed to hear that only the Jews did.
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Once inside the doors of the school, traditionally a refuge from the streets, things were no better. At one elementary school Aryan children were sent with sponges and soap to scrub seats where Jewish children had sat.
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Jewish boys, no matter how good, could not represent their schools in sports and school trips, and were usually excluded from excursions. Even if they were allowed to go along, there were tortures:
We had a tough hardcore Nazi as a physical education and swimming teacher. The first day we had to put on our bathing trunks and stand alongside the pool. When we were all lined up, he said, “Herz, step forward. And you stay there. We won’t go into the pool with a half Jew.”
From then on I spent swimming class, two hours every week, standing at the edge of the pool in my trunks.
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Some merciful teachers warned parents to keep their children at home on such occasions, but others could be devastatingly cruel, even when the celebration was Mother’s Day. “You have to be present for the festival,” a teacher told two little girls, “but since you are Jewish, you are not allowed to join in the songs.” When one of the children protested that she too wanted to sing for her mother, the teacher answered, “I know you have a mother … but she is only a Jewish mother.”
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It is terrible to imagine what it must have been like to stand silently in the midst of the singing children.
Not even the most innocent childish friendships were allowed to survive, a fact that the humiliated children often tried to conceal from their parents.
[The children] tried with all their willpower not to let us know about their suffering, but the signs of pain in the girl’s childlike face were too evident to escape our eyes … it was the younger one who had to tell it, since the child’s resistance was now broken and, with the wild sobbing which followed, there was not one word we could understand.… “Daddy,” she said, “until now, sister was sitting beside her best friend, though they had not been allowed to be together on the way home, nor during the recreation hour. But now the teacher said, in the presence of all the girls, that it was no longer possible to have an Aryan girl sitting beside a Jewish girl. This would be a disgrace for an Aryan. And the teacher ordered her to take her seat in the last bench against the wall, and no Aryan girl could take a seat in this row. Now she is sitting alone in the rear of the classroom.”
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There was no refuge in the intellectual sphere either, where every opportunity was taken to drive home the Nordic and Germanic message. All disciplines emphasized the conspiracy of “International Jewry” and the inferiority and biological unattractiveness of the “non-Aryan” races. This was not particularly aimed at the non-Aryan students, but was part of the indoctrination of their German peers. It was as if the “alien blood” students did not exist as sentient beings.
The themes introduced in geography and history were developed much further in biology. The teaching of racial studies and eugenics soon was required in designated classes. This order was a bonanza for the extremists whose eugenics texts had gone unread for years. Hundreds of books and
pamphlets were published for all levels of instruction. Written in turgid and propagandistic prose, they are guaranteed to put all but the most ardent fanatic to sleep. Ostensibly biology texts, the books, after providing minimal introductions to genetics and prehistory, were dedicated almost entirely to a totally unscientific definition of races and their supposed characteristics.
In one such volume, published in 1934 and typical of the genre, Europe was divided into five main racial types: Nordic, Dinaric, Alpine, Mediterranean, and Eastern/Baltic.
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Photographs and charts illustrated and compared physical characteristics. Needless to say, the best-looking and best-groomed were the Nordics. Eyes were compared, as were lips, chins, noses (Nordic—thin; Mediterranean—curved; Dinaric—quite fleshy; Eastern—thick, not curved; and so on), faces, heads, and body shapes. To this were added spiritual and intellectual qualities that read like bad horoscopes and that, naturally, demonstrated the superiority of the Nordic race.
Outside Europe things got more complicated: the Indians (from India, not Winnetou), originally “Indo-Germans,” had, alas, gone downhill due to mixing with lesser races, but the fact that an Indian, Dr. Chandrasekhara Raman, had won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1930 made clear that the Nordic element in India had not yet been completely eradicated. In Africa, the Negro had “triumphed biologically” over the white settlers and would soon do the same in the hopelessly heterogeneous United States. What’s more, the French, in throwing out the Huguenots in 1685 and the aristocrats in 1789, and in carrying on the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, had severely diminished their Nordic population, which accounted for their “intellectual decline.” A separate section was reserved for the Jews, who were worse than anybody, as they were not a “pure” race, but a complicated mixture of Oriental and Middle Eastern peoples who had also mixed with Dinarics, but who could easily be distinguished from the latter by their even fleshier noses.
The books also included a detailed explanation of the Nuremberg Laws, which, the authors claimed, would keep Germany pure while allowing Jews to lead their own lives. Miscegenation of any kind was condemned. Along with the Jews, Negroes and the yellow races were specifically mentioned, and the reader was cautioned that mixing with “Middle Eastern” and “Oriental elements” to “the east of our Reich” was also to be avoided, thus introducing the Slavs, who would be the next ethnic group to be designated subhumans, or
Untermenschen
.
To keep these undesirable races from prevailing, the schoolchildren
were taught, it was the duty of all Germans to trace their own purity. For this, one textbook noted (rather contradictorily, after all the noses and chins), visual analysis was insufficient. Nordic appearance, it was forced to admit, did not always indicate Nordic race. Indeed, a small dark type (like Propaganda Minister Goebbels) might well be impeccably Nordic. True race could only be determined by genealogical analysis. In one pamphlet, designed for twelve-year-olds, a highly decorative and rather heraldic fold-out chart was provided and full instructions given. Students were advised to create a family archive, complete with handwriting samples, photographs of ancestors, and other documentation, as a complete family history would make it easier to tell the race of a person.
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The students were also required to note any “special susceptibilities, talents, psychopathic dispositions or important illnesses” in their families, “as much can be done with this information,” which would lead to better “selection” and improvement of the “hereditary mass.” Thus children became unwitting informants for the various racial agencies.
The courses on racial hygiene were of the greatest importance, for on the outcome of the pretty little genealogical charts, as we have seen, whole lives depended. They would determine whom one could marry, where one could travel and work, how much food one was allotted, and, eventually, whether one would be put to death. It was bad enough to deal with one’s classification as an
Untermensch
even if one was prepared. For some, the shock of discovering this status in the course of a routine homework assignment could be devastating. Half- or quarter-Jewish children, many of whom had been baptized and whose protective parents had kept knowledge of their ancestry from them, sometimes became suicidal or physically ill at the revelation of a heritage that overnight closed to them most educational and career options and simultaneously turned them into social outcasts. Hatred for the “guilty” parents was not uncommon.
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The situation was not always without black humor. In the bosoms of families there were even jokes: “What does the ideal Aryan look like? As tall as Goebbels, as slim as Göring, as blond as Hitler.”
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And memoirs and oral histories are full of examples of blond, blue-eyed Jewish children being not only mistaken for “Aryans” but also held up as perfect examples of the race:
Most of the classes had been gathered that morning in the big hall, since an officer of the new
Rasseamt
, the office of races, had come to give a talk about the differences of races.… He said that there are two groups of races, a high group and a low one. The high and upper race that was destined to rule the world was the Teutonic, the German race, while one of the lowest races was the Jewish race. And then … he looked around and asked one of the girls to come to him.… “Look here, the small head of this girl, her long forehead, her very blue eyes, and blond hair,” and he was lifting one of her long blond braids. “And look,” he said, “at her tall and slender figure. These are the unequivocal marks of a pure and unmixed Teutonic race.” You should have heard how at this moment all the girls burst into laughter. Then from all sides of the hall there was shouting, “She is a Jewess!” You should have seen the officer’s face!… The principal got up … quickly and … dismissed the man, thanking him for his interesting and very enlightening talk.… At that we began again to laugh.
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Jewish children are humiliated in class
.
(photo credit 4.2)
Some mixed families tried to fight the system by requesting an “Aryanization” proceeding. One Aryan grandmother of immaculate propriety signed an affidavit saying that her son was not the issue of her Jewish husband but of a traveling “manufacturer from the Black Forest.” Her son and his blond children, accompanied by an Aryan uncle, then
went off to a special race institute in Tübingen for a hearing. The daughter remembered:
My father … was very stately [while] … this Aryan uncle … looked incredibly Jewish. We went up there, indeed to a castle in Tübingen, and the professor walked over purposefully to this uncle and said, “Good day, Herr Dr. Goldmann,” and my uncle said, “You have erred, Herr Professor. I’m the Aryan part of the family.” … And you could not
laugh …
we just about exploded. The scientists got very red faces.… My father … looked more like Kaiser Wilhelm.… Anyway, their whole theory was overturned within a quarter of a minute.
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The experiences of Jewish children varied widely from school to school. Worst off were children in country schools, where they often had few fellow sufferers. In the big high schools of cities like Berlin, some students continued without serious harassment, and almost all had certain teachers and loyal fellow students who protected them for a time. But the pressure on both the Jewish students and their sympathizers was unrelenting, and protective actions soon became dangerous. By 1936 nearly two-thirds of an estimated 60,000 Jewish children between five and sixteen had left the mainstream German schools to attend purely Jewish ones. Even here they were not entirely free from government supervision. The German Ministry of Education still controlled many aspects of the curriculum, and diplomas embossed with both swastika and Star of David were sometimes given to secondary school graduates. For many from assimilated families, the Jewish studies given at these schools were their first contact with both culture and religion. But there was no question that for the children, no matter how assimilated they had once been, the segregated schools were a refuge.
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One boy, sent to a Jewish boarding school in Potsdam, recalled that after months of humiliation by his history teacher at the local
Realgymnasium
, where he was the only Jewish student, and had, therefore, had to bear the “full measure of the [teacher’s] venom,” he at last “felt free and happy and in a loving atmosphere, conducive to learning.”
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And American Ambassador William Dodd, himself an educator, noted that the separation might be “beneficial in removing Jewish children from the ordinary schools where they occupy a definitely humiliating position.”
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On November 15, 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses all over Germany were looted, synagogues burned, and thousands of Jews beaten and sent to concentration camps, the Nazi government finally found its excuse to expel all the remaining Jewish students
from the schools on the grounds that it was now “self-evident that German students find it unbearable to share classrooms with Jews.”
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