Nazism and the Rise of Hitler part4 Flashcards
why was hitler interested in youth of the country
Hitler was fanatically interested in the youth of the country. He felt
that a strong Nazi society could be established only by teaching children
Nazi ideology. This required a control over the child both inside and
outside school.
what happened in nazi schools?
All schools were ‘cleansed’
and ‘purified’. This meant that teachers who were Jews or seen as
‘politically unreliable’ were dismissed. Children were first segregated:
Germans and Jews could not sit together or play together.
Subsequently, ‘undesirable children’ – Jews, the physically handicapped,
Gypsies – were thrown out of schools. And finally in the 1940s, they
were taken to the gas chambers.
what were ‘good german’ children made to do?
‘Good German’ children were subjected to a process of Nazi schooling,
a prolonged period of ideological training. School textbooks were
rewritten. Racial science was introduced to justify Nazi ideas of race.
Stereotypes about Jews were popularised even through maths classes.
Children were taught to be loyal and submissive, hate Jews, and worship
Hitler. Even the function of sports was to nurture a spirit of violence
and aggression among children. Hitler believed that boxing could make
children iron hearted, strong and masculine.
what does youth have to do in germany
Youth organisations were made responsible for educating German
youth in the ‘the spirit of National Socialism’. Ten-year-olds had to
enter Jungvolk. At 14, all boys had to join the Nazi youth organisation
– Hitler Youth – where they learnt to worship war, glorify aggression
and violence, condemn democracy, and hate Jews, communists, Gypsies
and all those categorised as ‘undesirable’. After a period of rigorous
ideological and physical training they joined the Labour Service, usually
at the age of 18. Then they had to serve in the armed forces and enter
one of the Nazi organisations.
what is the hitler youth
The Youth League of the Nazis was founded in 1922. Four years later
it was renamed Hitler Youth. To unify the youth movement under
Nazi control, all other youth organisations were systematically dissolved
and finally banned.
what wre girls children told to do in nazi society
Children in Nazi Germany were repeatedly told that women were
radically different from men. The fight for equal rights for men
and women that had become part of democratic struggles everywhere
was wrong and it would destroy society. While boys were taught
to be aggressive, masculine and steel hearted, girls were told that
they had to become good mothers and rear pure-blooded Aryan
children. Girls had to maintain the purity of the race, distance themselves from Jews, look after the home, and teach their
children Nazi values. They had to be the bearers of the Aryan
culture and race
In 1933 Hitler said: ‘In my state the mother is the most important
citizen.’ did hitler live up to this word?
But in Nazi Germany all mothers were not treated equally.
Women who bore racially undesirable children were punished
and those who produced racially desirable children were awarded.
They were given favoured treatment in hospitals and were also
entitled to concessions in shops and on theatre tickets and railway
fares. To encourage women to produce many children, Honour
Crosses were awarded. A bronze cross was given for four children,
silver for six and gold for eight or more.
what happens to women who deviate from the code of conduct
All ‘Aryan’ women who deviated from the prescribed code of
conduct were publicly condemned, and severely punished. Those
who maintained contact with Jews, Poles and Russians were
paraded through the town with shaved heads, blackened faces and
placards hanging around their necks announcing ‘I have sullied
the honour of the nation’. Many received jail sentences and lost
civic honour as well as their husbands and families for this
‘criminal offence’.
how was language used with care in the nazi society
The Nazi regime used language and media with care, and often to
great effect. The terms they coined to describe their various
practices are not only deceptive. They are chilling. Nazis never
used the words ‘kill’ or ‘murder’ in their official communications.
Mass killings were termed special treatment, final solution (for the Jews),
euthanasia (for the disabled), selection and disinfections. ‘Evacuation’
meant deporting people to gas chambers. Do you know what the
gas chambers were called? They were labelled ‘disinfection-areas’,
and looked like bathrooms equipped with fake showerheads.
how was media used with care in the nazi society
Media was carefully used to win support for the regime and
popularise its worldview. Nazi ideas were spread through visual
images, films, radio, posters, catchy slogans and leaflets. In posters,
groups identified as the ‘enemies’ of Germans were stereotyped,
mocked, abused and described as evil. Socialists and liberals were
represented as weak and degenerate. They were attacked as
malicious foreign agents. Propaganda films were made to create
hatred for Jews. The most infamous film was The Eternal Jew.
Orthodox Jews were stereotyped and marked. They were shown with flowing beards wearing kaftans, whereas in reality it was
difficult to distinguish German Jews by their outward appearance
because they were a highly assimilated community. They were
referred to as vermin, rats and pests. Their movements were compared
to those of rodents. Nazism worked on the minds of the people,
tapped their emotions, and turned their hatred and anger at those
marked as ‘undesirable’.
The Nazis made equal efforts to appeal to all the different sections of
the population. They sought to win their support by suggesting that
Nazis alone could solve all their problems
How did the common people react to Nazism?
Many saw the world through Nazi eyes, and spoke their mind in
Nazi language. They felt hatred and anger surge inside them when
they saw someone who looked like a Jew. They marked the houses
of Jews and reported suspicious neighbours. They genuinely believed
Nazism would bring prosperity and improve general well-being.
But not every German was a Nazi. Many organised active resistance
to Nazism, braving police repression and death. The large majority
of Germans, however, were passive onlookers and apathetic witnesses.
They were too scared to act, to differ, to protest. They preferred to
look away.
who is pastor niemoeller
y. Pastor Niemoeller, a resistance fighter, observed an
absence of protest, an uncanny silence, amongst ordinary Germans
in the face of brutal and organised crimes committed against people
in the Nazi empire. He wrote movingly about this silence
what did jews feel for nazism
What Jews felt in Nazi Germany is a different story altogether.
Charlotte Beradt secretly recorded people’s dreams in her diary and
later published them in a highly disconcerting book called the Third
Reich of Dreams. She describes how Jews themselves began believing in
the Nazi stereotypes about them. They dreamt of their hooked noses,
black hair and eyes, Jewish looks and body movements. The
stereotypical images publicised in the Nazi press haunted the Jews.
They troubled them even in their dreams. Jews died many deaths
even before they reached the gas chamber.
what do uk about holcaust
Information about Nazi practices had trickled out of Germany
during the last years of the regime. But it was only after the war
ended and Germany was defeated that the world came to realise the
horrors of what had happened. While the Germans were preoccupied
with their own plight as a defeated nation emerging out of the rubble,
the Jews wanted the world to remember the atrocities and sufferings
they had endured during the Nazi killing operations – also called the
Holocaust. At its height, a ghetto inhabitant had said to another that
he wanted to outlive the war just for half an hour. Presumably he
meant that he wanted to be able to tell the world about what had
happened in Nazi Germany. This indomitable spirit to bear witness
and to preserve the documents can be seen in many ghetto and camp
inhabitants who wrote diaries, kept notebooks, and created archives.
On the other hand when the war seemed lost, the Nazi leadership
distributed petrol to its functionaries to destroy all incriminating
evidence available in offices.
Yet the history and the memory of the Holocaust live on in memoirs,
fiction, documentaries, poetry, memorials and museums in many
parts of the world today
