Nazi Germany's education models
Nazi Germany's education models
Germany held ed exchanges with elite British and U.S. schools.
What the Nazis liked about those elite schools and vice-versa
A new book by U.K. historian Helen Roche reveals that Nazi Germany’s elite schools, called Napolas which were set up to train “racially suitable” future leaders of the Third Reich, used British private schools such as Eton, Winchester, and Harrow as their models.
According to Dr. Roche:
There was a feeling, which found its way into wider British attitudes towards Germany, that Britain would do well to emulate Germany's racial confidence, and there was an admiration for the sheer strength and physical development of the German boys.
Napolas were created through a blizzard of reciprocal exchanges between British and German schools in the 1930s, with boys from Britain’s most prestigious private schools spending extended periods in Germany.
I asked Dr. Roche about the involvement of U.S. elite schools in the exchanges. Here’s her tweet-back:
Thanks, Mike! - yes, the section on the exchanges also treats those with US academies, including Tabor Academy, Phillips Academy, and St Andrews Delaware. Tiny taster here:
Her headline reads “close ties” which I first misread as “class ties.” Hmm.
The Napolas took part in exchange programs with several U.S. academies under the aegis of the International Schoolboy Fellowship. American schools involved included Tabor Academy in Massachusetts, St Andrew’s Delaware, and Phillips Academy Andover.
Some American educators were in awe of the Nazi’s elite academies, with the headmaster of Tabor Academy, and former Dartmouth football coach, Walter Huston Lillard, still trying to persuade American schools to continue with the exchange program – even after Kristallnacht, the infamous pogrom in November 1938, during which Jewish-owned homes, business and synagogues were systematically attacked in major towns across Germany.
Dr. Roche writes:
Overall, both the British and American participants in the Napola exchange program appear initially to have been ready to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt. While they may not have been convinced by the Third Reich’s aims and ideals, they continued to hope that their national differences could be cast aside in the name of international cooperation – at least until Nazi belligerence reached its fatal climax.
The Nazis, in turn, were duly impressed by the Brit’s curricular emphasis on “character building” for the future ruling elite. While British private schools had been educating “the rulers of the centuries-old British empire”, Roche said it was envisaged “that the Napolas should train the rulers of the ‘thousand-year Reich’.”
The author found that the Napolas were much more effective at indoctrinating pupils politically than, for example, the Hitler Youth. That was because children attended from a young age and the schools were much more racially-exclusive and projected a greater sense of “superiority” than most German public schools.
While “Aryan” racial purity and supremacist race and gender theories were curricular essentials, you can bet that no critical race theories of the time were allowed.
Roche’s study was meant to show that “the history of an era, a regime, or a dictatorship, can be written through the medium of the history of education…”
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