“In the following study period we will examine the objects brought to school: shell fragments, bullets, parts of projectiles worked into jewelry, etc. — mind the fuses! and we’ll talk about the uses to which these were put during the War. After this we’ll describe scenes, such as a day in the trenches, an air raid, black Frenchmen, a bursting bomb, the burial of a comrade (using the universally-sung melody, Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden! ), how a dying man writes a farewell letter, a day of rest behind the front (Jews).”
Karl Ruger insists that the Jews, in large numbers, were having fun behind the lines while the Germans wrote farewells and died. Surely he knows that a disproportionately large percentage of Jews died in the War; but there is no concern here, either, for the truth. The one aim is to fix “race-consciousness” and blind obedience to the Führer in the children. We go on to the “Letters of Soldiers from the Front”:
“…As for the rest, we shoot but little and are not much shot at. Our activities consist principally in sleeping, eating, smoking, and playing chess. Some of the men play cards. We write letters and read the newspapers. You see, it is quite a cozy life. Especially in the evenings, in our ‘living room,’ when there is a little candle burning on the table around which we have gathered, everyone smoking or doing away with the sweets that have come by field-post. In the background, someone is making coffee on a little stove; another man is drying his socks, a third warming potatoes, and a fourth playing the mouth-organ, while the rest hum the melody, loudly and softly, along with him; yes, that can be unbelievably cozy.”
“Cozy”; that is the atmosphere of war, although Ruger admits that “dangerous things” are occasionally found. They are: aviators, grenades, bombs, bullets, poison-gas, cannon, rifles, machine-guns, tanks, sabers, barbed wire, shell fragments — a list that each child must memorize. He must also learn “What the soldier needs,” and “All about Ersatz products.” Written exercises are on themes like “The dictated peace of Versailles”:
“The best milch cows had to be given up, and so there were only a few milch cows left, which meant little milk and that not of the best quality; city children were undernourished, a fact which is still noticeable among many of them….”
It goes on, page after page with no other purpose than to fill little children with hatred for the “enemies of Germany,” who include, aside from the Jews, everyone not in complete accord with the plans and methods of the Führer: the French, English, Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons, Slavs in general, and Russians in particular.
It shows how “Jews, criminals, and international bandits” made a revolution in Germany, and, as late as February, 1933, set fire to “our” Reichstag as a signal for the Communist world revolution. “And there were always more and more people who said: ‘Yes, Hitler is right’ always more, millions and millions. Finally men of the old government said: ‘We are ashamed. We must go!’ Nor did Reich President von Hindenburg like them any more. So he went to Hitler and said to him: ‘You make a government!’ That was on January 30, 1933. Then Hitler became Chancellor.”
But Karl Ruger lies in obedience to orders. Dr. Max Stoll, Oberstudiendirektor, in Munich, described his own methods and recommended them to others in his preface to The Onward March of the German Nation: “It would never have sufficed simply to relate events; every relation must try to give form to the general picture….” And the N.S. Educator publishes a history curriculum which finds it by no means “sufficient merely to relate events.”
