Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
The Nazis’ gradual but relentless pressure on schools in the Germanic countries was not limited to the intellectual sphere any more than it was at home. Here too categorizations and listings were introduced that would help locate the undesirables when the moment came to be rid of them. Despite the application of many of the Nuremberg Laws, Jewish children were not immediately excluded from the schools. But by the spring of 1941, German security forces in Holland had noticed signs of resistance: entire school outings to swimming pools had been canceled because Jewish pupils were not allowed to enter such places. Teachers were said to be giving Jewish students better grades in order to show their anti-Nazi feelings, and schools known to be “pro-Jewish” were very popular, even with non-Jews.
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At the end of the term in July 1941, therefore, all Jewish schoolchildren were given special registration forms that they were required to fill out then and there, and a few days after the new term began in September, they were informed that they must withdraw and go to separate schools.
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Both the Catholic and Protestant schools strongly protested the removal of baptized children of Jewish origin from their institutions. The churches were not punished for this defiance. Seyss-Inquart, in order to “spare them the martyrdom” that he felt was their real objective, did not reply to the church protests, but instead, through the Dutch Jewish Council, threatened the parents of the Jewish pupils if they refused to take part in the segregation. Protest in the public schools was silenced in the same manner.
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School authorities quickly organized the necessary reshuffling of facilities, as non-Jews were removed from buildings taken over for the 10,000 children who were affected, and vice versa. For some Jewish students this now meant a very long trek to school, as they were not allowed to use public transportation. In the countryside, where many schools had only one or two Jewish students, special arrangements had to be made. This latter problem was solved in January 1942 when all Jews living in small towns were required to leave their homes and move to Amsterdam.
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In August 1943, school inspectors were also instructed to list all children who had “speech defects” so that they could be “helped.” Categories included children in special schools, such as the seriously hearing-impaired and those “who spoke poorly or not at all.” In these doomed institutions the Jewish pupils had kindly been allowed to remain.
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Children in primary and secondary schools were generally not greatly affected by Nazi measures; but to this day they remember the expulsion of their Jewish classmates. One girl defiantly drew a portrait of an expelled friend on the blackboard. For days, no one could bring themselves to
erase it. But it was dangerous to leave the drawing there, and the deed was finally done, with some emotion, by one of the teachers.
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It was soon clear that complete control of the Dutch schools would, as was the case in the Reich proper, take a long time. A chain of entirely German schools was, therefore, created to promote Germanization. Before the war eight German schools had already been established; it was now only necessary to be sure that they were staffed by Nazis. Forty-two more such schools were soon set up in buildings requisitioned from resentful town fathers. But their capacity of 10,000 was only slowly filled. Catholic Reich Germans avoided them, and 30 percent of the places were therefore opened to Dutch children, who were expected to come from Dutch Nazi (NSB) families.
From the beginning the NSB children had had a hard time at school. Within weeks of the German takeover, it was clear to everyone who was “right” or “wrong,” and nowhere more so than at school. The NSB children were relentlessly teased and even beaten up. These incidents were often not punished by “right” teachers. Things were not improved when NSB students denounced popular teachers, as they had in Heerlen. The transfer of Dutch children to German schools was at first forbidden by the nationalistic Dutch Nazi leader Mussert, but hundreds of protective NSB parents sent their children anyway, and Mussert was soon forced to relent.
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An attempt to set up a Dutch version of the Nazi boarding schools (NAPOLAs), known as NIVOs (Netherlands Institutes for Folkish Education), was a flop, due to NSB-Nazi competition for control. The German Nazis considered the NSB insufficiently interested in purity of race and excessively attached to their religions. Priority of language became a major issue. An SS officer involved in the school explained, with almost mystical passion, why the Dutch boys could not get the right message from the frequent Nazi ceremonies at the school unless they were fluent in German:
Not only music shapes the ceremonies, but even more essentially the word. And the word that is spoken and professed, that word is in the Führer’s
Mein Kampf
and in his speeches. That is the foundation for everything.… In order to understand the word of the Führer, one must know and especially, experience, his language. One must absorb it into oneself as a possession.
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The NIVOs were soon closed and replaced by two “Reichsschule,” one for boys and one for girls, which were completely under German control.
Things did not go too well at these boarding schools either. The boys’ school, which opened in September 1942, was set up in a former Jesuit monastery in Valkenburg, in the east of Holland. The local population was immediately outraged when the school demolished the monastery church in order to make space for a projected gymnasium. The students were equally unhappy with the drill-sergeant-like methods of some of the teachers, who often hit and kicked them. Not surprisingly, the ten- to twelve-year-olds cried a lot and wanted to go home. No one had told them or their parents that classes would be conducted entirely in German, and many had great difficulties with their lessons. There was also fussing about the lack of religion and the fact that Protestants and Catholics were mixed together, not normally the case in Holland. Students were to be brought in from Germany to maintain the two-thirds German majority and to inspire the others, but homogenization was difficult, as the Reich boys, resplendent in full regalia, were required to spend a great deal of time at Hitler Youth meetings, which were closed to the “foreign” Dutch boys. Eventually this rule was modified and other mellowing improvements were instituted: housemothers were hired for the unhappy little boys, a parents committee was set up, which raised funds for a nice tapestry for the school, and a serious PR effort was made to attract more Dutch children and counteract the continuing opposition of Mussert.
To attract more students, a fancy brochure was published full of the universal boarding-school-type photos of immaculately groomed and uniformed boys earnestly reading in the library. The headmaster even went so far as to make a film about school life, which was shown at theaters all over Holland. This was generally well received by Dutch Nazis, though some critics took exception to the scenes showing boys throwing grenades, which, they felt, might put off the average Dutchman, and said that there had been too much emphasis on sports and not enough on the very nice bedrooms and washing facilities in the schools.
Despite all, the headmaster trusted some of the boys in the first graduating class enough to send them off to indoctrinate Polish
Volksdeutsche
for their Land Year, and by February 1944, things were going so swimmingly that Himmler himself came to visit. Alas, all was brought to an abrupt end by the Allied invasion of Normandy, when the entire school was evacuated to the NAPOLA at Bensburg, just across the border, and eventually, by war’s end, on to Schleswig-Holstein.
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The girls’ school was far less successful, if considerably more colorful. Its headmistress was the Baroness Juul Op Ten Noort, who had met, and clearly charmed, Himmler at a prewar Moral Rearmament meeting. The
Baroness was very pro-German and for that reason had been thrown out of the NSB by Mussert, but she was consoled by Himmler with her job as headmistress. The school curriculum followed the Nazi Party line for women. Mme Op Ten Noort taught the racial studies class and served as a living example of Nazi procreationist policy when she became pregnant and disappeared for a time to “study in the East,” only to return with an “adopted” child named Heinrich, who was generally thought to be the son of the Reichsführer SS himself. This did not go over too well with the parents of the girls or enhance their reputation at the boys’ school, whose faculty found the girls to be snotty “little goddesses” who lived in a slovenly manner and did not even use proper tablecloths on Sunday.
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Mussert was more successful in keeping control of the Dutch equivalent of the Hitler Youth. The National Youth Storm (NJS), as it was called, banned in 1933, was revived at the German takeover. The Youth Storm had a long way to go. In 1940 its membership was only 1,500, way behind the Boy Scouts (46,000) or the Catholic Youth (32,000). By war’s end there were still only some 12,000 “stormers” and “stormsters.” The Hitler Youth, immediately after the fall of Holland, sent in representatives who invited NJS children and leaders to come to Germany. Mussert, fearful that his youth would be lost to Holland, reluctantly authorized a few short summer visits to HJ training camps. He need not have worried. Though many of the Dutch children were favorably impressed with the camp activities, the feelings were not mutual. The visitors were criticized for giving the Dutch Nazi greeting of “Hou zee” and not “Heil Hitler.” Some German children refused to speak to them, as “an enemy stays an enemy.” The Dutch youth leaders, new to the whole concept, could not understand much of the racial and folkdom lectures; they were outraged when one history teacher declared that the only Dutch person he had ever heard of was Rembrandt, who was really German. On top of this they were told that Holland’s heroic, eighty-year-long fight for independence from Hapsburg Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which holds the same status in Holland as the American Revolution does in the United States, was a “mistake of history” that had separated them from their German Motherland. These statements led one Dutch boy to declare vehemently that acceptance of such imperial German teachings would be a “betrayal of our Fatherland.” At the end of the sessions the Dutch were evaluated by their German mentors. The report cards were not flattering. Few were thought to have “leadership” potential: one girl was criticized for talking about her English boyfriend, others for talking back, crying, being “colorless,” or too religious. None of the girls who applied for membership in the Bund
Deutscher Mädel was accepted, and the visits were not repeated in subsequent years.
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Pressures on the elementary and secondary school systems of Francophone Belgium and France were superficially much the same as those in Holland. But in these non-Nordic areas the Germans promoted fragmentation and not a unified system. In Belgium, the Germans, as always taking advantage of local problems, joined in the eternal competition for control between Flemish and Francophone culture, but they did not yet attempt to challenge the control of the Catholic Church over most of the Belgian school system.
In France, schools opened as usual in September 1940, and early acts of defiance were soon suppressed. Flowers put on British military graves by children on All Saints’ Day were removed. In Paris, an entire section of the new military government, the Kultur und Schule division, devoted itself to the revision of textbooks and other scholarly pursuits. As there had been little time for proper vetting before school opened, here, too, many texts were purified by simply tearing out offensive pages, such as descriptions of the German defeat in World War I and maps showing Alsace as part of France. For after-school the Germans promoted a French-language comic book that featured nasty caricatures of Jews and a hero named Marc le Téméraire, who eventually volunteered to fight on the Eastern Front.
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French education regulations and appointments were closely supervised, buildings were arbitrarily requisitioned, and German officials were apt to drop in to classrooms without warning to see if the propaganda posters they sent out were properly hung. German language study was made obligatory and German Institutes were set up in provincial cities in the Occupied Zone.
None of this could stop the innumerable adolescent pranks and manifestations of nationalism aimed at making the Germans look ridiculous, many of which were encouraged by teachers. The “Marseillaise” and the British national anthem were defiantly sung as German soldiers went by, “V” graffiti were everywhere, and until the Nazis figured it out, the bizarre sight of students carrying two fishing poles, or
“deux gaules,”
was seen in many a city street.
The Germans were not the only ones who wished to make changes in the French educational system. Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, head of the new French government, which, to his surprise, had not been allowed to return to Paris but had been relegated to the provincial spa town of
Vichy, also had visions of a New Order for youth and family that were remarkably similar to those of Adolf Hitler. The major difference was that Vichy favored a prominent role for the Catholic Church. For generations, French education had been riven by a debate over the secular versus the clerical in the schools. With Pétain and his “Révolution Nationale,” the pendulum swung back to the latter.
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In addition, many high-ranking Army officers blamed the ignominious fall of France not on their own ineptitude and their outdated reliance on the Maginot Line, but on the teachers of the secular primary system, who had “failed to instill in young Frenchmen the spirit of sacrifice.” Pétain even told American Ambassador William Bullitt that “schoolmasters” had brought France to her knees. This obviously called for drastic reform of the system:
The era of least effort is over. We no longer desire to see hanging about our city streets young men sloppy in their bearing, slack and slovenly in their behavior, sadly vulgar in their talk. We can no longer suffer those young fops whose sole ambition was to rise late, install themselves in a café, allow free rein to their confused desires and take themselves off to bed late, content with their empty day. A novelist of immorality [André Gide], who, we hope, will no longer have any readers, set them on the road to defeat by teaching them that “every pleasure was good to be taken.” Our country, to be saved, needs bold men capable of achieving something.
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