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Jewish Children in German Schools

Teachers as well as students have changed in the schools of the new Reich; the curriculum has been changed by new subjects designed to set new trends.

This derives not only from the new law for civil servants, according to which non-Aryan teachers have had to resign or have been admitted only as minorities. Even in the past, Jewish teachers were scarcely represented in schools. Rather it concerns the inner change that has taken place among Christian teachers, on whom the educational future of our children depends. Certainly there were anti-Semites among the teachers before. But then anti-Semitism was considered—as was religion—a private matter. Today, as we all know, as in all spheres of middle-class life, so also in the schools it has become instructional dogma. This is evident from recent proposals, according to which it will even become the theme of a new school curriculum. There is no other way to understand the situation when racial hygiene [Rassenkundeand Nordic superiority are propagated in the new schools.

The alteration in the teachers and in the curriculum corresponds with the change which has taken place in our children's schoolmates, and has shed a glaring light upon it. These are mostly children of parents who over the past 14 years have constantly heard that the war was lost because of the Jews, who are supposedly also responsible for all of the misfortune in the post-war era. One should not be surprised that boys now write on the blackboard advising their Jewish schoolmates to get lost or else something will happen to them; or that a class of little girls greets their Jewish schoolmate with the words: But Steffi, what do you want here?! We don't need you here anymore; and that elsewhere Jewish benches (Judenbaenke) have been introduced for Jews, in order to mark the gap between Jewish and Christian students.

Source: "Juedische Rundschau," 16 June 1933.

Source: Yad Vashem