The Nazis, of course, place no funds whatever at the disposal of such schools, and it is often as a result of this lack of money that “children of foreign blood” are subjected to the martyrdom of Nazi instruction. In the Nazi schools, they are used to the same end as everything else. They are living examples in “Racial Science.” The Jewish child is called forward by the teacher; she stands on the platform, defenseless and trembling before her schoolmates (who are not allowed to be her playmates) while the teacher demonstrates the “distinctive marks of the Jewish race.” “What do you see in this face?” the pupils are asked; and, whatever the face shows, the children answer what they have learned from the Stürmer: “A gigantic nose, negroid lips, inferior frizzy hair.” And the tears in those dark eyes, the scarred spirit! —the scar that can never be explained or atoned for! “What else do you see?” asks the teacher; and when the pupils are silent, feeling that there is a boundary to cruelty, the teacher adds at last: “You see, besides, a cowardly and disloyal facial expression.”
“Aryan” pupils learn from living examples, and are taught not only “racial characteristics” but how to treat these types.
The great Italian man of letters and statesman, Count Carlo Sforza, tells this story in a Swiss newspaper:
“A cousin of mine spent last summer at a castle near Wurttemberg, and since she is a member of the nobility and was a guest, she was above suspicion; she was able to visit the schools that interested her. This is what she saw: During the morning recess, all the children lined up at the door of the canteen for a cup of milk and a piece of bread. Whenever a little Jewish girl reached her turn, the teacher in charge held up the cup, and cried: ‘Run along, Jewess! Next, please!’ And this was repeated daily. The little Jewish children were never spared the necessity of standing in line and reaching for the cup they were never given. The Christian children had to witness this scene daily, to learn how to treat a hungry Jewish child.”
The mark of this treatment on the lives of the Jewish children is frightful, of course; but the results are terrible also for the “German,” the “Aryan” children — for while the Jews are only tortured, they are corrupted, deeply corrupted. Some of the strongest of the “non-Aryans” may come through, and leave childhood with toughened nerves. But the “Aryans” are in peril, for their sense of justice and humanity is being stolen from them. And unless they meet other influences, they will lose all sense of truth — the sense which balances us and allows us to walk through the world.
* * *
If we have focused our attention on the education of boys, it is because of the secondary and minor role of girls in Hitlerland. “In the case of female education,” Hitler says in Mein Kampf (p. 169), “the main stress should be laid on bodily training, and after that on development of character, and, last of all, of the intellect. But the one absolute aim of female education must be with a view to the future mother.”
The sequence is applied to boys, too; but they are permitted the sciences, as far as they lead to war; the girls are refused even these. They are to become mothers, and nothing else.
“For, in the last analysis,” Gauleiterin Dr. Tschernig writes in the German Educator for June 5, 1937, “the concept of National Socialism is synonymous with motherhood. Motherhood, however, is nothing sentimental, nothing soft. Motherhood is something hard as steel. The National Socialist woman is mütterlich und wehrhaft” (ready to bear arms and children)…. “There are women who are already realizing this weapon-bearing motherliness in their lives. But by far the greater number has not yet found its way through to this. It is a question for us educators whether such women are going to live in Germany.”
Will Germany be populated by men who know nothing but war, and by steel women who can do nothing but bring new warriors into the world? What will you be like, you little German girls — you minor characters, admiring uniforms, putting your dolls in uniform, ignored, neglected? What will you be like? Will it be your voice that protests? Will you be far enough outside the struggle, ignored enough, to realize what it is to be wehrhaft in the service of tyrants?