The Nazi Party (NSDAP) directed propaganda at children in Nazi Germany between the 1920s and 1945 to influence the values and beliefs of the future generation of German citizens according to their political agenda and ideology. The Nazi Party targeted children with mandatory youth organizations, school courses on racial purity, and anti-Semitic children’s books. The Nazi Party's propaganda took advantage of children's ignorance about the Jewish community. Although the Jewish population in Germany was the largest in central Europe, it was still a relatively small fraction of the overall population, with only 525,000 members (0.75% of the total German population). [1]
Starting in the 1920s, the Nazi Party "targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages". [1] They encouraged the formation of Nazi youth groups for children who were "dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful." [1] As the Nazi Party grew, the number of children they targeted increased. By 1936, "membership in Nazi youth groups became mandatory for all boys and girls between the ages of 10-17." [1]
The Hitler Youth organization was founded in 1926 to train young boys for membership in the Sturmabteilung (SA; literally Storm Detachment), the Party's main paramilitary organization at the time. In 1933, leaders of the Hitler Youth decided to integrate boys into the Nazi national community and prepare them for service as soldiers in the Schutzstaffel (SS, also stylized as ). [1] Their practical methods of doing so included demonizing the previously existing independent youth organizations and replacing the concept and practice of youth hiking with marching in lock step. In fact, the Hitler Youth leadership officially banned the word "Wandern" (hiking) from their organization's language in 1937. [2]
Membership of the Hitler Youth increased from 50,000 in January 1933 to more than 2 million [1] by the end of the year. Before membership became mandatory in 1939, the group had surpassed 5.4 million members, with over 700,000 German youths holding leadership positions. [1] Once membership in the Hitler Youth organization had become mandatory, "German authorities ... prohibited or dissolved competing youth organizations". [1] The Nazi Party used the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls as the primary tools to shape the minds of the German youth and create the illusion of a mass community that reached "across class and religious divisions that characterized Germany before 1933". [1]
When boys reached age 18, they were required to enlist in the armed forces or into the Reich Labour Service [1] and "were put through three weeks of rigorous training. The need for discipline and unquestioning obedience was drilled into the boys." [3] Girls, on the other hand, were sent to Poland to help German farmers cultivate the land that had been seized from the Poles during the course of World War II. They were required to work long hours helping inexperienced farmers work the fields, and they were also forced to act as nursemaids for the sick. In addition to this work, they had the responsibility of overseeing that the "Nazi rules and doctrine were not violated". [3]
From 1943 to 1944, as Allied forces crossed the borders into Germany, the demands on the Hitler Youth intensified. German youths aged 16 were enlisted for active duty. Often these new soldiers fought in units alongside seniors who were over the age of sixty in the national militia (Volkssturm, literally People's Storm). As the war continued to turn in the Allied force's favor, the Nazi Party became desperate and began training boys as young as ten to handle and operate military-grade weaponry (machine guns, hand grenades, bazookas, etc.). [3] Hitler Youth tank divisions were formed to fight in the Battle of the Bulge; [3] the number of casualties rose steeply as "barely trained fifteen-year-olds [were] led by sixteen-year-olds". [3]
Soon after the Enabling Act of 1933 had been passed, Jewish teachers and professors were dismissed from German schools and universities. By April 1933, there were no Jewish teachers remaining in schools attended by 'Aryan' students, a racial term used by the Nazis to describe the Germanic peoples.
In the educational system, Jewish children regularly experienced ridicule, from both their peers and teachers. For example, Jewish children would be sent to the back of the classroom to reiterate to the non-Jewish German children the notion that they were inferior to them. [3] Additionally, "teachers would begin to pick out Jewish students in classrooms to use as examples during biology lessons about racial impurity. Jewish children would be told to stand at the front of the class, whilst teachers pointed to their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hair, comparing these to characteristics on Nazi propaganda sheets". [3] Eventually, the Jewish children were completely segregated from the non-Jewish German children in schools. [3]
During the period of segregation, Jewish teachers were allowed to set up separate schools for Jewish students. [3] This came, however, with its own set of issues for Jewish children, who were frequently beaten up and attacked by members of the Hitler Youth who "would wait outside at the end of the school day and set about beating Jewish boys as they left school". [3] In 1938, Jewish children were banned from receiving education completely and were removed from schools prior to being sent to concentration camps.
From this point onward, schools heavily used propaganda to indoctrinate children into Nazi ideology. [4] Textbooks and posters were used to teach German youth "the importance of racial consciousness". [5] Students' school work was often provided in an ideological context. The following math problem is an example: "The Jews are aliens in Germany. In 1933, there were 66,000,000 people living in Germany. Of this total, 499,862 were Jewish. What is the percentage of aliens in Germany?" [3] Textbook passages like this consistently reiterated the message of the racial inferiority of Jews, as well as the superiority of the German peoples they called the Aryan race.
With the dismissal of Jewish educators, the National Socialist Teachers League required that only teachers who could prove they were "Aryan" were teaching the German youth. Every educator "was required to submit an ancestry table in triplicate with official documented proof" of their lineage. [6] In addition, the league monitored courses for compliance with the Nazi Party's values. All educational courses had to reflect the aims of Hitler; of the required courses, they believed the most important was to teach German children racial theory and, by extension, the Jewish problem. [6] By 1936, 97% of German educators belonged to the National Socialist Teachers League.
Children's books were created throughout the Nazi's reign to incite hatred for Jews at a young age. These books contained demeaning illustrations of Jewish people; in these books, Jewish people were depicted as "usually stocky ... the posture is crooked or bent; the feet are flat; the hair is dark; there is a lot of coarse body hair. The face usually has dark and bulging eyes, a crooked or bent nose, hanging eyelids, a hanging underlip, and a heavy beard." [6] Furthermore, books such as Trau Keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud aufi seinem Eid (in English, Trust No Fox on his Green Meadow and No Jew on his Oath), written by Elvira Bauer , aimed to reiterate to German children that the war "was being fought to save the Aryan world from the Jewish alien invaders within the midst". [6] These books were distributed in schools with the sole purpose of teaching children Nazi ideologies.
Additionally, after-school activities and weekend trips were regularly sponsored by the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. These activities often acted as recruitment meetings for the participating school children. The Hitler Youth combined sports and physical outdoor activities with Nazi ideologies. Likewise, the League of German Girls emphasized collective athletics such as rhythmic gymnastics, which "German health authorities deemed less strenuous to the female body and better geared to preparing them for motherhood". [1] This was also used for public display. Authorities wanted these sports and activities to encourage "young men and women to abandon their individuality in favor of the goals of the Aryan collective". [1]
Hitler's ideologies were taught to the entire population of German children. [1] These children were instructed in Nazi ideology from a very young age, and through this and mandatory membership in the youth organizations, children were taught to hate Jews. The youth of Nazi Germany came of age in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s listening to racist and anti-Semitic lectures, reciting Nazi-inspired slogans, reading propaganda publications, and attending national youth rallies. [3] The affected children were instructed to report any activities or conversations that could be considered treacherous. Children reported the activity of neighbors, teachers, religious leaders, and even their own family. [3] Through these means, the youth of Germany were taught to respect, follow, and embrace the ideologies of the Nazi Party and those espoused by Hitler. The effect of propaganda on children would last for years after World War II ended.
In the last days of the war in Berlin, the Hitler Youth members of Werwolf could be heard singing, "Heute gehoert uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt" (Today Germany belongs to us, and tomorrow the whole world). [3] Even after the unconditional surrender of the German forces, many German youths continued to fight on behalf of the Nazi Party in Werwolf. The young members of Werwolf strongly believed that they were fighting for a just cause, and they felt disillusioned after the end of the war. [6] In the ensuing years, Allied occupation authorities required German youths to undergo denazification programs that were designed to counter the adverse effects of the Nazi propaganda.
Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship. The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", referred to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918). The Third Reich, which the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, ended in May 1945, after only 12 years, when the Allies defeated Germany and entered the capital, Berlin, ending World War II in Europe.
Der Stürmer was a weekly German tabloid-format newspaper published from 1923 to the end of World War II by Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia, with brief suspensions in publication due to legal difficulties. It was a significant part of Nazi propaganda, and was virulently anti-Semitic. The paper was not an official publication of the Nazi Party, but was published privately by Streicher. For this reason, the paper did not display the Nazi Party swastika in its logo.
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
The Hitler Youth was the youth organisation of the Nazi Party in Germany. Its origins date back to 1922 and it received the name Hitler-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend in July 1926. From 1936 until 1945, it was the sole official boys' youth organisation in Germany and it was partially a paramilitary organisation. It was composed of the Hitler Youth proper for male youths aged 14 to 18, and the German Youngsters in the Hitler Youth for younger boys aged 10 to 14.
This is a list of words, terms, concepts and slogans of Nazi Germany used in the historiography covering the Nazi regime. Some words were coined by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Party members. Other words and concepts were borrowed and appropriated, and other terms were already in use during the Weimar Republic. Finally, some are taken from Germany's cultural tradition.
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's community", "folk community", "national community", or "racial community", depending on the translation of its component term Volk. This expression originally became popular during World War I as Germans rallied in support of the war, and many experienced "relief that at one fell swoop all social and political divisions could be solved in the great national equation". The idea of a Volksgemeinschaft was rooted in the notion of uniting people across class divides to achieve a national purpose, and the hope that national unity would "obliterate all conflicts - between employers and employees, town and countryside, producers and consumers, industry and craft".
A German Blood Certificate was a document provided by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to Mischlinge, declaring them deutschblütig. This practice was begun sometime after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and allowed exemption from most of Germany's racial laws.
Blood and soil is a nationalist slogan expressing Nazi Germany's ideal of a racially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). By it, rural and farm life forms are idealized as a counterweight to urban ones. It is tied to the contemporaneous German concept of Lebensraum, the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and displacing the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost.
Werner Goldberg was a German of half Jewish ancestry, or Mischling in Nazi terminology, who served briefly as a soldier during World War II. His image appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt as "The Ideal German Soldier", and was later used in recruitment posters and propaganda for the Wehrmacht.
Rassenschande or Blutschande was an anti-miscegenation concept in Nazi German racial policy, pertaining to sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was put into practice by policies like the Aryan certificate requirement, and later by anti-miscegenation laws such as the Nuremberg Laws, adopted unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. Initially, these laws referred predominantly to relations between ethnic Germans and non-Aryans, regardless of citizenship. In the early stages the culprits were targeted informally; later, they were punished systematically and legally.
The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, also known as Civil Service Law, Civil Service Restoration Act, and Law to Re-establish the Civil Service, was enacted by the Nazi regime in Germany on 7 April 1933. This law, which followed Adolf Hitler's rise to power by two months and the promulgation of the Enabling Act by two weeks, constituted one of the earliest instances of anti-Semitic and racist legislation in Germany.
The propaganda used by the German Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship of Germany from 1933 to 1945 was a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of Nazi policies.
The Deutsches Jungvolk in der Hitlerjugend was the separate section for boys aged 10 to 13 of the Hitler Youth organisation in Nazi Germany. Through a programme of outdoor activities, parades and sports, it aimed to indoctrinate its young members in the tenets of Nazi ideology. Membership became fully compulsory for eligible boys in 1939. By the end of World War II, some had become child soldiers. After the end of the war in 1945, both the Deutsches Jungvolk and its parent organization, the Hitler Youth, ceased to exist.
The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several racist scientific racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its fascist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, genocide, ethnic persecution and others atrocities against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of Nordic race being best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, Blacks, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, including the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some non-Germanic groups such as Sorbs, Northern Italians, Greeks, and Iranians to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as Turks, Chinese, and Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as Slavs, Romani, and Indians were considered inferior.
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany began on April 1, 1933, and was claimed to be a defensive reaction to the anti-Nazi boycott, which had been initiated in March 1933. It was largely unsuccessful, as the German population continued to use Jewish businesses, but revealed the intent of the Nazis to undermine the viability of Jews in Germany.
The National Socialist People's Welfare was a social welfare organization during the Third Reich. The NSV was originally established in 1931 as a small Nazi Party-affiliated charity, which was active locally in the city of Berlin. On 3 May 1933, shortly after the Nazi Party took power in Weimar Germany, Adolf Hitler turned it into a party organization that was to be active throughout the country. The structure of the NSV was based on the Nazi Party model, with local (Ort), county (Kreis) and district (Gau) administrations.
The propaganda of the Nazi regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945 promoted Nazi ideology by demonizing the enemies of the Nazi Party, notably Jews and communists, but also capitalists and intellectuals. It promoted the values asserted by the Nazis, including Heldentod, Führerprinzip, Volksgemeinschaft, Blut und Boden and pride in the Germanic Herrenvolk. Propaganda was also used to maintain the cult of personality around Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and to promote campaigns for eugenics and the annexation of German-speaking areas. After the outbreak of World War II, Nazi propaganda vilified Germany's enemies, notably the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States, and in 1943 exhorted the population to total war.
Nazism, formally National Socialism, is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitler Fascism and Hitlerism. The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War when the Third Reich collapsed.
Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath! A Picture Book for Old and Young is an antisemitic children's picture book published in November 1936 in Nazi Germany. The book was written and illustrated by Elvira Bauer, a kindergarten teacher, art student, and Nazi supporter. It was the first of three children's books to be published by Julius Streicher, the editor of the infamously antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, who was later executed for war crimes.