Christine Liu

Professor Gilfillan

SLC 494

1 May 2008

Anti-Semitic Propaganda in German Children’s Literature during the Third Reich

The use of written newspapers, pamphlets, posters, and other forms of media were

effective tools used by the National Socialist government to spread an agenda aimed at blaming

Jews for Germany’s economic decay. Hitler recognized the power of artistic and literary forms

of communication and wasted no time in setting up his anti-Semitic laws and practices,

beginning by banning any and all books written by Jewish authors. Most of these were then

subsequently burned during the widespread public book burnings in 1933. The German tradition

of myth and folklore played an integral role in the National-Socialist Party’s agenda to mold

public opinion. Christa Kamenetsky writes of a “conscious revival of national folklore” enacted

by the Nazi Party which “sponsored numerous editions of Grimm’s Household Stories (Kinder-

und Hausmarchen) along with collections of regional folktales, German and Nordic legends,

folksongs, and medieval German ‘folk books’” (Kamenetsky 169). The fairy tale genre has long

held an integral place in Germany’s cultural history, and this genre was mimicked and exploited

by the Nazis to propagate their agenda of hate. Education also played a vital role in the National

Socialist government’s aims to cultivate a loyal following, and the ubiquitous use of anti-Semitic

propaganda and indoctrination was critical in creating a generation that would largely stand by as

over six million people were systematically murdered.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy tales are known and beloved by children and adults

alike all over the world, and Germans especially have long taken pride in this literary history. “In
1935, the main speaker at the National Book Week Congress in Berlin, touched upon sentiments

when reappraising the Kinder-und Hausmarchen as the “new Bible” of the German folk

program… What had united them in their love of Grimm’s folktales, said the speaker, was the

very spirit of their forefathers” (Kamenetsky 170). One of the Grimm Brothers’ lesser known

fairytales entitled A Jew Among Thorns carries unmistakable overtones of anti-Semitism. It tells

the story of a hard working servant who finally gets three years' wages and subsequently

embarks on a journey. He meets an old man, whom he pities and gives his wages. The old man

turns out to have the ability to grant three wishes to the servant, who wishes for a gun that will

hit any aim, a fiddle that can make anyone dance, and that any favor he asks of anyone will be

granted. He soon encounters a Jew listening to a bird in a tree and exclaiming that he wished it

were his. The servant shoots the bird with his magic gun, and the bird lands in a thorny bush. The

Jew jumps into the bush after it and the servant decides to try his fiddle. This forces the Jew to

dance right in the midst of the thorns, which tear his clothes and flesh. Finally, the Jew agrees to

give the servant all his gold if he will stop playing the fiddle. The servant then takes the gold and

goes on his way, whereupon the Jew runs to the town judge and tells him that this servant beat

and robbed him. The servant is arrested and sentenced to be hanged. The judge at first chooses to

believe the Jew's story because he doesn't believe that a Jew would just freely give up money to

someone else. In the end the servant gets out of being hanged by making a last request to play his

fiddle, which causes everyone to dance until the judge agrees to let him go if he stops. In the end

the judge believes the servant's story and the Jew is hung in his place (Robertson 64-67). Stories

such as this had been told in German household from generation to generation for centuries by

the time the Third Reich came to power, and it is appalling to think that the children who listened

to these stories were provided with a moral that encouraged them to identify with a hero who
maliciously tricks and steals, but is ultimately exonerated of any wrongdoing simply because his

victim is a Jew.

Children, with their affinity for the universal appeal of fairy tales with clear right and

wrong answers, were the primary targets of the National Socialist government’s indoctrination of

anti-Semitism. With the campaign aimed at children, the Nazis integrated both anti-Semitic

ideology and encouraged children to join the either Hitler Youth for boys of the League of

German Girls. The enrollment rate was very high, but the influx of children joining the two

youth organizations were not all going for their hatred toward Jews. Rather, many saw it as a

good opportunity to go camping, make friends; in a way, the equivalent of today’s Boy and Girl

Scouts of America Organization. It was likely that this combination of collective nationalism and

social interaction with perhaps more racist peers served to teach many of the children that anti-

Semitism was not only acceptable, but even beneficial for the glorification of their country.

Daniel Horn argues that “during the years 1933 to 1945 the real educational changes emanated

not so much from the government and its educational leaders as from the agitation and disruption

of schools by young Nazis. Their rebellion kept the schools in perpetual turmoil, disrupted the

educational process, undermined the status and prestige of the teachers, and brought about such a

catastrophic decline in academic quality that it placed Germany in jeopardy of losing its

technical and industrial preeminence” (Horn 426). The Nazis organized mass burnings of books

written by Jews or expressing objectionable ideas. Virtually all books by Jewish authors were

destroyed. Hitler Youth members enthusiastically committed masterpieces of the German

language as well as many foreign texts to huge bonfires. Throughout the spring of 1933, Nazi

student organizations, professors, and librarians compiled an extensive list of books they

determined to be degenerate and should not be read by decent Germans (Ritchie 627). They
proceeded to unabashedly use schoolbooks for propaganda purposes. Bernhard Rust, the

Minister of Education, saw the purpose of school textbooks was to achieve an ideological

education of young German people, so as to develop them into “fit members” of the national

community. Censorship Director Bouhler worked closely with Reich Education Minister

Bernhard Rust to revise German textbooks. Large numbers of text books were destroyed in 1933

leading to shortages of texts for several years. Publishers initially made only minor changes in

existing texts. They often reprinted existing with the addition of swastikas and Nazi Party

slogans. Rust by the late 1930s had overseen the replacement of school books that had been

completely rewritten by authors approved by the Ministry of Education and members of the

National Socialist Teachers’ Association. The new text and carefully chosen illustrations were

designed to support major Nazi tenants and were blatantly used to promote the Party program.

These major themes were incorporated into children's books. Children's literature in the Third

Reich was geared towards teaching children at an early age the evils of the Jewish race. One

example of this literature, Der Giftpilz, was published by Julius Streicher who operated the

publishing house Der Sturmer.

The book Der Giftpilz was created with the intention to spread a fear and hatred of Jews

to a wide audience. It was originally intended as a textbook to be used in classrooms, but it

quickly became a popular beginner’s book for children learning to read. Perhaps what makes the

book all the more disturbing is that, despite its sinister underlying message, it is beautifully

illustrated. For an audience raised on the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, this kind of aesthetic

would have been something they were familiar and comfortable with. The propagation of these

anti-Semitic ideologies are fueled just as much, if not more so, by aesthetics as careful

manipulation of coherent reason. A book like Der Giftpilz is clearly targeted towards a young
audience, and it presents its message in an oversimplified manner that children can easily follow,

using images that they can easily relate to. The book uses seemingly innocent and commonplace

scenarios such as picking mushrooms in the forest and going to school, and the victims of the

Jews are often portrayed as defenseless young women, children, and animals. “Young Germans

are cast as the hope of Germany and the saviors of a world under siege by a Jewish plague. The

cumulative effect of so many comparisons with the world of nature, one might think, would be to

make the elimination of Jews a natural and expected occurrence. Their extermination is

presented as being part of the natural order of things, and the child is invited to rescue the desired

natural order from the disaster planned by the Jews” (Mills). The image of the Jew as an

inhuman monster who victimizes helpless Germans is visually reinforced through the use of

grotesque images such as the ones below, portraying Jews as lewd and menacing strangers. This

representation casts the Jews as the obvious villains of the story.

The Nazi government brainwashed their citizens with anti-Semitic beliefs and taught the

German people that they were a supreme race using comparative representations of the Jew as a

dark and sinister enemy. Nazi propaganda was heard on the radio and seen on the television and

posters. They frequently targeted the minds of children, using colorful illustrations intended to

create a clear distinction between the “good” Germans and the “bad” Jews. Don’t Trust a

Fox/Trust Not the Jew is an anti-Semitic Children's Book published by the German anti-Semitic

newspaper, "Der Sturmer." Like the book Der Giftpilz, this book presents provides illustrations

that deal with issues such as “alleged Jewish control of capital, lust for world domination,

associations with communism, as well as stereotyping based on images of the body” in an

oversimplified way by painting a portrait of the Jews as lewd, gluttonous, and almost inhuman

figures who attempt to manipulate and take advantage of wholesome, hard-working Germans.
The cover of a similar children’s book Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher by Ernst Hiemer depicts a

dog made up of different parts from poodles, pugs, daschsunds, and pinschers, which illustrates

the genetic catastrophe that supposedly result from miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews.

“Realizing that children are basically very interested in the world of nature that surrounds them,

Hiemer constructs little stories centered upon what are generally considered to be despicable

traits in certain animals and insects and concludes each story by transferring the undesirable

characteristics to the human world via the Jews” (Mills). The book contains eleven stories that

use animals to illustrate anti-Semitic stereotypes. It draws correlations between Jews and such

animals as chameleons, poisonous snakes, locusts, and parasitic tapeworms. At the end of the

book, Hiemer offers the following conclusion:

“At the end of each story, we made comparisons between the animal and human

worlds. And we learned that Jews pose the same danger to humanity as

drones to bees, the same danger that the coo-coo is to the grasshopper, the

sparrow to the starling, and so on. Later, we learned about the Jewish brood of

poison vipers, of Jewish parasitism, and finally, about the Jewish world

plague.”

Under the Third Reich, racial education became an important part of the curriculum. “By

1937, 97% of all teachers belonged to the National Socialist Teachers’ Union. Every member of

this union had to submit an ancestry table in triplicate with official documents of proof. On the

topics that teachers were required to treat, the most important was racial theory and, by

extension, the Jewish problem” (Mills). It was presented formally as well as worked into many

other curricula materials. Pseudo-scientific works were taught as scientific fact. Racial science

was not only introduced as part of biology courses, but was presented to children in one form or
another at virtually every grade level. In 1933 and 1934 there were large numbers of Jewish

children in the schools and vicious racial thought was present to the class with them in it. Some

teachers even required the Jewish children to serve as class models of "inferior" "Jewish" racial

types. As illustrated in Der Giftpilz, teachers taught as part of the curriculum physical traits that

were supposed to identify those who were Jewish. Exams were given on this and other aspects of

Nazi ideology and Jewish children would fail if they did not provide the required answers on

their own inferiority. Some times in other subjects Jewish or part Jewish children would have

their grades reduced on principle. Faced with this treatment and sometimes physical harassment

from their classmates, which would always go unpunished, Jewish patents withdrew their

children from the state schools. At the same time the Nuremberg and other racial laws were

making it increasingly difficult for their parents to work. Hatred of the Jews and other so-called

sub-humans was the main theme in all courses, even math. Problem solving often included word

problems with questions about ammunition or the cost of maintaining an insane asylum.

The media spewed forth a continuous stream of propaganda celebrating the genius of

Hitler who liberated the German people from the depression, the Bolsheviks and the Jews. As

Jefferey Herf writes, “Hitler remained the key storyteller and propagandist. His speeches were

printed in the press, broadcast over the radio, and excerpted on hundreds of thousands of

posters… Hitler’s anti-Semitic convictions defined policy” (Herf 17). The vast majority of

Germans did not have access to any other news source and were completely under the influence

of this propaganda. Numerous spectacular rallies and pageants were held to show to the citizens

the power and influence of Germany and to provide a sense of security in the belief that

Germany was doing well at last under the Nazis. The ease and familiarity with which the

German people identified with their fairy tales was even used to elevate public opinion of Hitler
himself. The Reich propaganda leader for the National-Socialist Party, Joseph Goebbels, began

constructing the “Führer myth”, an image of Hitler to which the German people would give their

allegiance to even if they were dissatisfied with aspects of the regime itself (Peukert 67-70). In

the beginning Hitler was portrayed as the modest tireless worker who sacrificed himself for the

German people; as the friend, the caring older brother, a man with simple tastes who shared the

prejudices of the common German. Later he became the miracle worker, the savior who saved

Germany from destruction, the political genius who stood up against the rest of the world for the

sake of Germany, a man with extraordinary gifts.

The Nazis utilized propaganda to saturate Nazi ideology, philosophy, and mentality into

the German population, as well as to change the traditional German moral standards for thought

as well as behavior. Subsequently, as the Nazis hoped would happen, the ideas acquired through

these forms of propaganda would mature into a part of everyday German life. It would become

an issue in and out of the home. According to Hitler, the masses must not have two or more

enemies. Rather, they should concentrate on one primary enemy, the Jews. To support this idea,

the Nazi propaganda reinforced racist philosophy on the "normal" anti-Semitism by giving the

Jews the title of "enemy of the common people." Two elements, hatred and racism, were

integrated in propaganda to urge the population to find the importance of ridding Germany of the

parasitic and blood-sucking Jew, as children’s books such as Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher

portray them to be. In Hitler's view, anti-Semitism was a vital weapon in the propaganda

enterprise. He insisted that wherever it is used, it has a huge effect, and refused to it disregarded

as a political weapon. To achieve their goal, the National Socialist Party built upon the historical

anti-Semitism that long been a part of the culture, combined with the broadcasting and

distributing of their anti-Semitic propaganda through all means of media available to them.
 Works Cited

Herf, Jeffrey, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During the World War II and the Holocaust.

Harvard University Press, 2006.

Horn, Daniel. 1976. “The Hitler Youth and Educational Decline in the Third Reich”. History of

Education Quarterly: Vol. 16, No. 4, p. 425-447.

Kamenetsky, Christa. 1997. “Folktale and Ideology in the Third Reich”. The Journal of

American Folklore: Vol. 90, No. 356, p. 169-178.

Mills, Mary. “Propaganda & Children during the Hitler Years”. The Nizkor Project. 2008.

<http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/m/mills-mary/mills-00.html>

Peukert, Detlev, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life.

Yale University Press, 1987.

Ritchie, J. M. “The Nazi Book-Burning”. The Modern Language Review: Vol. 83, No. 3, p. 627-

643.

Robertson, Ritchie, The German-Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts 1749-1993.

Oxford University Press, 1999.

Wegner, Gregory. Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich. Routledge, 2002.