Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
The Nazis had even more draconian plans for the universities than for the schools. In April 1933, the Reich Ministry of the Interior, ostensibly in order to reduce the number of unemployed graduates in the country, limited the enrollment in the fall of 1934 to 15,000, of whom only 10 percent could be women. This drastic downsizing cut the size of the incoming student body by more than half. The 20,000 rejected applicants were helpfully directed to their district labor offices for help with job searches or placement in vocational training programs.
The reductions, combined with an already declining number of applicants due to the Depression and the fact that admission was limited to medically vetted “nationally reliable” students, who in any case were increasingly seduced by Nazi action propaganda to do less studious things, led to such small enrollments that several universities were faced with financial crises and the policy had to be reconsidered.
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The universities, traditional bastions of independent thinking, would, in addition to losing new scholars, also no longer provide any refuge to nonconforming academics of long standing. Despite their intellectual independence, university professors too were civil servants, and the Civil Service Law of April 1933 also applied to them. To the astonishment of the entire world, this led to the dismissal of hundreds of Germany’s most famous scholars, among them numerous Nobel Prize winners, including Albert Einstein.
Within days of the publication of the law, the pro-Nazi German Students’ Union, one of the major student organizations, had sent around a secret memorandum to its local leaders soliciting lists of “undesirable” professors. In addition to Jews, they included those with leftist political views, pacifists, those who had made critical remarks about the Nazi Party, or anyone a disgruntled student might not like. This document was leaked to the international press and reported in London’s
Daily Telegraph
under the headline
HITLERITE WAR ON PROFESSORS. STUDENTS’ BLACK LIST. ABILITY A MINOR CONSIDERATION
.
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The government did not, at first, dare dismiss Aryan full professors, whose positions were traditionally inviolable, but instead passed a law that made retirement mandatory at sixty-five and allowed the federal Education Minister to transfer academics from one institution to another at will or to abolish the chair they held, thereby forcing their retirement. Lower-level instructors, like the school-teachers,
were required to go to four-week courses at Nazi indoctrination camps more suitable for ten-year-olds, where they “slept six to a room, wore uniforms, did digging and sports, were given educative lectures.”
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The purge was not limited to personnel, but included whole subjects that the Nazis felt were frivolous, unpatriotic, or racially unacceptable. One result of the new policy was the nationwide ceremonial burning of books. But this was only a superficial indicator of what was to come. In his remarkable diaries of the war years, the Dresden professor of Romance languages Victor Klemperer, who was Jewish, gives a vivid account of both his and his department’s slow and torturous exclusion. Some professors were briefly protected by secret maneuvers of the university faculty committees, but the process was inexorable, if not always convenient for the students. In April 1933, for example, Jewish professors at Dresden were forbidden to conduct examinations. Just how their students were supposed to finish their courses, which still went on, was not clear. The problem for students of Romance languages at Dresden was solved in July 1936, when the department was closed down altogether except for one course in Italian, presumably useful for dealing with representatives of Axis ally Benito Mussolini.
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Romance languages and other unacceptable subjects were replaced by courses such as “Studies of Culture and Volk” or biased lectures such as “The Political and Economic Problems of Asia” (i.e., of the contemptible Slavic nations), which were made compulsory at certain institutions.
Faculty resistance to the Nazi decrees was cautious. Germany’s professorate had traditionally been conservative and nationalist and included a considerable percentage of non-Party members who supported Hitler’s election. But even academics who agreed with the Nazis on matters of foreign policy and anti-Semitism were appalled at the reduction of their powers both in university committees, where the Führerprinzip was instituted, and vis-à-vis the students. As Klemperer put it: “No letter, no telephone conversation, no word in the street is safe anymore. Everyone fears the next person may be an informer.”
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This was not mere paranoia. American Ambassador William Dodd noted in his diary the case of Hermann Oncken, the distinguished (and Aryan) head of the History Department at Berlin, who had been violently attacked by one of his own students for his less than flattering description of the Oliver Cromwell Interregnum in seventeenth-century England, which, the students claimed, was really a criticism of the Hitler government. After much publicity, Party guru Alfred Rosenberg ordered the
Ministry of Education to “retire” the professor. The protests of other students saved Oncken for the duration of the semester, but by the summer he had been dismissed.
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Protests of this nature by faculty were rare, however, as professors sought to ingratiate themselves with the new regime in order to get funding for their pet programs, or lay low in hopes of taking over the suddenly vacated positions, research files, and other perks of the purged. The cynicism of these maneuvers was not lost on the students: years after the war, a distinguished professor of medieval French at Oxford, sent to Germany for a graduate semester in the 1930s, recounted with outrage that when she had inquired about the dismissal of a well-known Jewish professor she was told by the man’s colleagues that “he had never really been very competent.”
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Even the Nazis were sometimes amused by the unseemly eagerness of those professors who could not wait to jump on the bandwagon and flaunt their insignia-laden Party uniforms at academic functions.
The violence of the pro-Nazi student demonstrations that had disrupted the universities for years before Hitler’s chancellorship, combined with the denunciations and the very real threat that the institutions might be closed down entirely, led academic authorities to seek compromises with the various militant organizations and to resort to underground machinations to preserve their turf. The fear of closure was not unfounded. One had only to skim through
Mein Kampf
to understand the truly vicious anti-intellectual bent of the Führer, an attitude that he frequently restated, perhaps most eloquently in a 1938 speech in which he declared that intellectuals, on whom he, as usual, blamed the German defeat in 1918, were
not bearers of faith, not unshakable, and above all, they do not stand fast in moments of crisis and danger. For while the broad, healthy mass of people does not hesitate to forge itself together into a
Volksgemeinschaft
, [the intellectuals] scatter like hens in a chicken run. And therefore one cannot make history with them, they are useless as supporting elements of a society.
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These sentiments were frequently echoed by others in the Nazi leadership. Julius Streicher, editor of the vicious magazine
Die Stürmer
, is said to have told one group of professors to their faces that they were “old men with beards and gold-rimmed glasses and scientific faces” who were
“worth next to nothing” and separated from the people by “so-called higher education.”
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It must not have been easy to be a university student and rationalize support for a regime that felt one was useless. Indeed, the Reich Student Leadership, spinning Hitler’s remarks, said he must have been referring not to real academics, but to people “with long hair and broadly padded shoulders.”
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The student leaders, just as fearful as their professors of university closure, which would have made them superfluous, saw cooperation with faculty as necessary to the success of their appointed mission to achieve total enrollment of the student body in their political education courses. This was difficult, as German students traditionally attended lectures only in their own disciplines; nor were there distribution requirements that could be transformed into ideological instruction sessions. It was thus necessary to work with the university authorities in order to introduce extra courses, make them compulsory, and keep track of attendance and grades. The interest in success was more than idealistic. In March 1935, the National Socialist German Students’ Association had been recognized as a major Party formation, equal in status to the Hitler Youth and the SS, and its officials, frequently ambitious “students” of a certain age, relished their power. Their uneasy cooperation with the university administrations was marred by frequent dramatic flare-ups, byzantine intrigues, and ferocious competition with other Nazi student groups, like the German Students’ Union, for the total commitment of those who had formerly belonged to non-Nazi organizations such as the Catholic Students’ Union, all of which had been successfully absorbed or abolished by the late 1930s.
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The student leaders were often so busy with their recruiting, propaganda, and paramilitary activities that they had little time to prepare for their own courses, much less to write lectures for political seminars that could be taken seriously at the university level, or to monitor the “Nazi scholarship” of the faculty. Even when ideological study groups were set up, it was hard for the untrained instructors to think of much to say except to repeat the platitudes the students had been hearing for years at school and in Hitler Youth meetings, or to assign readings from the excessively boring writings of the Nazi leaders and those who had inspired them, none of which stood up well to analytic scholarship. Courses in the scientific disciplines that were taught with a Nazi slant were even less successful, but the student leaders were not daunted. When it was pointed out that the
requirement that Einstein’s “Jewish” theory of relativity be eliminated from physics courses made study of that subject pointless, the ideologues in the Hamburg University student union solemnly set about doing research to isolate “Aryan elements in the theory.” As a result of these excesses, absenteeism and apathy became the order of the day as students went off to study for their real exams in the little free time left to them after the endless extracurricular activities imposed by the authorities. By the fall of 1937, the effects of the Nazification of academe were beginning to be felt outside the universities. Officials of the Air Force, economic planners, and the president of the Reich Research Council had all complained that there were not enough qualified engineers, and even Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg declared that the Party should not be too dogmatic when it came to science. A Hamburg professor pointed out that Nazification of scientific knowledge might be detrimental to the national interest, particularly when it came to the development of new weapons.
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Industry was less circumspect: a chemical industry journal stated flatly in 1939 that “the leadership in chemical research has passed to foreign countries.”
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It was, in fact, a miracle that students got any studying done at all. Required duties ran the gamut from military to agricultural. Students tried all sorts of ploys to avoid these requirements, among them the trick of transferring frequently from one university to another (a practice long condoned in Germany), so that the Nazi bureaucrats never quite caught up with them.
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Sports were made compulsory for all students in the spring of 1933. In September the Nazi storm troopers (SA) set up a special University Office to organize “physical and mental [training] in the spirit of the vanguards of German revolution.” Irritated faculties were forced to rearrange their entire academic schedules to accommodate the new program, whose organizers, even more irritatingly, thought nothing of changing the schedule again whenever they felt like it. Three semesters of heavily military training were required. Students who did not complete the program would not be allowed to register for the next year. The training was so strenuous and time-consuming that professors at Hamburg soon noticed a dramatic rise in absences, a “certain lassitude” in seminars, and a catastrophic drop in grades so severe that the program was dropped after only one year.
The withdrawal of the SA from the campus took some pressure off students during the academic term, but did not make their vacations any more fun. These were consumed by a number of obligatory programs. First came a Student Labor Service, quickly set up in the spring of 1933,
which demanded four months of work and political indoctrination in special camps, plus six weeks of paramilitary training prior to matriculation at a university. Jewish students, of course, were not accepted, and other undesirables, such as those intending to study Catholic theology, were exempted in the hope that they would stay away and thus be marginalized.
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The pre-freshman labor camps were only the beginning. Eager student leaders had similar proposals for later vacations, but these were often a flop, as many students needed to earn money in the summer to pay their tuition. A plan to replace factory workers with students so that the former could have paid time off had a pathetic response. More successful was the Land Service (Landdienst), which involved, for the most part, working in farm areas bordering Poland.
While the Land Service was moderately popular, its companion activity, the so-called Harvest Help, decidedly was not. In 1939, students at Munich and Heidelberg reportedly demonstrated openly against this activity. They whistled at its Nazi promoter in one assembly and threw eggs at another. Twelve students were whisked off to Dachau, despite which, in the night, graffiti reading
DOWN WITH HITLER
appeared in the corridors.
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Other students were found to be volunteering for summer training in the Army in order to make themselves ineligible for Harvest Help. This was not good for the Reich Student Leadership, which had been ordered to guarantee enough student help to get the harvest in as early as possible, “in light of frontier policing measures which have become necessary on the German Polish border.” The drain to the Army was stopped and some 45,000 students were found to cut the grain just in time for the motorized elements of the blitzkrieg to roll over the newly shorn fields into Poland.
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The students who had wanted to opt for the Army would soon not have any other choice.