An 11 year old German boy is sitting in the classroom, waiting for his teacher to arrive.
The lesson is religious education and the children are to be taught about the creation of the world.
Except that this is to be no ordinary lesson, for these are not ordinary times. The Third Reich has brought many changes to daily life, and none more so than to the national curriculum. Every lesson - and every schoolbook - has been made to conform with Nazi ideology.
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| Enthusiastic Nazi children salute Hitler |
Religious Education:
The young boy in the classroom was Frithjof Rodi - one of the family members that I interviewed for my book, Wolfram: The Boy Who Went To War.
Young Frithjof listened intently as the teacher began to explain the biblical version of events. Except that on this occasion, there was to be a new twist to a very old story.
The teacher said that God was very tired after making Adam and Eve. But He still had a little lump of clay left over. He tried to make a third figure but it was extremely ugly and so He threw it violently into the corner. This made its nose crooked and its legs all bandy.
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| The swastika was ever present |
Frithjof, along with the other children, listened to the teacher wide-eyed, never having heard this version of the creation.
The teacher then told them how this crippled and misshapen creature slowly came alive and started creeping towards God. God was appalled and said to it: ‘Go to hell, you Jew!’
Once the teacher had finished with his story, he made all the children write it out in their neatest handwriting. The children knew it was wrong - they even spoke about it afterwards - yet they still took pride in writing it neatly into their exercise books.
Geography:
Wolfram, too, remembers the new ideology beginning to take hold in the classroom. One afternoon, there was a visit to his school by a German émigré newly arrived from the Volga. Like so many ethnic Germans, the man’s family had lived there for more than two centuries. Now, in the wake of Stalin’s persecution, they were flooding back to Germany.
The man brought pictures of starving and malnourished children, and told Wolfram that the Russians were deliberately denying them food. There were endless images of corpses – entire cartloads of them – and he recounted narrowing stories of cannibalism. The photographs were so vivid that Wolfram had nightmares for weeks afterwards.
The Nazis wanted children to grow up with an intrinsic fear of Communism, but exhibiting these gruesome photographs to the pupils at the school infuriated Wolfram’s parents.
Science:
Science, too, was permeated by Nazi ideology - especially biology.
In the class of Hannelore Schottgen, a contemporary of Wolfram, race became the principal subject, focusing on the hierarchy of races.
At the very top was the Aryan race: Nordic, tall, blond with blue eyes, a noble character, hard-working and the brightest part of the German population.
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| Children were subjected to virulent racism |
Next down the scale were the Slavs, along with Latin and Mediterranean types.
All other peoples of the world – especially those who were black or Jewish – were considered completely degenerate.
At playtimes, Hannelore and her friends would talk excitedly about how close they were to the proper race, although they were sorely disappointed when they worked out that hardly anyone turned out to be pure Nordic. The tall ones were dark, the blonde ones were little and the sole fair-haired girl who was tall had a crooked nose.
Hannelore felt uncomfortable in these biology lessons, largely because the teacher herself was uncomfortable, teaching the new curriculum without any enthusiasm while doing her best to keep a distance from it.
She and her friends, aware that she did not agree with what she was having to teach, decided not to ask any difficult questions because they liked her.
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UK paperback |
NOW PUBLISHED IN PAPERBACK
And for my American readers, it is now published under the title: The Boy Who Went to War: The Story of a Reluctant German Soldier in WWII available here
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Newly published US edition |
'Idiosyncratic and utterly fascinating... an extraordinary tale of hardship, horror and amazing good fortune' James Delingpole, The Daily Mail
