people. The 1939 edition of the People’s Encyclopaedia (Volksbrockhaus) defined the Volksgemeinschaft as ‘the life-community of people, resting on bonds of blood, on a common destiny and a common political faith, to which class and status conflicts are essentially foreign’.4 After the near civil-war conditions of the Weimar Republic, the notion of an organic, harmonious, biologically based racial community, with common political beliefs and a common historical destiny, transcending and healing the wounds of the preceding years, could sound intrinsically appealing to many Germans. Every effort was made by the regime to realize this concept of society, both through overt indoctrination and through the transformation of social organization and everyday experience.
Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, created in March 1933, sought increasing control of all media of communication and culture. A symbolic early event was the burning of books written by Jews, socialists and other ‘undesirable intellectuals’ on 10 May 1933. Although instigated by radical students, the book-burning was given official blessing by Goebbels’ presence at the bonfires on Berlin’s central street, Unter den Linden. The event did not in practice succeed entirely in eradicating books by banned authors from libraries across Germany, but it certainly contributed to the ‘inner emigration’ – self-censorship and public silence – as well as the literal emigration of many authors, among them Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht. Subsequent cultural life in Nazi Germany was to a considerable extent reduced to the level of ‘German art’, typified by a mediocre realism in painting and grandiose schemes in architecture; in the fields of music and drama, some notable individuals compromised with the regime to continue to realize peaks of artistic perfection in the performance of German classics. Britain and, on a larger scale, the United States were the major beneficiaries of the mass exodus of cultural talent from Nazi Germany.
Goebbels also made use of the media of popular entertainment and less highbrow culture to attempt to influence the masses. Film was a highly effective medium for propaganda, and the Nazis became adept at producing short newsreel pieces glorifying the achievements of the Führer, illustrating popular adulation of Hitler and celebrating the achievements of the Reich as a result of its ‘national awakening’. Care was taken to stress positive aspects and downplay features that would tend to alienate people and lose popular support. The press, which under the Weimar Republic had been diverse and decentralized, was gradually subjected to Nazi control. This was done partly by the Nazi publishing house gaining an increasing share in the outright ownership of newspapers, partly by increasing control over publishers, editors and journalists, partly by censorship, and partly by feeding stories through a Nazi-run news service. By the later 1930s news reports for different newspapers were sufficiently gleichgeschaltet (co-ordinated) and predictable for most people to adopt a cynical approach and put little store by what was said in German newspapers. The radio was similarly co-opted to Nazi ends, and mass ownership of the ‘people’s receiver’ (Volksempfänger) was encouraged – which trebled ownership in the 6 prewar years, giving Germany the highest percentage of radio owners in the world. The emphasis was placed on a combination of light entertainment and snippets of slanted ‘news’ coverage.
In education there was a purge of teachers lacking the appropriate racial credentials or political views, at both school and university levels. While a large number of school and university teachers in the Weimar Republic had held conservative and nationalist views, by no means a majority were of Nazi leanings. Many leading academics were forced into emigration, including, for example, Albert Einstein. Attempts were made to influence the contents of what was taught as well as the people who taught it. While topics such as biology, history and German were fairly readily adapted for Nazi purposes, other scientific and technical subjects were less susceptible to Nazi distortion. Yet even at the level of school mathematics, examples could be used for exercises in arithmetic that sustained or propagated a certain worldview. Pupils were asked to do sums relating to the distance covered in certain times by tanks, torpedo boats, infantry battalions; they were asked to work out, given different speeds, at what distances from a town an enemy aircraft would be met by German air defence forces, if the latter started when the former were a certain distance away, and so on.5 The subject of racial science (Rassenkunde) was introduced, putting across Nazi views on heredity and racial purity. Schoolchildren undertook such projects as bringing to school a photo of a relative and writing an essay describing the features characteristic of the racial group of the person illustrated. The overall balance of the curriculum was altered too. There was an increased emphasis on sport and physical fitness, with sport compulsory even at university. For a small and select group, there was enhanced ideological education and paramilitary training, as in the elite Nazi boarding schools known as Napolas (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten), which were set up specifically to train future leaders. Of greater significance to far larger numbers of young people was the emphasis on community service through various work schemes – a useful means not only of attempting to inculcate a sense of community but also of obtaining cheap labour, particularly important in the later years of the Third Reich.
Attempts were also made to create a sense of national community through organizational means. On one hand, old, previously autonomous organizations had their independence removed and their capacity for harbouring subversive views neutralized; on the other hand, people were harnessed for activities that gave them experience of comradeship and community at the same time as promoting particular Nazi aims. The luxuriant profusion of clubs, associations and societies characteristic of Imperial and Weimar Germany was pruned, coerced and remoulded into new, Nazi-dominated frameworks. The wide variety of youth organizations, ranging from conservative and nationalist through Catholic to Social Democratic youth groups, were submerged into the Nazi youth organizations under the leadership of Baldur von Schirach. Children between the ages of ten and fourteen were encouraged and expected to join groups for boys (Deutsches Jungvolk, DJ) and girls (Jungmädelbund, JM), while those between fourteen and eighteen were to join the Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend, HJ) and League of German Maidens (Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM), respectively. The Nazi youth organizations were at first similar to their non-Nazi predecessors in their open-air activities: camping, hiking and singing songs as they marched through the pine forests or sat by campfires at a lakeside. Many young people undeniably enjoyed the expeditions and comradeship engendered by these activities. But from December 1936 the Hitler Youth was given an official status alongside school and home as an educational institution that was supposed to cover all those in the relevant age groups. Children were expected to enter on 20 April (Hitler’s birthday) in the year in which they reached the age of ten. Membership finally became compulsory in a decree of March 1939. Meanwhile, since 1934 there had been an increasing emphasis on paramilitary activities and attitudes.
Nevertheless, it does not seem that the Nazi youth organizations were an unmitigated success in inculcating a Nazi worldview in those who participated in them. Many young people simply conformed to the minimum extent necessary to avoid sanctions. Other young people developed their own youth subcultures, which the Nazis failed to suppress. Alternative youth groups included the ‘Edelweiss Pirates’ (spontaneous groups of youngsters who waged war on the Hitler Youth) and the Leipzig Meuten, the Dresden ‘Mobs’, the Halle Proletengefolgschaften, the Hamburg ‘Deathshead Gang’ and ‘Bismarck Gang’ and the Munich Blasen. While these groups were in the main working class, the swing movement was largely supported by upper-middle-class enthusiasts for ‘decadent’ jazz music. It is quite clear, not only from autobiographical accounts of individual alienation from the Hitler Youth (such as that by Heinrich Böll) but also from these more visible subcultural groups – members of which ran considerable risks and did not always escape retribution for their nonconformity – that Nazi attempts to bend the minds of a whole generation were only partially successful. Even so, the younger generation was in general far more Nazified than older generations.6
Plate 2 Members of the Nazi League of German Girls (BDM) walk proudly down the street of a German town. Source: Holocaust museuam.
