Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Education during Nazi Germany
The rise of the Nazi party in support of Germany
Factors for the rise of Nazism in Germany
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Education during Nazi Germany
Elwira Bauer's Nazi Propagandist Children's Book Trust No Fox on Green Meadow and no Jew upon his Oath
In response to the factional society of the Weimar Republic, Nazism endeavored to create a new, more-unified society; an ideal national community, populated by an ethnically and culturally homogenous citizenry dogmatically obedient to the theories, laws, and policies of the central governing apparatus (the Nazi Hierarchy and ultimately Hitler). To attain its aims, Nazism employed a variety of tactics: laws were enacted to ethnically purify the population (e.g., the 1935 Nuremberg Laws), sentiments were propagated with the intention of uniting the population behind its leadership (i.e., the Führer Principle), and policies were instituted to ensure total cultural, political, and economic unity (e.g., the 1933 implementation of “Gleichschaltung”). In addition, Nazism utilized enormous amounts of written and oral propaganda to reinforce its principles and accompany its measures, rendering them more palatable to the public and consequently increasing their success, “Local cooperation and leadership were essential to the success of Coordination. So was a bombardment of propaganda from party newspapers and publicists…[e.g., Dr. Goebbels, der Angriff, etc.]” (Bergen 65).
The excerpt entitled “The Führer’s Youth” from Elwira Bauer’s 1936 Nazi propagandist children’s book Trust no Fox on Green Meadow and no Jew upon his Oath, exemplified the new ideal society envisioned by Nazism and reinforced Nazi theories and processes. The title of the book itself, “Trust … no Jew upon his Oath,” reinforced Nazism’s principle that “non-Aryans” were inferior to “Aryans” and, consequently, supported Nazism’s position that an ethnically homogen...
... middle of paper ...
...bably appeared in children’s stories written prior to the twentieth century and still in circulation today is not surprising in light of the fact that Hitler’s, and consequently Nazism’s, beliefs were unoriginal, “Adolf Hitler was not a brilliant, original thinker. There was nothing new about his views nor even in the way he combined them….What was different was the intensity with which he held his views…his ability to captivate large audiences [and] the tremendous power he achieved after he became chancellor of Germany…” (Bergen 40).
Works Cited
Bauer, Elwira. “The Führer’s Youth.” Nuremberg: Stürmer Verlag, 1936.
Bergen, Doris. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. New York, NY:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2003.
Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2001.
The heavily proclaimed novel “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak is a great story that can help you understand what living in Nazi Germany was like. Throughout the story, the main character, Liesel goes through many hardships to cope with a new life in a new town and to come to the recognition of what the Nazi party is. Liesel was given up for adoption after her mother gave her away to a new family, who seemed harsh at first, but ended up being the people who taught her all the things she needed to know. Life with the new family didn’t start off good, but the came to love them and her new friend, Rudy. As the book carried along, it was revealed that the Hubermanns were not Nazi supporters, and even took in a Jew and hid him in their basement later on in the book. Liesel became great friends with the Jew living in her basement, Max, who shared many similarities which helped form their relationship. Both of
He further uses propaganda techniques to change the views of the German people. His book The Mein Kompf was spread to the people of Germany and his Nazi party. This book is Adolf Hitler’s manifesto in which he outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germany such as the hierarchical status of the Aryan race towards the Jews and other inferior race. In his book he stated, that “The child is the objective of the struggle and the very first appeal is addressed to it: 'German boy, do not forget that you are a German. ' 'German maid, remember that you are to be a German mother.” Which means that Germanys race was to be kept at its purest form. He further targets young Germans to rise up to his cause because the future of their country is their hands and they have the right to claim its title. Other than his book, Hitler’s implicates fear tactics and speeches to manipulate the Nazi party. The Schutzstaffel, better known as the infamous SS, were established by Hitler, to act as protection force at Hitler’s mass meetings in public. This was due to early Nazis meeting that can turn to violent during its early rise to power because of competing factions within the party. In 1934 an event happened to which was called, “The Night of the Long Knives “; it was a cleansing of other political opponents of Hitler within the party. Hitler uses this to instill fear in the party and warns other that whoever imposed him shall suffer and die. Hitler’s speeches were also part of influencing the views of the party. In 1939 he made a speech that changes everything. This speech move thousands of people and change the views of Germany towards the Jews and other inferior race. He stated, “The peoples [of the earth] will soon realize that Germany under National Socialism does not desire the enmity of other peoples. I want once again to be a prophet. If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of
In the book Eichmann Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, we are shown a man that is seemingly normal and a common type of man. As the the trial goes on, we begin to see deep inside the mind of this banal, monstrous man. Evil does not always have a “look”, sometimes evil is found in the most ordinary of men with a cliche lifestyle and a stamp of approval from half-a-dozen psychiatrists.
The book, Your Loyal and Loving Son, is a compilation of letters home written by Karl Fuchs, a young German male sharing his experiences, feelings and emotions from 1937, when he comes of age for the Labor Service until his premature death on the Eastern Front in 1941. Even though many contend that serving in the German military during WWII inevitably classifies an individual as evil, Karl Fuchs, a young man who grew up in Germany during the Nazi Party 's escalation of power ought not be generalized into the taxonomy of 'immoral Nazi ' for the underlying principle, his only true offenses of patriotism, a sense of nationalism and honor developed as a result of exposure to the Nazi faction 's propaganda machine.
While reading the book, it is as though Hitler was there speaking in detail about the early years of his life, the first years of the Nazi Party, his plans for a better Germany, and his ideals and thoughts about politics and the races of man. Hitler divides humans into categories based on physical appearance, establishing higher and lower orders, or types of humans. At the top, according to Hitler, is the Germanic man with his fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler refers to this type of person as an Aryan. He asserts that the Aryan is the supreme form of human, or master race. In following this way of thinking, if there is a supreme form of human, then there must be others less than supreme, the Untermenschen, or racially inferior. Hitler assigns this position to Jews and the Slavic peoples, as well as the Czechs, Poles, and Russians.
As named in the stanza before, the Nazis used Gleichschaltung to unify the German empire and all its citizens, in political and social ways as well as private and public lives. Gleichschaltung means coordination or making the same. The term is used to describe that National Socialists tried to coordinate all people to be equal and follow their ideology. All the organizations named above, like the organizations for children Hitler Jugend and Bund Deutscher Mädel were established to bring the citizens of the country together. In those organizations, the people were taught the ideology and concepts of the leaders, so everybody would think and support the same thing, which of course was National Socialism. Within this process of coordination, previous values were changed to the Nazis’ ideology.
World War II was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It struck devastation and fear into the many lives of the people who fell victim to the Third German Reich. “A Nazi Childhood”, written by Winfried Weiss, is an autobiography about the author’s childhood. The author gives his recaptured perspective of Germany and the Third Reich. Born in Germany in 1937 Winfried Weiss was raised alongside his two sisters by his mother. His father was an SS officer who suddenly disappeared one night in Russia because of an ambush. Nazi Germany was as successful as it was as they were able to get people to conform to their beliefs because they played on citizens’ sense of nationalism and could indoctrinate the youth of Germany.
Pre- WWII, Germany was distraught due to the collapsed economy and suffering government. The Hitler Youth is an important factor in understanding the significance of the Hitler/Nazi movement, due to Hitler’s method of “brainwashing” the minds of children in Germany. Once Hitler determined that children between ages ten and eighteen could be persuaded to get involved in politics, he started recruiting nearly all German children to help support his ideas and organization. After promising the juveniles uniforms, a social status, and weekend activities, children poured into the training camps. Hitler wanted to transform children’s dedication from their home and family to them defending their country and economic
In conjunction with these sources, the motives of Adolf Hitler and his dependency on specific agents enhancing ideals, reliance on citizen participation, execution of isolating policies and its transformation of Germany into a genocidal state reinforce the complex nature of decision-making. As a result of the radicalized National Socialist party under Adolf Hitler’s guidance, his personal prejudices against the European Jewry became state interests accumulating to extermination.
Although Hitler claimed “that the Nuremberg Laws would actually help the Jews by creating a ‘level ground on which German people may find a tolerable relation with the Jewish people,” his implementation of those laws were “to ostracize, discriminate, and expel Jews from German Society” (Noakes and Pridham). With these laws, Hitler took “the first step toward getting rid of” the Jews, thus “imposing racial conformity on society” (Noakes and Pridham). Subsequently, “the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 laid the foundation for the next ten years of racial policy” (Noakes and
While many may suspect that the ruthless and tyrannical leader of Germany had a damaging upbringing, the opposite is the truth. Adolf Hitler was a child that was immersed in love and affection and in reality, spoiled by his mother, Klara Polzl who lost all three of her children prior to Adolf’s birth to childhood diseases. Hitler adored his mother and gave his father the uttermost respect. As a child he had a normal upbringing and was actually considered to be a good and intelligent student. However, as a teenager, between the ages of fifteen to nineteen, one of his friends August Kubizek, described him to be a “shy, insecure young man who hid his insecurities behind a façade of self-confidence that bordered on arrogance” (Crowe, 82). August
A normal child would not think much of a Jew. Therefore they would also think that a Jew is a very nice person and just like everybody else. Hitler changed the youth's point of view. Lehman a former member of the Hitler Youth remarked, "I was shocked that the nice people in a candy store I frequented had been Jewish”. Moreover, Hitler would tell the youth that the Jews were not good people and that they should be punished. Many youth were convinced that they were a part of something new and great. “The young Lehmann, a fanatical Nazi, was convinced that he was part of a "new order" destined to last 1,000 years.” (The Telegraph) The people of Germany no longer had their own opinion they had to believe what the Nazis said. Even teachers could be punished for saying something unkind or different than what Hitler promotes. Consequently a teacher could possibly be fired for stating their
The treatment of Jews and other minority groups by the Nazi’s can be described as actions that could only be done by a totalitarian state. Hitler believed in eugenics, the idea of improving a race by selective breeding. Nazi ideology of the Jewish race was severe anti-Semitism and pure hatred. The Nazi policy towards the Jews has been said to be the most brutal and horrific example of anti-Semitism in history.
Historians argue that in Nazism, ‘the value of the totalitarian concept seems extremely limited’ as they compare the regime to other totalitarian states. They state that Nazism could not have been totalitarianism because it wasn’t as organized and monolithically structured as Stalin’s Russia. The Nazism ideology was a mere scheme of self-fulfilment and lacked the methodical theory of Marxism. Under no circumstance was there a level of state possession and influence over the economy in comparison to that which developed in Stalin’s Russia. In spite of the Nazi Party’s dominance over state affairs, authority was divided between themselves and a quantity of major power groups including the industrialists and the armed forces, while Stalin’s Communist Party possessed unconditional power over all Russian state affairs. A German historian stated that Hitler ‘...brought about a state of affairs in which the various autonomous authorities ranged alongside and against one another...’ Hitler relied on a level of popularity from the nation acquired through promoting himself through propaganda to maintain his leadership. There are no implications that Stalin sought popular appeal to maintain his power. Generally, historians have debated the weak dictatorship of Hitler but never have they contemplated ...
“When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” written by Judith Kerr, is a heartwarming tale of a young German girl named Anna, who must flee her home country before Hitler is elected. The book is a reflection on the Authors own life, and was published in 1971 when her son, after watching the Sound of Music, commented “now we know what it was like for mummy as a little girl!” Kerr wanted him to know what it was actually like, and so, wrote this novel. The book gives a distinct child's perspective on the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany and the experience of being a refugee, reflecting the Judith Kerr’s positive feelings about her own experience.