Other chapters deal with “Gas Weapons”: “Eye Irritants,” “Lung Poisons,” or “Choking Weapons” (green cross), “Skin Poisons” (yellow cross), and “Nose and Throat Irritants” (blue cross).
Laboratories all over Germany, filled with school-children, playing cheerfully with death and suffering!
DRAWING
Endless repetition, for the Nazis repeat endlessly in their drive to one goal, shouting their slogans with all the inflections, teaching their mottoes in every class. Even the lesson in drawing, which used to be the gayest and most relaxed hour — what has happened to it?
Any issue of Art and Youth offers a lively picture of a Nazi drawing lesson. The May, 1937, issue begins with a “Family Tree of Instructors,” and a “Pedigree of Residences”!). The leading editorial is a long illustrated essay entitled Aerial Defense in the Drawing Class. Joseph Stuchler says: “The first thing we must demand of a task is its value in terms of national preparedness. It is characteristic of our epoch that the defense instincts ( Wehrhaftsinne ) of our youth are stimulated through the awakening of its will to bear weapons. In this sense, lessons of aerial defense in the drawing class meet with our educational objective!”
He goes on to describe classes in grammar school, keeping to his theme of “Aerial Defense.” He begins with the sixth grade (the German schools have nine classes, numbered Nine to One), and here he is referring to children of ten:
“Everything that moves, that is unusual, may be the object of portrayal. Thus, for example, an air-raid, the activity of weapons of defense, the searchlight, parachute jumping, explosions, burning houses, the fire department in action, helping the medical officers, the strange appearance of men in gas masks, to which, of course, we add the element of color. All this belongs to the life and experience of a ten-year-old boy. Motionless forms, such as, for example, the houses of a city, are no more than meaningless scenery, and as such can often be omitted altogether.”
For the fifth grade, more ambitious tasks!
“We proceed in our study of movement, and we portray the act of ‘falling out,’ with both arms stretched upward… also, we can depict the act of ‘falling backward unconscious,’ with the marked declivity of the whole body and of the arms in a backward motion: that is easy to reproduce. And now we observe the medical officers at work. The simple walk of the doctors and their aides as they transport a wounded man on his stretcher, as well as the simple pose of kneeling, ought not to be too difficult even for those pupils less gifted in drawing.”
The fourth grade is to draw a bomb-proof cellar; but to stress the dramatic impact of a bomb hitting near the cellar rather than the passive distress of the people huddled inside. “In this manner the teacher can awaken the imagination dormant in the child and make use of it in a manner helpful to our theme.”