Cliff's Notes for Nazi School, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1849

Oh happy day for this handy Cliff's Notes pamphlet for the visiting visitor, for the foreign foreign, to the "new" Germany of 1937.  It is difficult to imagine but not horribly so the subtitle here, "Vacation Course for Foreigners"--it was, after all, so far as the rest of Europe and England and the rest of the world was concerned, still only a conceit that the Germans were harboring for themselves, the sabre-rattling Lebenstraum was still in the theoretical stage, though the loathing and discrimination of the Jews and other sorts of humans was not. 

The pamphlet promises to "give our foreign guests an opportunity o f seeing young National-Socialist Germany as it really is" and to "show them that the German people do not want anything but to attend to their work in discipline and peace". Which was not the case.

I was interested to see the "programme" of instruction, and to check out the near-futures of the people who were the lecturers for each section.  Before I began, I wondered how much their fates would be changed eight years hence and if they would resemble the fates of other high ranking Nazis. (I looked at the lives of Nazi medical personnel and experimenters in an earlier post here called  "Kristallnacht: The Long post-WWII Lives and Forgotten Pasts of Criminal Nazis: Doctors", here.)

Mostly, they went on to live long lives.

In the program, Dr. Reinhard Hoehn delivered a talk on "National-Socialist Law". Hoehn was a Nazi academic lawyer with a criminally morose view of jurisprudence; he went rather high-ranking and was successful in laying the "legal" groundwork for Nazi ambitions, including being a representative at the Wannsee Conference.  Born in 1904, Hoehn went on to live until 2000.

Next, Wilhlelm Haegert taught "The People, the Party and the State" to our foreigners, and became the Staff Director of the Propaganda Department and was a lead lawyer in Greater Berlin, during and after the war.  He died in 1994, aged 87.

Friedrich Berber, lecturing on "the International Situation of Germany", was a leading Nazi Propaganda persona nd international jurist. helping to pave the necessaries for the Lebenstraum philosophy.  He went on to establish the Institute for International LAw at the University of Munich, serving as its chief, from 1954-1968. He died in 1984, aged 86.  He was an esteemed jurist post-war, and seemingly his Nazi career didn't stand in the way of his later success. As a matter of fact, one of the current judges at the International Court of Justice contributed to a Festschrift for Berber in 1973, celebrating Berber's 75th birthday. 

Karl Boemer (lecturing on the Nazi press) became chief of the Foreign Press Department--he came to an earlier and bad end in 1942, after having spoken to the wrong people about the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and was tried and sent to the Eastern Front, where he met his end.

Herbt Scurla, speaking on "Cultural Problems of National-Socialist Policy" (and god knows what that was about), survived the war and lived to 1981. Heinrich Hunke, speaking on "State and Economics", lived to be nearly 100 (dying in 2000), was a Nazi who served Deutsche Bank well to secure the assets of "undesirables". 

And lastly from the sample is Eugen Fischer, a Nazi by 1940, director of the Institute of Anthropology (and Eugenics), a racial anti-semite who worked in his anthro-derived eugenic race-baiting hae experiments into a basis for Nazi policy and practice and ideology.  He was a respected figure post-war, filling in his dates like some of the others, living to 93 (1874-1967).  I'm not sure if he died in his own bed, on his own pillow, or not. 

 These were high-ranking officials, almost all of whom (so far as I can determine) managed to escape (or disassociate) themselves from their high-Nazi past, and live to old age in a future they tried to destroy.