The Hitler Youth and Educational Decline in the Third Reich

Abstract

That the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in January 1933 began a revolution of virtually every phase of German life is a well known fact. What is not so well know, however, is that an educational revolution of an astonishing dimension accompanied the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. Most historians of the educational development of Nazi Germany have focused primary attention on the purging of Jewish and Liberal teachers, the burning of anti-Nazi books, and the imposition of racist and militaristic curricular and methodological innovations. Concentrating on ideology, these authorities have long contended that the Nazi educational revolution consisted largely of an attempt to create a “new man” for the totalitarian regime through adoption of its ideology in the schools that functioned in an authoritarian manner after the introduction of an absolute leadership principle or Fuhrerprinzip. By emphasizing official decrees and ideological proclamations without examining what was actually happening in the schools, these scholars have ignored a vital aspect of the history of National Socialist Germany: that there occurred something of a youth rebellion conducted largely by Nazi students enrolled in the Hitler Youth and directed against the educational structures and authorities of Germany. Moreover, that rebellion transcended the mere alteration of the Weimar system and continued without abatement even against Nazi controlled schools until 1945.