The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

Abstract

In The Third Reich’s Elite Schools Helen Roche explores an aspect of the Third Reich’s education system so secretive and selective that even contemporaries were barely aware of its existence. The National Political Education Institutes (or ‘Napola’) were designed to mirror the English public school system with elements borrowed from the Prussian cadet schools and the rigours of ancient Spartan discipline. These forty-four schools—the last opening in April 1944—trained boys from the age of ten through to their Abitur (final school exams), and aspired to produce an elite next generation of leaders for the regime. They were distinct from the well-known attempts to achieve this in the Ordensburgen for adults and the Adolf Hitler Schools set up by the Hitler Youth; these latter, Roche reveals, being deliberate copies of most of the Napola curriculum. Yet Roche makes the claim that where much existing literature has grouped these schools together and branded them ineffectual, the Napolas were instead cohesively organized, well-funded and well-supported ideological institutions and, given their success in training loyal officers, ‘the Nazi dictatorship’s most effective educational experiment’ (p. 425).