Holocaust Ideas for Teachers

IF YOU TOUCH ON THE HOLOCAUST in class here are a few photos (mostly from the internet), a few ideas I used in class, and a few stories I have encountered since I retired and would try to use if I was still teaching.

(Use whatever you can.)

First, you might be surprised, as I was, if you address the topic in class. By the time I left the classroom in 2008, I was running into students occasionally who no longer recognized the man below.

Hitler fought bravely in World War I and won the Iron Cross.
How would history have been altered if a bullet had killed him in 1915 or 1916?
(Photo owned by author; feel free to use it.)

Hitler walks with Helga Goebbels, the daughter of his propaganda minister.

IN MY CLASS WE BEGAN a Holocaust unit by focusing on “dehumanization.” The Nazis, I explained, referred to Jews and others as “vermin.” 

I suggested to students that most people are at times guilty of “labeling” others, or “seeing all members of a group as the same.” 

I said it was easier to hate people you “labeled” because you never thought about them as individuals. 

For this lesson, I had to be careful. But when I asked kids if they could think of any “labels” people used examples always came pouring out: kike, fag, gook, nigger, retard and many, many more.

It made students uneasy to realize that when they were sometimes guilty of dehumanizing others, for instance, when they called classmates “nerds” or “losers.” 

One of the most powerful moments I ever experienced in a classroom came when, near the end of this very discussion, just as my fourth bell class was about to end, a young lady held up her hand. I called on her; and in an anguished voice she announced, “Mr. Viall, the other kids label me. They call me a ‘dog.’”

I think her peers were stunned to recognize their own guilt and I waited for someone to offer explanation.

No one dared utter a word and I had to fight back tears, myself. Then the bell rang for lunch and the class filed out in complete silence. I think they had looked in a mirror, as it were, and had not liked the image they saw reflected.

I stopped the young lady before she could leave and told her she was one of my favorite students.

What is the boy in the cap thinking? What is his mother thinking?
What are those Nazi soldiers thinking?

Pages from the diary of Anne Frank.

Trouble for the Jews in Germany began as soon as Hitler came to power.
Here party members call for a boycott of this Jewish-owned store in 1933.
"Kauft nicht bei Juden" means "Do not buy from Jews."

Jews were required to wear yellow stars.
In the camps homosexuals wore pink triangles.

I tried to point out to my students that the yellow star was just a kind of label. You saw it, you need not think about the person.

This made hating easier.

This Jewish family in the Netherlands was wiped out.

Some were lucky.
Leo Goldberger (second from right) and his family were helped to escape by boat from Denmark.
They found safety in Sweden, a neutral nation.
He was 13 at the time.

His story can be found here.

Selection: Upon arrival Jews and other prisoners were sorted according to their usefulness.
Healthy young men and women might make good slave laborers.
Most young children would be taken to the gas chambers immediately.

TELL THEM I WAS NOT AFRAID

I would use this story for reasons I think are clear.... 

Bret Stephens, writing in the NYT (6/9/18) takes offense to the words of a German right-wing politician Alexander Gauland. “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Stephens’ maternal grandmother, born Rachel Westerman was born in the Latvian port town of Liepaja (or Libau) in 1919. She died 96 years later in Israel. She left behind a book about her life which he long feared to read. In it she describes a happy Jewish childhood, he says.

“When the Soviets took over in 1940 she was living in Riga, the capital, studying and acting and being wooed by a journalist and playwright named Grisha, her future husband.

“The Russian occupation brought midnight arrests and deportations. The Nazis, who invaded the following June, brought mass slaughter and enslavement.

“Raya’s father, Shmuel, was arrested along with the other Jewish men on his street in Liepaja on July 14. He ‘kissed my mother and took his walking stick with him to the jail,’ Raya wrote. ‘Later the men were taken to the lighthouse and shot.’

“Raya’s older brother, Abrasha, was arrested on Oct. 1 and murdered about a week later, most likely by Germany’s Latvian henchmen. ‘Bye, my girl, I hope we meet again,’ were his last words to Raya. His wife, Zina, was murdered as well.

“Grisha’s entire family—his green-eyed mother, Bella, his older sister, her three children—were murdered in Riga ‘in the first days of the German occupation.’

“Raya’s mother, Haya, and two of her sisters, Becka and Ethel, survived a little longer. On Monday, Dec. 15, 1941, they and thousands of other Jews were taken to the women’s prison in Liepaja. From there, in the freezing cold, they were marched to a nearby beach called Skede, forced to strip to their underclothes, taken to the edge of a trench, made to strip naked, and shot in groups of 10. After three straight days of methodical slaughter, 2,749 Jews—mostly women and children—had perished.

“The victims were photographed in their final moments….

“What about Raya? She and Grisha had barely escaped Riga under heavy German fire. They wound up in Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan, where he enlisted in the Red Army and was badly wounded in action. In 1945 they were reunited in Riga, and Raya set about discovering what had happened to her family.

“One of the handful of Jewish survivors of Liepaja (out of the original population of 6,500) had known Raya’s mother and had tried to help her. ‘I brought your mother a work certificate attesting that she was working and did not need to go with the rest,’ the survivor told Raya.

“‘I begged here to take the paper, but she told me, “I will not take it. My husband is already gone. My sister, Becka, is terrified, and we will go together. Just know that I am not afraid.”’

“She added this:

“‘If you meet any of my children, tell them I was not afraid. Tell them to continue living knowing that I was not afraid.’

“In 1972, Raya emigrated to Israel, which is where I came to know her. She had taken her mother’s words to heart and had the steady gaze of a woman who feared nothing because she had seen the worst.”

Arriving in a camp.

EVERY DECISION DURING SELECTION could make the difference between life and death; notes from another story:

In a NYT book review of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, the reviewer cites the case of Moritz Choinowski, a Polish-born Jew who survived six years in the camps, 1939 until the end of the war. His tour of Hell included stops at Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Dachau.

Primo Levy: “Trains heavily laden with human beings went in each day, and all that came out was the ashes of their bodies, their hair, the gold of their teeth.”

Hans Loritz, SS, who took over one camp explained, “In regards to discipline, I am a swine.”

Rudolph Hoss had been wounded in WWI; he rose in the ranks and took over at Auschwitz in 1940. Female prisoners worked as tailors and hairdressers for his wife. “Every wish of my wife, of my children, was met,” he explained.

The first use of Zyklon-B, there in 1941, dispatched a group of Russian POW’s. “One could see that these people had scratched and bitten each other in a fit of madness before they died,” one witness admitted.

Hoss was pleased with this new method of killing—sparing his SS soldiers the trauma that followed mass shooting bloodbaths.

At Auschwitz some prison doctors decided it was best to kill newborns and therefore spare the mothers. Olga Lengyel arrived at the camp with her son. When asked by an SS physician, Dr. Fritz Klein, how old the boy was she made sure to tell him he was under 13, and only looked older. This was her way, she hoped, of sparing him a life of hard labor. At Auschwitz nearly all prisoners under age 14 were gassed, her son among them. After the war she still wondered, “How should I have known?”

What would these prisoners be thinking when they arrived at the camp?

I CREATED A DETAILED and horrifying reading for my students. Here I describe how guards lured prisoners to their deaths. 

At camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka:

…victims arrived by the trainload, to be gassed in large chambers disguised as showers. Sometimes guards told new arrivals to tie their shoes together so they could find them after their “bath.” There were numbered hooks for hanging clothes and signs in many languages saying: “Showers.” One guard encouraged victims to move faster. “Hurry,” he lied. “Coffee is waiting. Coffee is ready in camp.” 

At another camp, flowers were planted round the gas chambers. Meanwhile a band of pretty Jewish girls in white blouses and navy-blue skirts entertained those about to die. The music they were ordered to play was always merry.

Suitcases at Auschwitz.

For more than seventy years this mug kept its secret.
Beneath a false bottom a Jewish family, headed for a concentration camp,
had hidden a gold ring and necklace.
Usually the camp guards looted all valuables. This time they missed them.

The story is told in more detail here.

Regina Feldman survived the Holocaust in part because she could knit.
She and her family were sent to Sobibor in 1942.
Her parents, three brothers and a sister were gassed.

You can read more about her by clicking this link.

Feldman buried her mother’s wedding ring (shown below )so guards wouldn’t steal it The ring was found decades later by archaeologists studying the camp.

Each ring would represent a love affair terminated by poison gas.
II might ask students to do a writing assignment about the story behind one ring.

Twins Eva and Miriam Mozes.
They survived the Holocaust, in part, because Dr. Josef Mengele
often chose twins for hideous medical experiments.
Mengele became known as "The Angel of Death."

Dr. Josef Mengele, center.

Hate comes easy if you dehumanize your victims.
The Germans referred to prisoners by numbers, not names.

In general, it was easier to shoot people in the back of the head.
Looking into a victim's eyes was often hard.

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the war the Germans sent out special military units to round up and shoot Jews and other “undesirables.” Thousands of men, women and children were sometimes mowed down in a few hours.

In a letter to his wife, one German soldier described what it was like to perform such bloody duty. “All we did was shoot Jews, shoot Jews all the time,” he said. “My arm hurt from shooting.”   

Intent on making sure my students could grasp the horror, I created a reading for my classes called Hitler’s Black Harvest. I wanted them to feel the Holocaust in their hearts and souls, not to pass over it in a history book. 

The only real problem I had was that the reading made students cry. 

Here’s another sampling:

            Hermann Graebe [a German officer who did not approve] witnessed one mass killing. Even though he took no part, what he saw turned his soul to ice. Trucks were bringing in victims. Guards were hustling them off. Whips cracked in the air as prisoners undressed: shoes in one pile, coats in another, underwear in a third. Graebe was surprised by how little crying he heard. People “stood about in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign.” Then they moved to the edge of the pit where they would be shot. 

A family caught his eye:

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him.

Then a guard counted off twenty prisoners, including the old woman and her family. They stepped closer to the pits and were cut down in a storm of bullets.

 Hitler's Black Harvest is for sale on TpT.

Czeslawa Kwoka, 14, was sent to Auschwitz in December 1942.

You can read more about her here.

Marina Amaral recently colorized the girl's photo to bring her "back to life." 

PRISONERS WHO COULD BE OF USE, even in the death camps, were sometimes able to survive. Wilhelm Brasse, a photographer, took the two pictures above. As long as he could do his work he had a chance.

Marcel Nadjari was part of the unit that disposed of all the bodies at Auschwitz. He left a written account of life in the camp, stuck it in a thermos, put the thermos in a leather pouch and buried it in 1944. 

It was found many years later.

“We all suffer things here that the human mind can not imagine,” he explained.

His story is told here.

Some prisoners were spared to perform slave labor.
At Buchenwald prisoners were tied to a cart loaded with stone and sand
and forced to pull it, singing as they went.
Guards called them "singing horses."

Russian prisoners of war were forced to do work for the Nazis
or starved and murdered by the hundreds of thousands.

Prisoners at Mauthausen had to work in a stone quarry.
If you were too weak to work you were sent to the gas chambers.
It was hard to survive on a diet of only 1,000 calories a day.
Karl Peterik remembered eating oats meant for a horse he was tending.

Women chosen for slave labor; some worked in factories or on farms for the Germans.

HERE ARE A FEW NOTES I took on a story about women in the camps:

“Remember the Women,” in NYT book review, 4-12-15; story of Ravensbruck camp

Germans had 980 concentration camps; 30,000 camps for slave labor; 1,150 Jewish ghettos, 500 brothels where women served as sex slaves. Ravensbruck opened in 1939, for women, at first, “asocials,” prostitutes, “race defilers,” and criminals, including political prisoners and Roma (Gypsies). At this camp the killings usually involved workers who could no longer serve, who were sick or weak from hunger. Polish “rabbits” were subjected to medical experiments, including breaking their legs to work on repair procedures, insertion of contaminated material to study treatments for German soldiers. Russian army women tried to resist—refused to make munitions—tried to hold onto uniforms—after, were sometimes sent to Siberia, on false charges of having collaborated with the Germans. Killing became a way to make room for healthier arrivals.

Himmler’s mistress had a baby at a clinic not far from the camp and he took a special interest in the camp. Siemens and Daimler-Benz both used slave labor and sent prisoners back to the camps when they could no longer work. With the Russians approaching, Dr. Carl Clauberg continued to sterilize prisoners. Rudolf Hoss, commandant at Auschwitz and then Ravensbruck, admitted later, in the words of author Sarah Helm, that the urge to kill “was nurtured for so long in the Nazi psyche that it eventually ran of its own volition, impossible to extinguish.”

Gandhi called Hitler’s regime “naked ruthless force reduced to an exact science.”

Gypsies were also considered "undesirable" by the Nazis.
They were also slaughtered.

A serious "problem" for the Germans was disposing of all the bodies of their victims.
Mass grave shown at the end of the war.

Corpses at Bergen-Belsen

The Germans experimented with all kinds of methods to burn bodies.
American officers, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower (third from left, front row),
examine the evidence.

The Hungarian Jews were saved from a train headed for the concentration camps
in the spring of 1945. 

These children survived at Auschwitz.

Female survivors.

A BRIEF NOTE:

NYT (1-2-16) Marceline Rozenberg was arrested in 1943, in France, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

She was a teen at the time and went with her father, Szlhama (Schloime) Froim Rozenberg. Awaiting transport, he told her, “You will come back, perhaps, because you’re young, but I will not come back.”

She has since done films about the Holocaust; in one she has an actor stretch out on a bed and speak the words she said to her father: “I love you so much that I was happy to be deported with you.” (Her parents had moved to France in 1919, from Poland, because they wanted greater freedom. France failed the Jews in many ways, she feels, helped them in others.)

A survivor: What is he thinking?
What would he say about his experiences in such a hell?

Prisoners were never well-fed.
Many grown men were reduced in weight to as little as 75 pounds.

PRISONERS WERE PACKED packed into barracks, three, four, and even six to a bunk, sleeping on filthy straw. 

Many were covered with lice until “their clothing looked as if it had been sprinkled with poppy seeds.”

Having been rescued by Allied troops, two camp survivors help tally the dead.
What kind of nightmares would such men and women have?

Lucky to be alive.

A survivor accuses a Nazi guard of being a murderer.

I SAW THIS STORY ABOUT A GUARD on trial years later; his story might be worth following up in detail:

San Francisco Chronicle; 4-22-15, “Concentration Camp Guard Testifies at Trial”

SS Sgt. Oskar Groening told a German court he helped guard thousands of Jews at Auschwitz as they left the cattle cars and headed for the gas chambers. At age 93, he is charged with 300,000 counts of “accessory to murder.” He admitted seeing another guard silence a crying baby by bashing its head against a truck. He says he requested a transfer; when it was not granted he began drinking vodka heavily. “I share morally in the guilt but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide,” he told the judges. He volunteered for the SS in 1940; worked at the camp 1942-1944; says his main task was to “help collect and tally money as part of his job of dealing with the belongings stolen from people arriving;” the presiding judge asked him what his opinion of this money being sent back to Berlin.

In his opinion, Groening responded, it belonged to the state. “They didn’t really need it anymore,” he told the court, to the shock of Auschwitz survivors watching. He could get 15 years in jail.

Seventy years later, survivors went back to the camps to remember.
What would they want to remember?

The slogan over the gate reads: "Work shall set you free."

A ring owned by Hitler was pocketed by a U.S. soldier in 1945 when Berchtesgaden,
his mountain retreat, was captured.
Silver, plated in gold, with a large ruby in the center,
it was expected to sell for almost $100,000 when it went up for auction in 2013. 

Read more about the ring here.

Hitler at his mountain retreat.

Gandhi called Hitler’s regime 

“naked ruthless force reduced to an exact science.”

I Read Mein Kampf: So You Don't Have To

YOU CAN THANK ME, I suppose. I once read Mein Kampf, plowing through all 687 pages, and took notes. In light of recent events in Charlottesville [the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017], however, it seems we might need to reexamine exactly what it was Hitler had to say. If you have the stomach you can get by with just these notes. 

Certainly, the toxic nature of Nazi ideology has always been clear. Hitler’s poisonous ideas are on display on every page. Hatred, particularly, but not exclusively, directed at Jews, is the foundation of his thought.

I was surprised one year when I discovered
many of my seventh grade students didn't recognize this face.

    For teachers today it can be chilling to realize that as a boy Adolf Hitler was influenced by Dr. Leopold Pötsch. This educator alternately moved Hitler and his classmates to tears and inflamed them with enthusiasm for nationalistic causes. 

Hitler explains: 

What made our good fortune all the greater was that this teacher knew how to illuminate the past by examples from the present, and how from the past to draw inferences for the present. As a result, he had more understanding than anyone else for the daily problems which then held us breathless. He used our budding nationalistic fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor… 

This teacher made history my favorite subject.  

And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became a little revolutionary. (15) 

 

Even growing up in Austria, young Adolf said he could see racial danger at every hand: “In the north and south the poison of foreign nations gnawed at the body of our nationality, and even Vienna was visibly becoming more and more of an un-German city.”  

Soon “the granite foundation” of a future ideology was set. Threats to racial purity were as life-threatening as “incurable tumors.” (15; 22; 29) 

Reading Mein Kampf has always been a sickening slog, tedious page after tedious page, punctuated by venomous illogic. Even Hitler’s opinion of the intellectual capacity of his followers drips with cynicism. Political ideas, he says, must be “engraved in the memory and feeling of the people by eternal repetition.” 

“The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak.” (31; 42)

 

LIKE ALL WHO HATE, he first dehumanizes his enemies. He paints them as a racial and religious “threat.” Then he uses the frightening picture he creates to justify violence to advance the Nazi cause. When workers with different political views tried to drive him from a job site when he was a young man, threatening to toss him off a scaffold, Hitler said he had to decide. If ordinary Aryan workers were blind, was he wrong to believe in the greatness of the Aryan race?

    It would be years before he answered that question to his satisfaction. Meanwhile, he watched in dismay as Social Democrats, Communists and other political parties spread their competing ideologies. Newspaper stories in support of other parties infuriated him. He railed against “the brutal daily press, shunning no villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with such a virtuosity that would bend iron beams, all in the gospel of a new humanity.” 

Eventually, it dawned on him that his beloved Aryan people had been terrorized. They were victims. Their enemies – those in politics and the press – were seducers. Hitler promised he would break the grip of opposing political groups, including Communists, whose philosophy he compared to a form of “terror.”  

He would do so by opposing them with “equal terror.” (41-42; 44) 

Hitler writes that he was fooled, growing up in Austria. The Jews he saw had “become Europeanized and had taken on a human look.” Only gradually did he grasp the truth. “Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.” “By their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers.”

    Worse, “you discovered the moral stains on this ‘chosen people:’” 

Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?  

If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light - a kike! (52; 57)

  

Hitler warned against a diabolical Jewish influence in the press, in literature, in art and theater. “This was pestilence, spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death of olden times, and the people were being infected with it.” He began to examine the worldwide press with clear eyes. What he read was “more akin to lies than honest truth; and the writers were – Jews.” (58)

    He attacks the Jews constantly on the pages of Mein Kampf. At one point he likens them to a “spider” slowly beginning to “suck the blood out of the people’s pores.” 

Race purity must be guarded: 

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. (58; 193; 214)

    Students today – and apparently more adults than we’d care to imagine – may need to be reminded. Hitler’s racism and hatred were multifaceted. In one passage he refers to Negroes as “half-apes.” He describes being “repelled” by a “mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats.” Worst of all was “the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews.” (123; 394)

    Students today – and apparently more adults than we’d care to imagine – may need to be reminded. Hitler’s racism and hatred were multifaceted. In one passage he refers to Negroes as “half-apes.” He describes being “repelled” by a “mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats.” Worst of all was “the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews.” (123; 394) 

As early as 1913, he says he had already “expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the question of destroying Marxism.” In Hitler’s warped worldview, Communists were as bad as Jews and often one and the same. Marxism, he warned, could take form “only in the brain of a monster – not a man.” In another illogical leap, since Communists oppose all forms of religion, he wrote, “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.” “By defending myself against the Jew,” he continued, “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” (63; 65; 155) 

Western-style democracy posed a grave danger. As Adolf Hitler sees it, “the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature.” Nature intended superior races and superior individuals to dominate. In a Germanic democracy, and by such a road did he dream of rising to power, “the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.” (81; 344)

In other words, his plans for a dictatorship should have been clear to all.

ADOLF HITLER ALSO HAD DEFINITE PLANS for spreading his ideas. “The broad masses have a very limited understanding of politics. By far the greatest share in their ‘political education,’ which in this case is most aptly designated by the word ‘propaganda,’ falls to the account of the press.” Equally important would be “the mass meeting, the only way to exert a truly effective, because personal, influence on large sections of people” and to win their allegiance to the cause. 

Particularly the broad masses of people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of literary aesthetes and drawing-room heroes. (85; 106; 107)

 

Hitler believed only key elements of a human population were valuable. So any decision by members of the valuable elements to limit the number of children to whom they gave birth meant “robbing” the nation of its future. The German people must multiply and spread east across Europe.  

[[It] can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another. In this case we must not let political boundaries obscure for us the boundaries of eternal justice. If this earth really has room for all to live in, let us be given the soil we need for our livelihood. 

True, they [neighbor nations] will not be willing to do this. But then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take.   

 

Poles and Russians and other Slavic peoples barred the path. Someday It would be necessary “to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.” (138-139; 140) 

When World War I erupted in 1914, Hitler says he had been thrilled. “I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time … A fight for freedom had begun, mightier than the earth had ever seen.” 

True. Long years of combat took a toll. Hitler came to accept the “horror” of a war he had anxiously anticipated.  

The enthusiasm gradually cooled and the exuberant joy was stifled by mortal fear. The time came when every man had to struggle between the instinct of self-preservation and the admonitions of duty…often it was only the last remnant of conscience which decided the issue. (161; 165)

    Hitler would steel himself and do his duty, and do it well. Here, we might note he won an Iron Cross for bravery, the highest medal the German army bestows. 

The war dragged on for four bloody years. Communist elements inside Germany continued to spread their ideas, what Hitler referred to as “Marxism…this pestilence,” a “venomous plague,” helped by “Jewified universities.” It should have been the duty of any government to destroy this threat, he argued, “to exterminate mercilessly the agitators who were misleading the nation. “If the best men were dying at the front,” he added, “the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin.” (167-169) 

That last statement is typical of almost all his thinking. In his mind his enemies were always subhuman – vermin – scum – parasites – incurable tumors – always a threat to the best racial elements.

HITLER RETURNS OFTEN TO THE IMPORTANCE of propaganda. “[Its] effect for the most part,” he explains, “must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.” 

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. 

 

Propaganda was a blunt tool to wield ruthlessly in service to the cause. “It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.” The masses are slow to make up their minds “and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.” (180-185) 

Again, he makes clear he has no respect for the intellect of the masses, since “in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.” (231)  

In years to come, Hitler, backed by a massive Nazi propaganda machine, would become adept at pedaling the Big Lie. 

Even a limited democracy, he complained, left the ballot in the hands of “the mob of the simple or credulous.” A future Nazi government would have to guide the thinking of the simple people. That meant control of all sources of news, as well as control of curriculum in the nation’s schools: 

   The state, therefore, has the duty of watching over their education and preventing any mischief. It must particularly exercise strict control over the press; for its influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating, since it is applied, not once in a while, but over and over again.  

...the state must not forget that all means must serve an end; it must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called ‘freedom of the press’ and let itself be talked into neglecting its duty and denying the nation the food which it needs and which is good for it: with ruthless determination it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state and nation. (242) 

    What exactly was at stake? All the great advances in history, Hitler insisted, “everything we admire on this earth today – science and art, technology and inventions – is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race.” The key was to protect that one race. “All great cultures of the past perished,” he warned, “only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” 

    All the culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word ‘man.’ (288-290)

SCANNING A MAP OF EUROPE, Hitler saw a future filled with a “multitude of lower-type beings standing at their [the Aryans’] disposal as helpers.” Once in power, the Nazis would employ these lesser humans as “suitable beasts.” 

Hitler pounds away at the racial theme: 

Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood.   

All who are not of good race in the world are chaff. (291; 294; 296)

 

By comparison, the Jews banded together out of a “primitive herd instinct.” Left alone in this world, they “would stifle in filth and offal…” 

He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period. (301-302; 305) 

 

The Jew “poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the Christian who marries a Jewess. The bastards, however, take after the Jewish side.” “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.”  

To cover the damage, and his own tracks, the Jew, “talks more and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools begin to believe him.” (316; 325) 

The Aryan race, cutting across national boundaries, bonded by blood, a folk group, must be preserved, protected and strengthened: 

…the folkish philosophy…by no means believes in an equality of races, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated, through this knowledge, to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe…It sees not only the different value of the races, but also the different value of individuals…in a bastardized and niggerized world all the concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all ideas of an idealized future of our humanity, would be lost forever. (383) 

    Aryans must remain apart: 

Thus, the highest purpose of a folkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality, which not only assures the preservation of this nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom. (394)       

IN THE QUEST FOR RACIAL PURITY, the full apparatus of the state would serve as “a mighty weapon” to which “everyone must submit.” Individual rights would not matter. 

[There] is only one holiest human right, and this right is at the same time the holiest obligation, to wit: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a nobler development of these beings. 

A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape. (399)

  

The state “must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children.” 

And conversely it must be considered reprehensible: to withhold healthy children from the nation…the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit… [The government] must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into actual practice. Conversely, it must take care that the fertility of the healthy woman is not limited by the financial irresponsibility of a state regime which turns the blessing of children into a curse for the parents. (402; 403-404) 

 

Once he rose to power, the Nazis would facilitate early marriage among desirable elements, increasing the number of racially valuable children. Marriage, he warned, “cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal, the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and task.” Even the “right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race.” 

What about the less desirable elements? 

“The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.” In other words, the policy outlines of Nazism were laid down. In years to come tens of thousands of handicapped German children would die in gas chambers as a result. (252; 255)

ONCE HITLER TOOK POWER, shaping proper racial attitudes would be a job for schools. He explains: “…education in particular must first of all consider and promote physical health; for taken in the mass, a healthy, forceful spirit will be found only in a healthy and forceful body.” Every day, one hour of physical training in the morning and one in the afternoon would be required. If stress were placed on physical beauty, “the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible.” (407; 412) 

The schools would be a critical tool in spreading Nazi ideology. Science, world history and cultural history would all be taught in such a way as to foster “national pride,” “so that when the young man leaves his school he is not a half pacifist, democrat, or something else, but a whole German.” 

The crown of the folkish state’s entire work of education and training must be to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity. (426; 427) 

 

Nor was there any secret in how Hitler hoped to rise to power. His party would be protected by special guards, organized in military units, and these “monitor troops must be preceded by the reputation of not being a debating club, but a combat group determined to go to any length.” (490) Followers would be stirred with heavy doses of martial music. The movement would be bound by symbols, including the Nazi flag, which Hitler claims he designed in 1920. 

In the red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic. (497) 

 

Once united under Nazi rule, Germany would not repeat mistakes made during World War I. In those years the best young men, “filled with fervent love of their fatherland, with great personal courage or the highest consciousness of duty” volunteered to fight and even die for their country. When Germany was forced to surrender in November 1918, “it was not the German people as such that committed this act of Cain, but its deserters, pimps, and other rabble that shun the light.” (520-521) 

Evil politicians, puppets of Marxists and Jews, had stabbed Germany in the back. Punishment would come once Hitler rose to power. “[A] German national court must judge and execute some ten thousand of the organizing and hence responsible criminals of the November betrayal and everything that goes with it,” he insisted. The future would be filled with gas chambers:

If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of the very best German workers in the field [of battle], the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future. (679)

 

CALLING ON READERS TO JOIN HIM in a titanic struggle, he promised he and his Nazi party would elevate the “Jewish question… transforming it into the driving impulse of a great people’s movement.” The Jew, Hitler said, was “the mortal enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom.” 

This contamination of our blood, blindly ignored by hundreds of thousands of our people, is carried on systematically by the Jew today. Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile our inexperienced young blond girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world. (545; 561; 562)

 

The French were also a mortal threat. Of them, Hitler says: “This people, which is basically becoming more and more negrified, constitutes in its tie with the aims of Jewish world domination an enduring danger for the existence of the white race in Europe.” The French were a “mulatto state,” infected by the blood of “lower humanity.” The German people must rise as one, having “recognized racial pollution as the original sin of humanity,” and defeat France once and for all. (624; 644) 

Nazi leaders would have to: 

…find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or serving others as a slave nation.  

State boundaries are made by man and changed by man. The fact that a nation has succeeded in acquiring an undue amount of soil constitutes no higher obligation that it should be recognized eternally. At most it proves the strength of the conquerors and the weakness of nations. And in this case, right lies in this strength alone. If the German nation today, penned into an impossible area, faces a lamentable future, this is no more a commandment of Fate than revolt against this state of affairs is an affront to Fate. No more than any higher power has promised another nation more territory than the German nation, or is offended by the fact of this unjust distribution of the soil. Just as our ancestors did not receive the soil on which we live today as a gift from Heaven, but had to fight for it at the risk of their lives, in the future no folkish state will win soil for us and hence life for our people, but only the might of a victorious sword.

 

The Aryan people – the folkish nation – must turn its “gaze toward the land in the east.” The Germans must “shift to the soil policy of the future.” And in that, Hitler’s meaning was again crystal clear. We “can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.” (646; 653-654) 

If war did come what could justify an attack on Germany’s neighbors, Poland and Russia? Hitler explained: “Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that they are the scum of humanity…that these rulers belong to a race which combines, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying.” He claimed “the international Jew…completely dominates Russia.” The Bolsheviks were the “spawn of hell.” 

It was imperative that Germany expand: 

Never regard the Reich as secure unless for centuries to come it can give every scion of or people his own parcel of soil. Never forget that the most sacred right on this earth is a man’s right to have earth to till with his own hands, and the most sacred sacrifice the blood that a man sheds for this earth.  

Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy will be acknowledged correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent, and not living penned in as factory coolies for the rest of the world, but: as peasants and workers, who guarantee each other’s livelihoods by their labor. (661-662; 664; 673) 

 

As for the Jew, “No nation,” Hitler wrote, “can remove his hand from its throat except by the sword.” (651)

WRITING IN 1923, Hitler was painting a picture of a grim future ahead. Rising to power a decade later, and with accelerating brutality once World War II had begun, tens of millions would die as a result.

***

If you found this post helpful you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching.

It’s based on my 33 years in teaching and focuses on the one factor which, I believe, most dramatically influences success in the classroom.

There was never any doubt about what Hitler intended to do.

(All quotes are from a translation by Ralph Mannheim first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1943. Mein Kampf was published twenty years before.)