Teachers
During the Holocaust, teachers often embraced the racist ideas promoted by the Nazis. Many taught racism in their classrooms and even targeted their own students. A small number chose to speak out against Nazi rule or help vulnerable young people. What led some teachers to treat Jewish students as inferior?
Jeanne Daman (center) poses with Jewish children under her care in the Nos Petits kindergarten. Brussels, Belgium, ca. 1942. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, gift of Jeanne Daman Scaglione
1. Teachers and Students Humiliate German Jews
Baden-Baden, Germany, November 10, 1938 US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lydia Chagoll
Teachers and Students Humiliate German Jews
“Here Are the Jews”
In November 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed violent attacks on Jewish people across Germany. Local Nazis encouraged non-Jewish Germans to join them in burning synagogues and looting businesses owned by Jews. Thousands of Jewish men across the country were arrested and dozens were killed. Brutality and terror against Jews during Kristallnacht continued for days.
In many German towns, Jews were arrested and paraded through city streets. In Baden-Baden, Nazi paramilitaries yelled at crowds watching this ritual of humiliation: “Here are the Jews. Do to them what you will!”
Some who watched this scene recalled “embarrassed” non-Jewish Germans watching along the street. But they also remembered groups of jeering schoolchildren. One witness recounted how students attended with their school principal, who was distributing candy at the “event.”
What might students learn from watching this cruel spectacle?
Location: Nazi Germany
Beginning in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis transformed the country into a dictatorship. New anti-Jewish policies met with support among some Germans. The regime’s economic and foreign policy successes helped many ordinary people accept attacks on Jews. By early 1939, Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and the Czech lands.
Mosbach, Germany, November 1938 Mosbach Stadtarchiv; Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart
Teachers and Students Humiliate German Jews
Students and Teachers Assemble
A crowd gathers in a square in Mosbach, Germany, during Kristallnacht. Sacred objects from a local synagogue are readied for burning. School children of all ages assemble with the group.
Some non-Jewish teachers and their students did more than watch during Kristallnacht. Encouraged by teachers and leaders, school groups and Nazi youth organizations helped stage this and many similar acts intended to intimidate and humiliate Jews in Germany.
2. Excluding Jewish Students
Excluding Jewish Students
Oral History: Rosa Marx
Rosa Marx did not feel the sting of anti-Jewish hate in the classroom until 1938. That November, Nazi officials organized a days-long wave of violence and terror against Jews in Germany that became known as Kristallnacht. Nazi officials then declared it “intolerable for German schoolchildren to sit in a classroom shared with Jews.”
This disturbing reality struck 14-year-old Rosa as she arrived at school after the violence of Kristallnacht. Her longtime teacher, Mrs. Knauer, treated her with hostility. Former friends and classmates refused to speak to her.
How might Mrs. Knauer’s example have influenced students’ attitudes toward Rosa?
USC Shoah Foundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education
Eleven-year-old Rosa Marx poses with her sixth-grade class in 1935; Vienna, Austria. Courtesy of Rosa Marx
Excluding Jewish Students
From Friend to Outcast
Rosa had long been the only Jewish student in the class, but she had close friendships with her non-Jewish classmates. She saw Mrs. Knauer as a trusted role model. At the end of 1938, she and other Jewish children in Germany were expelled from public schools.
Like many other Jewish people in Germany, Rosa was terrified after Kristallnacht. Her parents obtained a visa for her to travel to the United States and live with relatives, but they were unable to find a visa for themselves. German authorities deported them to the Łódź ghetto in occupied Poland in 1941. They did not survive.
Location: Nazi Germany
Beginning in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis transformed the country into a dictatorship. New anti-Jewish policies met with support among some Germans. The regime’s economic and foreign policy successes helped many ordinary people accept attacks on Jews. By early 1939, Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and the Czech lands.
3. Spreading Nazi Racial Ideology in the Classroom
A German teacher examines a child’s face, seeming to praise the child’s “Aryan” features. Germany, 1939–1945. Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo; quote from Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 156
Spreading Nazi Racial Ideology in the Classroom
Reading, Writing, and Racism
Under Nazi rule, German educators taught schoolchildren Nazi theories about race, declaring the superiority of Germans over others, particularly Jews. Many German teachers received special training in such “racial science.” They were often required to pass these lessons on to their students, beginning at the elementary school level.
By 1939, nearly a third of all teachers had joined the Nazi Party and followed the regime’s school curriculum. Teachers who weren’t party members faced pressure to join. As one student later wrote, “If somebody wanted to be promoted he had to show what a fine Nazi he was, whether he really believed what he was saying or not.”
Location: Nazi Germany
Beginning in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis transformed the country into a dictatorship. New anti-Jewish policies met with support among some Germans. The regime’s economic and foreign policy successes helped many ordinary people accept attacks on Jews. By early 1939, Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and the Czech lands.
Spreading Nazi Racial Ideology in the Classroom
Teaching Materials
Nazi views on race were at the center of schooling in Germany. Teachers used textbooks and pictures to illustrate the supposedly “scientific” differences between Jews, “Aryan” Germans, and peoples from around the world. Students were taught that facial characteristics, body types, and other physical features determined a person’s “racial fitness.”
A German school principal named Alfred Vogel produced this and other racist, anti-Jewish charts for a biology textbook in 1938. The book emphasized that “race mixing” would degrade a “German race” and cause crime, disease, and the collapse of German society.
Chart from Alfred Vogel, Erblehre, Abstammungs, und Rassenkunde in bildlicher Darstellung. Original chart on the left; translated version on the right. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Library of Congress
4. A Teacher’s Conscience Saves Thousands
Jeanne Daman (center) poses with Jewish children under her care at the Nos Petits kindergarten. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, gift of Jeanne Daman Scaglione
A Teacher’s Conscience Saves Thousands
For “Our Little Ones”
Teacher Jeanne Daman was 20 years old when Germany occupied Belgium in 1940. German officials soon introduced anti-Jewish laws, including a ban on Jewish children attending public schools. Although she was not Jewish, Jeanne took a job teaching at a kindergarten for Jewish children, Nos Petits [“Our little ones”].
Jeanne was soon face-to-face with Nazi brutality. Her students’ parents began disappearing. Near her school, she witnessed arrests of Jewish people in the street. Many were murdered or deported to camps and killing centers in occupied Poland.
Responding to parents’ pleas for help, Jeanne started to hide students with non-Jewish Belgian families. She ferried children from place to place, risking certain death if caught. By the war’s end, Jeanne had saved 2,000 children from deportation and murder. She later helped the children reunite with parents who had survived.
Jeanne later reflected, “My sense of responsibility became so strong that I would have felt guilty if I had not done what I did.”
Location: Collaboration with Nazi Germany
Most of Europe was under Nazi Germany’s control by 1942. In their efforts to deport and murder Europe’s Jews, German authorities found willing helpers across the continent. Police, public officials, and workers played a critical role in the Holocaust. A rare few took risks to aid the victims.
From left, Rosa, Harry, and Manfred Markowicz, Brussels, Belgium, 1941. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Harry Markowicz
A Teacher’s Conscience Saves Thousands
A Letter to “Mademoiselle Jeanne”
Harry Markowicz and his family fled to Belgium in 1938, seeking safety from anti-Jewish violence in Germany. After Germany occupied Belgium, his mother was desperate to protect her family. A friend told her to contact a “Mademoiselle Jeanne,” who was helping to hide Jewish children.
Jeanne hid four-year-old Harry with a non-Jewish Belgian family. He lived with them under a fake identity until the war ended. Jeanne also found homes for his sister and brother. Harry and his siblings reunited with their parents in 1944.
Many years later, Harry learned that it was Jeanne Daman who had saved him. Although Harry could not thank her personally—Jeanne had passed away decades before—he wrote her a letter in 2016:
5. A Professor Helps Students Take on Nazism
Professor Kurt Huber in 1942.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo; quote from Inge Scholl, The White Rose, 31
A Professor Helps Students Take on Nazism
A Rare Opponent of Nazism
Respected scholar of philosophy and popular teacher Kurt Huber was unlike most German professors—he strongly opposed Nazism. Although Huber was a German patriot and a conservative, he rejected what he saw as the Nazis’ blind obedience to Hitler and senseless military aggression.
Huber had himself suffered as a target of Nazi persecution. With a limp and a tremor in his hand, pro-Nazi university officials saw Huber as inferior. They declared him “unfit” for any promotion because of his disabilities.
By 1942, Huber’s lectures hinted at his anti-Nazi stance. According to one student, Hans Scholl, the professor classes “were always packed, because he managed to introduce veiled criticism of the regime into them.”
Location: Nazi Germany
Beginning in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis transformed the country into a dictatorship. New anti-Jewish policies met with support among some Germans. The regime’s economic and foreign policy successes helped many ordinary people accept attacks on Jews. By early 1939, Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and the Czech lands.
Hans and Sophie Scholl, 1936–1940. dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo; quote from Inge Scholl, The White Rose, 31.
A Professor Helps Students Take on Nazism
Forming Resistance
Together with a few other young people, college students Hans and Sophie Scholl formed a secret anti-Nazi group—“the White Rose”—in Munich in 1942. The siblings and others in the group found inspiration in Professor Huber‘s lectures. Hans called him “one of [us].”
Members of the White Rose were upset by the loss of German lives in the war and disturbed by news of Germany’s mass murder of European Jews. To push other Germans to oppose the Nazis and end the war, the group secretly distributed thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets and painted graffiti around the university campus.
Inspired by his lectures, the group asked Huber to write the White Rose’s next leaflet in 1943.
Pamphlet published in Munich, Germany, by the White Rose resistance group.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
A Professor Helps Students Take on Nazism
“For our future, freedom, and honor”
German secret police arrested Professor Huber and other members of the White Rose in 1943. A Nazi sympathizer had spotted Sophie and Hans dropping copies of Huber’s leaflet in the halls of the university. The leaflet written by Huber called on German students to reclaim rights denied to them in Nazi Germany:
At his trial, Huber was accused of poisoning German youth with ideas. He replied, “I have done as I had to on the prompting of my inner voice.”
Despite pleas from their families, the Nazi regime executed Kurt Huber, Hans, Sophie, and two other White Rose members. The threat of violent death—several White Rose members were killed by guillotine—prevented many Germans from publicly opposing Nazism and the mass murder of European Jews.