By David Crossland in Vogelsang, western Germany
Surprisingly little is known about the students who attended Vogelsang because records were lost or destroyed after the war. They were called "Junker," a medieval term best translated as "squires" which was intended to evoke their elite position and supposedly ancient heritage.
They were male, aged between 25 and 30, and had been nominated to attend the college by local Nazi party organizations. They had to be athletic -- people with glasses weren’t taken -- and able to prove their pure Aryan roots.
"Many of them came from lower-middle class backgrounds, sons of low-ranking white-collar workers, men who had no proper job training and who had been uprooted by the depression of the late 1920s,” Ring said.
Academic qualifications weren’t necessary, and were deliberately ignored. Married applicants were preferred. Robert Ley, Hitler’s head of organization in the Nazi party who set up Vogelsang and two other such colleges, judged that a man who wasn’t married by 25 was too indecisive to become a top Nazi official.
The final selection came at a ceremony at which Ley looked each candidate in the eye to judge whether he was what he called a “real man.”
Some 400 “real men” were picked for the three-year degree program and the first course started in 1937. The aim of Vogelsang and the two other “castles” -- one in Bavaria and the other in what is now Poland, both still used as army barracks to this day -- was to overcome a severe shortage of Nazi party staff for top government and administrative jobs.
So it may seem surprising that they spent much of their time learning fencing, riding and even flying airplanes. They were meant to feel like a chosen elite, and were treated to bus tours to the opera in nearby Cologne and trips to the North Sea coast. The communal halls were feudal and elaborately decorated while the barrack-like sleeping quarters were spartan -- all part of the Nazis’ emphasis of the communal over the individual.
But there were classes, too. Lectures in the morning and smaller tutorials in the afternoon, with the emphasis on geopolitics and race ideology.
“We Want to Free Ourselves of Compassion”
In one lecture, one of four recorded in 1937, the later headmaster of the school, Hans Dietel, conveyed Nazi thinking on the need for racial purity and the survival of the fittest:
“We have to confront the sick with the healthy ... We have to stamp out compassion with the force of self-assertion. We have to replace servility with lordship and push aside anyone who stands in our way,” said Dietel.
“God did not create man to wither and become servile, but to do what every plant and every animal does constantly, to strive for harmony and completeness ... in this striving we want to free ourselves of compassion ... we know God is with us in this struggle ... With us and with our struggle truly lies the eternal creative force of the universe. With us and with our struggle lies God. Heil Hitler!”
The Holocaust, the euthanasia program, even the invasion of Eastern Europe and Russia ring out in those words. The lecturers were drafted in from universities, high schools and from within the Nazi party.
Although the college had a huge library filled with respected scientific works that refuted all the ideology the students were being taught, no one seems to have read them. Many of the students didn’t even have enough education to follow the classes.
New Lessons from Hitler
“An internal party review found that the education standards of these students were far too low for these lectures,” said Ring. “There are records of complaints that many students couldn’t understand the lectures and questions were asked about whether the course made any sense.”
In the end, it was irrelevant. None of the students finished the degree and only two course years were completed. At the outbreak of war in 1939, most of them left to join the army and some are believed to have committed war crimes. Some 70 percent of Vogelsang's students are thought to have died in the war, said Ring.
Some 140,000 people visited Vogelsang last year, of which 50,000 joined guided tours explaining its history, and Ring expects a similar number in 2007. It already has a small visitor center which offers basic information on the site and the surrounding Eifel national park.
It will take several more years before the museum, or “documentation center,” is built. Architects are being invited to submit designs. There are also vague plans for a youth hostel and a separate academy to encourage broader debate on the lessons of the Nazi period.
“It can’t be enough to just inform people about the past, we want to show that racism didn’t die out in 1945, and that it remains a global phenomenon,” said Ring.
Keeping out Neo-Nazis
Having a museum on the site should also help keep out neo-Nazis, of whom around 100 visited Vogelsang last year in four groups. Vogelsang's management reserves the right to evict anyone wearing far-right clothing or symbols and banned one of the groups last year, said Ring.
“If you want to attract Nazis to a site, put barbed wire around it and board it up, then they’ll get interested and think they can find secrets there,” said Dahm.
“You have to open it, make it transparent, return modern and normal life there and reflect its history with a serious museum, then the place becomes uninteresting to neo-Nazis because it desecrates it in their eyes.”
On the Obersalzberg, for example, the number of neo-Nazi visitors has gone down drastically since the museum opened in 1999, Dahm said.
But anonymous worshippers still occasionally place candles around the few remaining ruins of Hitler’s nearby chalet, the "Berghof," especially around his birthday on April 20.
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