“For us, feelings are more important than reason”: how German Nazis convinced the children that dictatorship and war are right and fair

Umberto Eco in his “fourteen signs of fascism” mentioned the cult of death. “Everyone is brought up for him to become a hero,” wrote the Italian philosopher. Almost all dictatorships in world history tried to “correctly” prepare a growing generation. Some were limited to prohibitions of specific music or clothing, others demanded the participation of young people in official ceremonies, and others went much further.

A striking example of systematic brainwashing for children and adolescents was Nazi Germany of the 1930s. “To whom the youth belongs, this belongs to the future,” repeated the promotion Reichsin, Joseph Goebbels. And it is the political pumping of German schoolchildren that perfectly reveals the ideological insignificance of German Nazism. Under the guise of patriotism and faith in the highest ideals, the regime tried to feed children with banal xenophobia, militarism and admiration for the leader.

The Nazi dictatorship did not manage to offer many of their young citizens to offer anything else. After all, hundreds of thousands of Germans growing during Nazism did not return home from the fronts of World War II.

The author of the material condemns Nazism, Nazi crimes against humanity and any attempts to rehabilitation.

From the post -Persian resentment - to ordinary Nazism

German Nazism (National Socialism) was a complex phenomenon. He possessed many specific attributes and was never a holistic philosophy like liberal or Marxist-Lenin. But the very model of creating such a syncretic “ideology of hatred” and the arrival of her adherents to power look quite viable.

The core of national socialism became several pseudo-nouses and conspiracy theories. This included racial anti-Semitism, Eugenika, Social Darwinism, “Aryan idea”, the doctrine of “blood and soil”, a faith in the existence of the island of Tula, “German Atlantis” and other similar provisions. Back in the XIX century, they were shared by a very small part of the Germans, while most fellow citizens ignored these dubious inventions.

After the First World War, two more interconnected concepts were added to the already existing theories of conspiracy. The first read that for Germany, unlike its opponents, participation in the lost conflict of 1914-1918 was fair. Therefore, the difficult for the Germans, the Versailles Treaty of 1919 is doubly offensive. The second theory claimed that the country won the war until the rear traitors inflicted a “knife in the back” of the heroic army.

Both concepts obviously distorted reality. Germany, like the powers of the Entente, fought for expanding the territory on the continent and the seizure of overseas colonies. And the final defeat in the fall of 1918 became inevitable much earlier: a country with limited resources and weak allies could not wage a protracted war on several fronts at the same time. The Versailles world really made the payment of huge reparations on Germany, deprived it of a number of lands and limited the armed forces. But the Germans ignored that in the event of their victory, they would impose about the same conditions to the British and French.

In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP, the National Socialist German Working Party ( N Ational S Ozialistische D Eutsche a Rbeiter P Artei) gathered together the old and new populist myths. It turned out that only the stronger power of the leader would unite all the Germans in a real folk state, liberate him from the dominance of Jews and ensure dominance over the whole world, which is intended for the “Aryan race”.

Hitler and members of the Nazi party, 1930

Bundesarchiv, Bild

In March 1933, after a long struggle, the Nazis became a party in power. By the fall of the same year, they completely dismantled the previous democratic orders: multi -party, independence of the courts and the media, freedom for any public organizations, federalism and local self -government. The restructuring of the education system also began - in full accordance with the Nazi ideology.

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