Worth your time-----EDUCATION IN THE THIRD REICH-----The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany: William L. Shirer, Ron Rosenbaum: 9781451651683: Amazon.com: Books

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany: William L. Shirer, Ron Rosenbaum: 9781451651683: Amazon.com: Books
EDUCATION IN THE THIRD REICH
"...On April 30, 1934, Bernhard
Rust, an Obergruppenfuehrer in the S.A., onetime Gauleiter of Hanover, a Nazi
Party member and friend of Hitler since the early Twenties, was named Reich Minister of Science, Education and Popular Culture.
In the bizarre, topsy-turvy world of National Socialism,

Rust was eminently fitted for his task.

Since 1930 he had been an unemployed provincial schoolmaster, having been dismissed in that year by the local republican authorities at Hanover for certain manifestations of instability of mind, though his fanatical Nazism may have been partly responsible for his ouster.

For Dr. Rust preached the Nazi gospel with the zeal of a Goebbels and the fuzziness of a Rosenberg.

Named Prussian Minister of Science, Art and Education in February 1933, he boasted that he had succeeded overnight in “liquidating the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics.”

To such a mindless man was now entrusted dictatorial control over German science, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning and the youth organizations.

For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax not so much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as conscripts, in the armed forces.

Hitler’s contempt for “professors” and the intellectual academic life had peppered the pages of Mein Kampf, in which he had set down some of his ideas on education.

“The whole education by a national state,” he had written, “must aim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodies which are physically healthy to the core.”

But, even more important, he had stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service “of a new national state”—a subject he returned to often after he became the German dictator.

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’”

And on May 1, 1937, he declared, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”

It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.

The German schools, from first grade through the universities, were quickly Nazified.

Textbooks were hastily rewritten, curricula were changed, Mein Kampf was made—in the words of Der Deutsche Erzieher, official organ of the educators—“our infallible pedagogical guiding
star” and teachers who failed to see the new light were cast out.

Most instructors had been more or less Nazi in sentiment when not outright party members.

To strengthen their ideology they were dispatched to special schools for intensive training in National Socialist principles, emphasis being put on Hitler’s racial doctrines.

Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through the universities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League which, by law, was held “responsible for the execution of the ideological and political co-ordination of all teachers in accordance with the National Socialist doctrine.”

The Civil Service Act of 1937 required teachers to be “the executors of the will of the party-supported State” and to be ready “at any time to defend without reservation the National Socialist State.”

An earlier decree had classified them as civil servants and thus subject to the racial laws.

Jews, of course, were forbidden to teach.

All teachers took an oath to “be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler.”

Later, no man could teach who had not first served in the S.A., the Labor Service or the Hitler Youth.

Candidates for instructorships in the universities had to attend for six weeks an observation camp where their views and character were studied by Nazi experts and reported to the Ministry of Education, which issued licenses to teach based on the candidates’ political “reliability.”

Prior to 1933, the German public schools had been under the jurisdiction of the local authorities and the universities under that of the individual states.

Now all were brought under the iron rule of the Reich Minister of Education.

It was he who also appointed the rectors and the deans of the universities, who formerly had been elected by the full professors of the faculty.

He also appointed the leaders of the university students’ union, to which all students had to belong, and of the lecturers union, comprising all instructors.

The N.S. Association of University Lecturers, under the tight leadership of old Nazi hands, was given a decisive role in selecting who was to teach and to see that what they taught was in accordance with Nazi theories.

The result of so much Nazification was catastrophic for German education and for German learning.

History was so falsified in the new textbooks and by the teachers in their lectures that it became
ludicrous.

The teaching of the “racial sciences,” exalting the Germans as the master race and the Jews as breeders of almost all the evil there was in the world, was even more so.

In the University of Berlin alone, where so many great scholars had taught in the past, the new rector, a storm trooper and by profession a veterinarian, instituted twenty-five new courses in Rassenkunde—racial science—and by the time he had really taken the university apart he had eighty-six courses
connected with his own profession.

The teaching of the natural sciences, in which Germany had been so pre-eminent for generations,
deteriorated rapidly.
Great teachers such as Einstein and Franck in physics, Haber, Willstaetter and Warburg in chemistry, were fired or retired.

Those who remained, many of them, were bitten by the Nazi aberrations and attempted to apply them to pure science.

They began to teach
what they called German physics, German chemistry, German mathematics.

Indeed, in 1937 there appeared a journal called Deutsche
Mathematik, and its first editorial solemnly proclaimed that any idea that
mathematics could be judged nonracially carried “within itself the germs of
destruction of German science.”

The hallucinations of these Nazi scientists became
unbelievable, even to a layman.

“German Physics?” asked Professor Philipp Lenard of
Heidelberg University, who was one of the more learned and internationally
respected scientists of the Third Reich.

“‘But,’ it will be replied, ‘science is and remains
international.’

It is false.

In reality, science, like every other
human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.”

Professor Rudolphe Tomaschek, director of the Institute of Physics at Dresden, went further.

“Modern Physics,” he wrote, “is an instrument of [world] Jewry for the destruction of Nordic science … True physics is the creation of the German spirit
…In fact, all European science is the fruit of Aryan, or, better, German thought.”
Professor Johannes Stark, head of the German National Institute of Physical Science, thought so too.

It would be found, he said, that the “founders of research in physics, and the great discoverers from Galileo to Newton to the physical pioneers of our time, were almost exclusively Aryan, predominantly of the Nordic race.”

There was also Professor Wilhelm Mueller, of the Technical College of Aachen, who in a book entitled Jewry and Science saw a world-wide Jewish plot to pollute science and thereby destroy civilization.

To him Einstein, with his theory of relativity, was the archvillain.

The Einstein theory, on which so much of modern physics is based, was to this singular Nazi professor “directed from beginning to end toward the goal of transforming the living—that is, the non-Jewish—world of living essence, born from a mother earth and bound up with blood, and
bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all individual differences of peoples and nations, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survives which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws.”

The world-wide acclaim given to Einstein on the publication of his theory of relativity, Professor Mueller proclaimed, was really only a rejoicing over “the approach of Jewish world rule which was to force down German manhood irrevocably and eternally to the level of the lifeless slave.”

To Professor Ludwig Bieberback, of the University of Berlin, Einstein was “an alien mountebank.”

Even to Professor Lenard, “the Jew conspicuously lacks understanding for the truth … being in this respect in contrast to the Aryan research scientist with his careful and serious will to truth … Jewish physics is thus a phantom and a phenomenon of degeneration of fundamental German.
And yet from 1905 to 1931 ten German Jews had been awarded Nobel Prizes for their contributions to science.   

During the Second Reich, the university professors, like the Protestant clergy, had given blind support to the conservative government and its expansionist aims, and the lecture halls had been breeding grounds of virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism.

The Weimar Republic had insisted on complete academic freedom, and one result had been that the vast majority of university teachers, antiliberal, antidemocratic, anti-Semitic as they were, had helped to undermine the democratic regime.

Most professors were fanatical nationalists who wished the return of a conservative, monarchical Germany.

And though to many of them, before 1933, the Nazis were too rowdy and violent to attract their allegiance, their preachments helped prepare the ground for the coming of Nazism.

By 1932 the majority of students appeared to be enthusiastic for Hitler.

It was surprising to some how many members of the university faculties knuckled under to the Nazification of higher learning after 1933.

Though official figures put the number of professors and instructors dismissed during the first five years of the regime at 2,800—about one fourth of the total number—the proportion of those who lost their posts through defying National Socialism was, as Professor Wilhelm Roepke, himself dismissed from the University of Marburg in 1933, said, “exceedingly small.”

Though small, there were names famous in the German academic world: Karl Jaspers, E. I. Gumbel, Theodor Litt, Karl Barth, Julius Ebbinghaus and dozens of others.

Most of them emigrated, first to Switzerland, Holland and England and eventually to America.

One of them, Professor Theodor Lessing, who had fled to Czechoslovakia, was tracked down by Nazi thugs and murdered in Marienbad on August 31, 1933.

A large majority of professors, however, remained at their posts, and as early as the autumn of 1933 some 960 of them, led by such luminaries as Professor Sauerbruch, the surgeon, Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, and Pinder, the art historian, took a public vow to support Hitler and the National Socialist regime.

“It was a scene of prostitution,” Professor Roepke later wrote, “that has stained the honorable history of German learning.”

And as Professor Julius Ebbinghaus, looking back over the shambles in 1945, said, “The German universities failed, while there was still time, to oppose publicly with all their power the destruction of knowledge and of the democratic state.

They failed to keep the beacon of freedom and right burning during the night of tyranny.”

The cost of such failure was great.

After six years of Nazification the number of university students dropped by more than one half—from 127,920 to 58,325.

The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists and
engineers, was even greater—from 20,474 to 9,554.

Academic standards fell dizzily.

By 1937 there was not only a shortage of young men in the sciences and engineering but a decline in their qualifications.

Long before the outbreak of the war the chemical industry, busily helping to further Nazi rearmament, was complaining through its organ, Die Chemische Industrie, that Germany was losing itsmleadership in chemistry.

Not only the national economy but national defense itself was being jeopardized, it complained, and it blamed the shortage of young scientists and their mediocre caliber on the poor quality of
the technical colleges.

Nazi Germany’s loss, as it turned out, was the free world’s gain, especially in the race to be the first with the atom bomb…"

And on and on and on til we get to 2008...

Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(Kindle Locations 6066-6090). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.