The regime, fearful in spite of pomp and celebration, is making preparations.
The Frankfurter Zeitung of June 26, 1937:
“We have recently been informed that an order has been proclaimed by the Reich Minister of Education to the effect that all reports of school graduations or diplomas are to omit any mention of the activity of the pupil in the National Socialist Party and its sub-organizations.”
This proclamation was not to be made public (according to some official correspondence), for it needed a preliminary notice to explain it. Repeatedly, the activities of pupils in organizations had been described as harmful to their academic development, and mention of these were likely to injure their future chances. Rudolf Hess, Representative of the Führer, has compelled the Minister of Education to command that no mention be made of the Party or its organizations — and that, for children of school age, means expressly the Jungvolk and the Hitler Jugend, the Jungmädels and the B.D.M. The secret order, published by mistake, overreaches itself. Wouldn’t it have been enough to issue an edict forbidding unfavorable notices (suicidal to the teachers who wrote them, considering the status of the schools)? But no notice at all! There is a good reason for it. Usually, the school rating of children stands in inverse proportion to their activity in the State Youth, because of the time the organization work requires and the emphasis it puts. And if a business man finds a boy with a good organization record and good marks, he will not believe the good marks; or he will prefer not to have an obvious government agent, perhaps even a government spy, working for him. And the boy himself, turned down at every job, will consider his report with its seductively high marks, and blame his failure on the notice that he was Gefolgschaftsführer. How many of these cases must have added up before the edict was issued, behind Herr von Schirach’s back! And how it must have confused the children, to have their proudest title, this rank that ornaments their position in the State, commanded secretly to be kept a secret!
These are policies dictated by a bad conscience, directed now, not against a world of enemies, but against the most promising members of the new State in a commonwealth of people whose boast is of complete unity.
That’s how things are. Hitler’s regime says: We have enemies in Germany, many of them, and we can only pray to Wotan that, as in the past, they will fear us more than we fear them. But we have youth on our side. That makes us strong. Also, we have the guns.
They have the guns and that makes them strong. But the youth? There are proofs to the contrary. In this force of millions, who are supposed to be truly and irrevocably Nazi, the young men, the university men, are the first to show disappointment and disgust. They protest by leaving empty benches before Storm Leaders disguised as professors and by crowding the halls for those few who have a little knowledge of the extra-Nazi world. And these men were, yesterday, the State Youth.
There are other signs. Voices find the outside world. They are voices of young workers, students, men of deep religious convictions, and their expressions are of wrath and hope. Here is the spectacle of a country — uneducated politically, seduced by romantic nationalism and a charlatan who said he was a savior — whose moral and spiritual resources as a country are now forced underground. The forces still live. In the past, they nourished all the greatness of Germany. They survive; they cannot be withheld from the soul of a people; in the end, they are the highest concepts of human life, and they triumph, they emerge in the end.
EPILOGUE
I N NEW YORK, I LIVE IN a small hotel on the East Side. It is a pleasant hotel; the management advertises it as “continental.” But I like it for its American details — closets and showers — no luxury in this country, of course, but I cannot help being pleased by them.