Foundation and Administration

This chapter provides a concise account of the Napolas’ foundation, and the bureaucratic tasks involved in their administration by the NPEA-Inspectorate (Landesverwaltung der Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten in Preußen/Inspektion der Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten). It also investigates the schools’ relationship with other organizations within the Nazi state, including the SA, the SS, the Nazi Party, and the Hitler Youth. Among these institutions, the competition to gain power over the schools was constant, with Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, gradually gaining the upper hand. As such, the Napola administration provides a particularly apt case study of the constant polycratic wrangling which lay at the heart of the Nazi state, as well as mirroring the relative power and respective positions of the SA and SS within the dictatorship’s organizational hierarchy. The chapter concludes by exploring the Inspectorate’s methods of recruiting and controlling Napola headmasters (Anstaltsleiter) and teachers (Erzieher). Ultimately, Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust, along with NPEA-Inspectors Joachim Haupt and August Heißmeyer, desired to create a cadre of ideologically sound and fanatically loyal staff who conformed completely to the National Socialist ideal of the ‘Führer personality’.

Alternate Fronts

Chapter 2 investigates the previously unexplored history of extracurricular youth mobilization among the Vojvodina’s ethnic Germans during the interwar period. It traces the many specifically “German” youth organizations that flourished as Yugoslav German cultural organizations like the Kulturbund, local pro-Reich Erneuerer, Third Reich teachers, Hitler Youth agents, Yugoslav sports groups, and both local and “reichsdeutsche” Catholic and Protestant agencies entered the youth mobilization race, attempting to imbue young Donauschwaben with specific notions of “Germanness.” As the chapter indicates, the initial organizational plurality and relative indifference to exclusivist national causes “from below” shifted towards the late 1930s: by 1940, over 90 percent of Yugoslavia’s young Donauschwaben had joined the local pro-Nazi Deutsche Jugend, creating a formidable army of potential home and battle front recruits ready and willing to fight for Hitler’s Reich.

Membership Required: Juventude Brasileira and Fascist Education in Brazil’s Estado Novo Dictatorship

Brazil’s Estado Novo dictatorship (1938-1945) saw the establishment of a new national youth organization called Juventude Brasileira (Brazilian Youth). Founded by Hitler Youth-inspired bureaucrats, the organization’s operations show how profoundly fascism pervaded the inner-workings of this regime, and more generally, how much educational policy reflects the most foundational priorities of an authoritarian government. However, the persistent dissent against Juventude Brasileira, from within the Ministry of Education and ultimately by a dissatisfied public clamoring for democracy, also illustrates paths of resistance against authoritarianism.

The experience of the Hitler Youth - boys in the national-socialism

Losing the First World War, unemployment, the generation gap and the cult of youth led to the party of Adolf Hitler gaining popularity in the Weimar Republic. Using slogans of the restoration of a strong Germany the national socialists organized structures, which formed and educated German Youth. Hitler Youth – brought up according to the rule: “youth leads youth” – was a very fertile environment for the spread of the idea of national-socialism. The specific values – racial supremacy, honour, obedience – handed down by parents were the beginning of the Nazi indoctrination. In the later period such organizations as Bund Deutscher Madel or Hitlerjugend took power over German youth. Education, upbringing, ideological content used by the institutions in Nazi Germany are described in the extensive literature on the subject. However, very important are the experiences of individual members of the Hitler Youth that show the Nazi youth activities from a time perspective. Experiences such as the wisdom of life, and gained knowledge, enable recognition and description of the reality which is discussed. The scope of historical and pedagogical research shows the essential facts constituting the full picture of the life of young people during Nazi era.