BYSTANDERS, PERPETRATORS, AND RESCUERS
TEACHING LESSON 9

Handout 9A:   A Nazi Education

Handout 9B:   A 150-Percent Nazi

Vocabulary:   Hitler Youth

All of the people whose lives students have read about so far have been survivors of the Holocaust. Peter Becker, the man students will read about in Handout 9B, is different. Like many thousands of non-Jewish Germans of this period, he was not just a passive bystander, but an active supporter of Hitler and the Nazi party. In his own words, he was a “150-Percent Nazi.” Handout 9B offers some insight into how young Germans like Peter were educated or indoctrinated to develop loyalty to Nazism and Hitler. He tells not only how he became a Nazi but also explains why he only began to question his intense admiration for Hitler after the war ended with Germany’s defeat.

Peter’s devotion to Nazism began with his membership in the Hitler Youth, the youth movement of the Nazi party. Becker started out in the preparatory junior youth program for children ages six to ten. The Hitler Youth was first organized in 1926. Ten years later Hitler outlawed all other youth groups. By 1938 the Hitler Youth movement had almost eight million members, boys and girls ages six to twenty-one. In many respects participation in the Hitler Youth was considered more important than formal education in Germany.

In any society, individuals learn the normal, or accepted, political beliefs and behavior of their society from their family, friends, schools, churches, and synagogues, and other community organizations. Learning the accepted political beliefs of one’s society is called political socialization. Among the values and beliefs German youth learned through participation in the Hitler Youth were loyalty to Hitler and the Reich, the importance of political and military activism in support of the Reich, extreme hatred of Jews, and total devotion and unques-tioning obedience to the will of the Fuehrer.

Begin the lesson by asking students to name some of the political values and beliefs they have learned as Americans. Write their responses on the board. You may want to give them a few examples. (Voting is an important right and responsibility of citizens. All people are created equal. All people should be treated equally under the law. The United States is a democracy whose leaders govern with the consent of the people.) When the list is completed, have students discuss where they have learned these beliefs and behaviors of American democracy. (school, textbooks, home, church or synagogue, television, the Internet, and other media) In this lesson, students will read about a young man who was socialized in the very different political culture of Nazi Germany.

Distribute Handout 9A. Ask each student to list eight political beliefs or values that a German boy might have learned in the course of his schooling, judging by the statements of the Nazi Minister of Education and the examples from the arithmetic book and geography lesson. Have students share their lists with the class. (Germans should be willing to sacrifice or face death for the Nazis and for Hitler. The purpose of schooling is to teach obedience to authority. The most important responsibility of a girl is to bear children. Girls do not need to be well educated to fulfill their responsibilities to the Nazi state. Jews are aliens. Germany is powerful because of its racial purity. The U.S. is weak because of its racial impurity. Democracy is an inferior and inefficient form of government.)

Distribute Handout 9B. Have students read the handout and work in groups to answer these questions:

1. How was Peter socialized or educated to become a Hitler Youth?
2. Name at least three values or political beliefs Peter held as a Hitler Youth.
3. Whom did Peter blame for Germany’s economic problems? How did he form this opinion?
4. Why do you think Peter so willingly accepted what he learned in the special Nazi school and the Hitler Youth?

Focus discussion on Question 4. Emphasize that Peter’s family, his peers, his teachers, and respected authority figures like the Nazi leaders who visited his school all shared and reinforced the beliefs and values he was learning in school, his after-school activities, and his youth group. Moreover, his textbooks taught and reinforced this distorted view of German history. His access to information, particularly accurate information, was carefully controlled in the special Nazi school. Although his life was less structured in his later teen years, access to accurate information was still carefully controlled by the totalitarian government under which he lived.

Have students describe events that led Peter to question his understanding of German history and the Nazis. List responses on the board. ( viewing a traveling exhibit in Bremen, listening to Nuremberg Trials, talking with the American teacher, studying German history) Ask students how each event affected his view of the Nazis, the war, and his participation in the Hitler Youth. Conclude by discussing the final paragraph of Handout 9B entitled “A Warning.” Write the following on the board: “Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty.” Briefly review with the class Overviews 2 and 3. Then have a volunteer paraphrase the state-ment on the board and explain how it applies to events in Nazi Germany. Ask:

• What safeguards exist in a democracy to make the rise of a Hitler or a catastrophe like the Holocaust less likely?
• Why does Peter consider a free press so important to the defense of liberty?
• How would Peter’s education have been different if Germany had possessed a free press at that time? Why didn’t Hitler allow a free press?
• Why do you think Peter says people need to become “politically active” to protect their freedoms? What does he mean by “politically active”? (Examples of politically active citizens include people who are informed about events in their community, states, and nation; knowledgeable about the candidates who run for office; vote; are willing to speak out against actions by other citizens or government leaders that affect or take away the rights of citizens and minorities.)

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/