European studies blog

One of the exhibits in The British Library’s current exhibition ‘Propaganda: Power and Persuasion’ is a school textbook, opened to show one of the nastiest maths problems ever posed: how much does it cost to care for the ‘hereditarily unfit’ in terms of a ‘normal’ worker’s annual salary? The book was published in Germany in 1941, and its young readers were effectively asked to put a value on human lives and encouraged to see one kind of life as more valid than another.  Other calculations in the book involve the proportion of German territory lost in 1918, the falling percentage of Jews in the German population since 1933 and the comparative sizes of the British and German navies.

'Was Kostet die Betreuung Erbkranker', from Rechenbuch für Volksschulen. Gaue Westfalen-Nord u. Süd. Ausgabe B. Heft V – 7. und 8. Schuljahr. (Leipzig, [1941]). British Library YA.1998.a.8646

Maths might seem an unlikely field for spreading propaganda messages, but the Nazi regime could press almost any school subject into the service of its propaganda machine. Hitler made no secret of his desire for children to ‘learn nothing else but to think as Germans and to act as Germans’, and the schoolbooks published under his rule promoted the Nazi mindset in many different ways.

An obsession with race and eugenics was a major part of this mindset, promoted in biology textbooks with long sections on ‘racial studies’. But two biology textbooks in our collections also show more subtle use of propaganda. One is intended for use in girls’ schools and contains information on food and nutrition and on choosing a healthy partner; its cover shows a woman in a blossoming orchard, surrounded by blond children. Woman’s role is to nurture, to feed – and to breed. In contrast the textbook for boys’ schools is more technical and its cover features a powerful woodcut of a muscular ploughman, hair blowing in the wind. Man’s role is to fight the elements and tame the soil.

Biology for girls and boys: Graf, J. Biologie für höhere Schulen. Bd. 4. Ausgabe für Mädchenschulen. (München, 1943). YA.1994.a.15364, and Meyer, E. Lebenskunde: Lehrbuch der Biologie für höhere Schulen. Bd. 3 (5. Klasse). (Erfurt, 1942). 7006.v.17

The boys’ textbook uses the term ‘Lebenskunde’ instead of ‘Biologie’, and this preference for more ‘Germanic’ terminology developed throughout the period: a geography textbook which originally had the ‘does-what-is-says-on-the-tin’ title Lehrbuch der Wirtschaftsgeographie became in its 1940 edition Volk – Raum –  Wirtschaft (British Library: 10004.ppp.44.)

Geography of course offered further opportunities to hammer home to children the losses to German territory following the ‘diktat of Versailles’. History too was a fertile field for the propagandist, focusing on the heroes and triumphs of the German past. One history textbook describes the boy Hitler reading about the ancient Germans and lamenting that his native Austria was no longer part of a great German empire. Another includes an ‘appendix of enemies and traitors’, from Segestes, the betrayer of Arminius, to the Weimar Republic politician Walter Rathenau.

It’s hard to know how much influence this kind of textbook propaganda had on the children of Hitler’s Germany, but a generation grew up with these books and the teaching that went with them. Few if any can have remained completely untouched, and the post-war world must have given them much to un-learn and reconsider.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies