Exemplifying the success of a Nazi “enlightenment” campaign in schools, nine-year-old pupil Helga Gerbling wrote a composition called “The Cuckoo and the Jew.” “When we call ’Cuckoo, Cuckoo,’” the child wrote, “he also scrapes and bows like the Jew merchant who always tries to be polite so that we Germans should buy from him. Both Jews, the one among the birds and the one among the humans, are parasites.”
With the blessing of the Bavarian Ministry of Culture which has ordered schools to conduct an “enlightenment” campaign about Scientology, twelve-year-old pupils at the Ickstatt School in Ingolstadt prepared an art “exhibition” ridiculing the religious beliefs of Scientologists. The school manufactured a T-shirt design consisting of a cartoon story degrading Scientologists and gave it to the pupils to wear.
he vulnerable young minds of German schoolchildren were a primary target of Nazi “enlightenment” campaigns in the 1930s. Children were subjected to Nazi propaganda about “the evil Jew” from the earliest ages. In a popular board game called “Get the Jews Out!,” children threw dice to move six Jews out of their homes and businesses and onto the road to Palestine. It sold over a million copies in 1938.
Pictures of classrooms from the day show blackboards featuring discussion topics to promote “enlightenment.” A 1935 photograph from Cologne-Ehrenfeld shows young children discussing “Who knows the Jews knows the devil. No salvation for the German people without solution of the Jewish question.”
There was no rational reason for the Nazi persecution of Jewish people.
Similarly, today there is no justification for the intolerance incited against the Church of Scientology and its members by some extremists within the German government.
Bavarian Minister of the Interior Guenther Beckstein has been at the forefront of a propaganda campaign against Scientologists in his state. On November 1, 1996, he implemented a 15-step approach to ostracize Scientologists from public and private life throughout Bavaria.
As a result, the Bavarian Ministry of Culture ordered that all schools conduct an “enlightenment” campaign about the Church of Scientology.
Information supplied to all headmasters for use in the campaign reveals that the Bavarian government has respect for neither human dignity nor the German Constitution. Lies disguised as research abound, as do transparent attempts to incite fear and loathing, such as the statement: “As a consequence [of participation] ... one can observe physical changes like a change in weight (fatness/slimness)... altered beard growth....”
A circular sent to all schools in Munich County advises headmasters that they “are asked to report by September 25th, 1996 about the measures they have taken [about Scientology]” and it concludes ominously, “Non-compliance will not be tolerated!”
One school reported that the class wanted to invite representatives of the Scientology organization to discuss the subject with them, but the idea was prohibited by the government.
“Never again” must not be an idle slogan, it must be a promise we keep. True, no one has been killed or hauled off to death camps. But history has taught us that we would be at fault if we stood by and did not point out the alarming similarities between the 1930s and today. German officials protesting these comparisons should stop recreating the past and they will remind no one of it.
Germany Then and Now
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