Curricular Wars and Averting Auschwitz
Pramod K. Nayar | 4 June 2023 | The Wire
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany, June 1940. This picture was found in Eva Braun's photo albums seized by the US government. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
In Fritz Fink’s The Jewish Question in Education (1937), a textbook in Nazi Germany, there were detailed guidelines on how to identity the Jews: “Jews have different noses, ears, lips, chins and different faces than Germans’ and ‘they walk differently, have flat feet… their arms are longer and they speak differently.”
Fink’s was not an isolated diatribe but part of a larger and systematic attempt to instil racial science and anti-Semitism in the very young – as a foundation for the larger project of the Third Reich. The curriculum and the pedagogy became, so to speak, the first line of attack as school-going children and graduates set about ‘understanding’ the ‘Jewish question’. Many aspects of the later pogrom are anticipated in the virulent curriculum of the years leading up to Hitler’s reign. As Gregory Paul Wegner has shown in his Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich (2002), German schools played a major role in preparing the youth for genocidal actions.