I think one of the most chilling images of the recent "House Through Time" was the look at the German teacher in Primary Schools. The reading primers had originally no Nozi propaganda or imagery in the early 1930s. By the late 1930s, they were full of it.
I suppose I have always wondered when seeing the Hitler Youth at rallies how they could have been sucked into this pernicious ideology. Images of teenagers saluting in rallies are widespread, but I had never before seen pages of a children's book before. Of course, we tend to see the war and its symbolism in black and white, which distances it from us. The book, however, unlike film clips and photographs is there with swastikas against vivid red flags. One of the first words they had to learn in the new regime, as David Olusoga told us, was "Heil". As in "Heil Hitler".
It is I suppose logical that if you want to capture a State, you start with the youngest hearts and minds, and inculcate them in your ideology.
You also go after the academics and professionals. A doctor living in the block in Berlin left to go to America because, being Jewish, he lost his job. As David said:
"For Herbert Rosenfeld, a Jewish doctor living in Pfalzburger Strasse, it means the loss of his livelihood. His contract is abruptly terminated as a result of new policies preventing Jews from working in the professions. He is stripped of his job as a dermatologist because he is 'not of Aryan descent."
But those who were Jewish sympathisers who stood up for their rights were also in a perilous situation. Poke their head above the parapet, and they would be taken away.
An ideology cannot stand contradiction, and we can see how the beliefs taken on by the young fed into the wider picture. The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s.
It was those young people who now became the ambassadors for the regime, set on burning any books which were viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but came to include very many authors, including Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology.
Dissenting voices were silenced, and where those opinions lived on in books, they were destroyed. As the Nazi ideology spread, the police, far from preventing scapegoating and threats against those who stood out, were also suborned to take action against those people.
Could it happen again? Certainly. Perhaps not in the same way, but the same signs would be visible. The demonising of critics of an ideology, the promotion of it to young children, the silencing of dissenting voices, the removal of books from libraries. Subjects of debate become taboo. These would all be warning signs, as would the fear that to speak out would be dangerous, and it would be better to just keep silent and not speak out. We should not assume that just because we have freedoms now, we will keep them.
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it."(John Stuart Mill)
"If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. "(George Orwell)
References:
A clip of the schoolbooks from the BBC website
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