How the Nazis have monopolized all fields of thought and action in present-day Germany is described in a symposium on the Nazis which occupies one-third of the April issue of “Foreign Affairs”, internationally known quarterly.
The symposium is the outcome of an exhaustive investigation conducted by three well-known American authorities. Prof. Charles A. Beard describes the Nazi conquest of the German educational system. Norman Thomas described the Nazi regimentation of labor. Dorothy Thompson shows how the regimentation includes every phase of cultural life, particularly literature; the theatre, music and the press.
Prof. Beard, a former president both of the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association, examines the present situation of German education as regards content, method, and personnel. His investigation leads him to conclude that academic freedom and freedom of research have been entirely eliminated, that “a rigid pattern life and thought is imposed on teachers and pupils alike,” and that the result is “a youth drilled in party doctrines and objectives, ignorant of all other considerations, contemptuous of other races and peoples, equipped with powerful bodies and narrow minds for the work of the state-especially its supreme work, war.”
Of the teaching body, Prof. Beard writes: “Administrative officials can discharge, retire, transfer, and promote at their pleasure. Rectors of universities are no longer chosen by members of the faculties, but are selected by the Ministry of Education. Faculties have lost the right to control the admission of new members. The Minister in charge may appoint any man – an insider, an outsider, a foreigner or a German, a competent university graduate or a vigorous Nazi educated in ‘the university of hard knocks.’ Thus all protective safeguards against administrative removals, transfers, and demotions have been broken down, and the teaching profession stands defenseless before the administrative machine.”
In the Nazi version of history, writes Prof. Beard, “stress is laid on the prehistoric period of the Germanic race, people with semi-mythical heroes and celebrated in stories and songs of dubious authenticity. Here in the dark shadows of primeval forests a noble race of mighty men prefigured the bodily strength, the fighting energies, and the earthy qualities of modern Nazis. With historic sources scanty, of comparatively recent date, and open to every sort of interpretation, the untrained Nazi teacher can freely manufacture primitive support for the Leader, the army, the subjection of women, and the glorification of force.
“Turned in upon themselves, nourishing deep resentments, and lashed to fury by a militant system of education, the German people are conditioned for that day when Hitler, his technicians, and the army, are ready and are reasonably sure of the prospects of success in a sudden and devastating attack, East or West. To cherish any other conception of Hitler’s State or of the aims of German education is to cherish a delusion.”
JOBLESS JEWS NOT LISTED AS “UNEMPLOYED”
The report by Norman Thomas regarding the status of labor under Hitler includes a careful account of the suppression of the trade unions, the imprisonment or exile of their leaders, the seizure of their funds, and the methods by which the Nazi Party preserves its ascendancy alike over employer and employee.
The fictitious nature of the employment figures given out by the German Government is indicated by Mr. Thomas as follows: “The number of unemployed Jews is great and is increasing; but these are not counted as unemployed. A decision by the highest labor court at Weimar on November 27, 1935, opened the way for the dismissal of all Jews working for non-Jewish employers. This means that the Nuremberg laws are to have the widest application in the industrial field, in order to protect ‘Aryan’ employees from Jewish influences. Jews will have to work for Jews or not at all.
“Another source of ‘invisible unemployment’ has been the wholesale discharge of women whose husbands are employed, and of unmarried men under twenty-five. None of these are included among the unemployed in the official statistics.
“The reintroduction of conscription takes many hundreds of thousands of young men off the labor market. German agricultural workers are forbidden to come to the cities and the unemployed are enrolled in the so-called Land Service and Land Helpers. In 1935 came the increase in employment due to rearmament; of course this is dependent on a continuance of rearmament at the same lively rate.”
NAZI CONTROL OF CULTURE COMPLETE
“The control of every conceivable branch of German culture is complete,” writes Dorothy Thompson, who in private life is Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. “It begins, not by censoring what actually appears, but by determining who shall be the creators and transmitters of culture. No publication, no concert platform, no publishing house, no theater, no gallery, is open to any writer, artist, or musician, who has not first of all run the gauntlet of the Propaganda Ministry.
“One may not exhibit a picture in Germany, or present a play, or perform on the piano, or write in the papers and magazines, unless one is a member of the established ‘Chamber’. One cannot get into the Chamber if one is suspected of being a heretic. And the very first test is a blood test-one must be able to prove a blood stream uncontaminated by “non-Aryan” admixture.”
To indicate the status of German intellectual and scientific activity. Miss Thompson tells what a great cancer specialist said to her when she was last in Germany. “I am supposed to treat cancer in a National Socialist manner,” he said. “But I do not know what that means unless it means that I am cure it in Aryans and let it do its worst to Jews.”
Decrees have established, notes Miss Thompson, that “the Minister for Propaganda is competent to deal with all measures for mental influence upon the nation, the publicity for state, culture, and business, the instruction of the public within and outside the nation concerning the above, and the administration of all devices that serve these purposes. These vast powers, which cover the whole field of the spoken and written words, as well as pictorial, theatrical, and musical creation and presentation, are not merely executive. They are legislative and judicial as well.”
All this has led to the emigration of many of Germany’s foremost scientists and artists, and the strifling of the intellectual and cultural originality of those who remain in Germany. There still exists a creative German culture. Miss Thompson finds, but it is not any longer inside Germany. “In Switzerland and Holland, in France and in England, in America, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Germans are playing and composing German music, writing German poetry and novels, adding to the structure of German science, not unmoved by the National Socialist revolution, not unchanged in their sense of values because of it, but free of its strangling shackles.”
At home, Miss Thompson believes that Dr. Goebbels and Dr. Rosenberg, the dictators of Nazi culture, have failed. “Stuffiness,” “boredom”, “sterility”, “monotony”, are some of the words this writer uses to describe the Nazi literary output. “A peace pervades Germany,” she says, “like the peace of death.
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