German Ministry Orders Investigation into Nazi Influences in Schools

Education Ministry officials here today ordered a full-scale investigation into Nazi influences in West German schools, after a protest by a British, Oxford-trained schoolmaster, Mark Lees. He has been fired from a teaching job at the Max Planck high school here for complaining that “Nazi ideas are being pumped into the minds of pupils by fellow-teachers.”

Lees complained that he could find no reference, in the schools’ history textbooks, to the Nazi war atrocities. He declared that one teacher in his school told students that reports about concentration camps and the extermination of Jews during World War II “were British and American propaganda inventions.” Another teacher, according to Lees, told the students that “Hitler was good for the Germans.”