Four Sinister Things School Children Learned in Nazi Germany

They turned schools into brainwashing factories

Jacob Wilkins
Lessons from History
4 min readAug 26, 2024

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A Nazi propaganda poster by Ludwig Hohlwein, 1936 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Nazis wanted the Third Reich to last for a thousand years.

To achieve this, they needed to manipulate the youth of Germany and convince them the principles of Nazism were worth preserving. Schools, therefore, were vital to the new regime.

During the 1930s, the Nazification of the education system was gradual, not immediate. With each passing year, schools throughout Germany became more and more sinister.

1. Jews Are Evil and Racially Inferior

An antisemitic poster by Horst Schlüter, 1937 (Wikimedia Commons)

Nazi ideology infected biology more than any other subject. Using a warped version of Social Darwinism, teachers brainwashed their students with concepts like racial hygiene and racial purity, stressing the importance of racial superiority.

The school curriculum targeted groups such as the Sinti, the Roma, and the mentally handicapped. But the Jews were denigrated the most and depicted as the eternal enemy of the Aryan race. This overlapped with the “Stab in the Back” myth, an anti-Semitic conspiracy…

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