The Way of Social Science and History Teaching in Hitler's Germany

SINCE the advent of the Hitler regime in Germany it would appear that almost every phase of collective and individual activity has been "coordinated" with the political ideals and social objectives of the party program. The machinery of the school system has already been thoroughly subjected to the magic p;ocess of Gleichschaltung, but reform of the curriculum has only recently been taken in hand. In a recent radio address, Dr. Haupt, adviser in the ministry of education and religion, delivered a sweeping attack upon the educational aims of the liberal republican era and outlined a new program to conform to the needs of the German Fascist state. Paramount in this project is the complete transformation of the social science and citizenship courses in the German public schools. History, as the cornerstone of all such instruction, is the first subject to be reorganized. In its broadest aspect, the new program for history and the social sciences aims at the suppression of older liberal concepts, which heretofore motivated instruction in these subjects, and substitutes a set of conventions based upon a new and, in most points, utterly false interpretation of political and cultural development. The liberal paraphernalia of discrimination, tolerance, and objectivity is now thrown on the scrap heap. With one accord National Socialist "educators" declare the fundamental purpose of history to be the cultivation of national consciousness and development of an appreciation of the heroic. Hitler, himself, in a recent declaration on the Government's policy, stated that "The veneration of great men must be again hammered into the German youth as a great legacy. In all fields of our historical and cultural life the bridge from this past to the future must be built.'" Likewise, Dr. Rust, minister of education and religion, says: "It is not so ilnportant that a student know the plan of campaign of the battle of Salamis, but it is important that the heroic spirit be comprehended and that the living meaning of Salamis be restored." The heroic ideal is to be revived not only in the history of national development, but also in the field of cultural history which is to be portrayed in its national rather than in its international aspects. Hitler, in his digest and history of National Socialism, Mein Kampf, declares that an inventor is not to be honored simply as a great inventor, but must be portrayed as still a greater German; the greatest names in German history are to be sought out and presented to the students in such a manner that they become the real pillars of an unshakeable national feeling. This will assure that "the young man when he leaves school is not a half pacifist, democrat, or what not, but a complete German." In the new history there is now no place for the liberal concept of objectivity. It is banned both as a quality to be encouraged in the pupil and as an ideal in historical instruction. "One poisons not only the child's heart with the curse of our objectivity," says Hitler, "but also the things pertaining to the preservation of our own ego." Naturally the leader of the National Socialist movement conFellow of the Social Science Research Council,