8 The Reichsschulen and the Napolas’ Germanizing Mission in Eastern and Western Europe

On 10 October 1944, NPEA-Inspector August Heißmeyer wrote to the Reich Finance Minister with urgent concerns regarding the future financing of the increasingly transnational network of Napolas and Reichsschulen which had, by this point, been founded throughout the occupied territories which lay beyond the borders of the Altreich. The Reichsschulen (Imperial Schools) in the Netherlands and Flanders should, in the Inspector’s view, henceforward be subsidized entirely via his own personal bureau in the SS Central Office (SS-Hauptamt, Dienststelle SS-Obergruppenführer Heißmeyer), since the schools which were soon to be founded in the Polish General Government, in Denmark, and in Norway, could all then be financed in a suitably unified fashion. In particular, Heißmeyer stressed that the development of these institutions must remain free of any threat of external interference: ‘The political situation is different in all of the countries in question here, so that the tackling of this task cannot be carried out schematically, but must be adjusted to suit the state of affairs in each region.’ He concluded his observations with the resounding claim that ‘the work of these schools is really exclusively directed towards the safeguarding of our empire’.¹

This communiqué reveals very acutely a number of elements which are of cardinal importance when considering the genesis and role of the Napolas and Reichsschulen which were established during World War II in the Eastern and Western occupied territories respectively.² First and foremost, these institutions were considered crucial, if not irreplaceable, to the Third Reich’s Germanizing mission. As such, their aims and praxis both mirrored and directly contributed to broader Nazi occupation and Germanization policies in Eastern and Western Europe.³ On the one hand, the schools in Holland, Flanders, and Luxembourg promoted a positive engagement with their ‘Germanic’ pupils, whose allegedly Aryan bloodline supposedly made them suitable guarantors of the future National Socialist ‘Greater Germanic Reich’.⁴ Had the schools which were planned in Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland ever got off the ground, these would have served the same function.⁵ On the other hand, the schools in the Czech and Polish occupied territories were far more preoccupied with ‘rescuing’ Eastern European children of supposedly ‘ethnic German’ (volksdeutsch) heritage, in order to ‘re-Germanize’ them and incorporate them into the ‘Greater German Reich’ or Volksgemeinschaft.⁶ Nor were these ambitions merely propagandistic; the Napola authorities and their counterparts in regional and local government, both East and West, appear to have genuinely believed in their institutions’ capacity to instil the requisite imperial ambition and loyalty in their charges.⁷ That the schools were also at least partially successful in this mission may be inferred from the number of graduands of the Reichsschulen and the Eastern Napolas who eagerly volunteered for the Waffen-SS—even if some were less than keen to be condemned to the pioneering life of an SS warrior-farmer somewhere beyond the Urals.⁸

Furthermore, it was this extreme preponderance of SS influence and tutelage which marked out the Eastern NPEA and the Reichsschulen most particularly—indeed, the Reichsschulen in the ‘Germanic’ lands were ultimately subordinated to Heißmeyer in his capacity as head of the SS Central Office (SS-Hauptamt), rather than in his role as Inspector of the NPEA, reporting to Bernhard Rust and the Reich Education Ministry.⁹ Just as the Waffen-SS recruited ‘Germanic’ collaborators in the Western occupied territories and selected willing ‘Volksdeutsche’ (ethnic Germans) in the conquered Eastern borderlands, in the hope of gaining broader political influence and creating a ‘catalyst for an organic alignment of the Germanic countries and…the seed for a new Europe[, forming] the core of its elites and leaders’,¹⁰ the Reichsschulen and the Eastern Napolas also provided the SS with a means of gaining political control over the children of those whom they had conquered. Thus, the Third Reich’s imperial SS legions now potentially possessed an ever-renewable source of fresh manpower which could fuel Himmler’s insatiable ambition to secure yet further Lebensraum in the wild East, training future officers as loyal National Socialist cannon fodder from their earliest youth.

Indeed, this parallel between the imperial role of the Waffen-SS and the Reichsschulen was one which was made frequently, not only by Dutch critics of the regime and by the Nazi occupation authorities, but also by ‘Germanic’ collaborators and officials, as exemplified by this extract from the protocol of a meeting between NPEA representative Dr. Wilhelm Kemper and the Dutch collaborationist education tsar Robert van Genechten:

In the SS, as at the NPEA, there are no Württembergers, Bavarians, Austrians, and Prussians, but solely Germans; yes, more than that, here, from one Germanic wellspring, Jungmannen live and grow together as the guarantors of Greater Germania. We feel ourselves to be the Führer’s long Germanic arm, which trains and leads a Germanic youth in tried and tested collective education for the new Europe. It is within this framework that I view the significance of the NPEA in the Netherlands.¹¹

This chapter therefore explores the ways in which the various facets of the Third Reich’s racist colonial project were mirrored at the level of Napola policy. In the West, Nazi imperial praxis was premised on the fundamental assumption of racial (quasi-)equality and ‘Germanic’ brotherhood. Meanwhile, in the East, the emphasis lay rather on ‘saving’ those ethnic Germans and Slavs who were deemed to possess suitably ‘German’ blood. The cases of the Reichsschulen and the Eastern NPEA will hence be used to parse and analyse the varying styles of colonization policy which shaped these two very different spheres of Nazi-occupied Europe.

In so doing, the chapter aims to compare and contrast the relevant aspects of National Socialist Eastern and Western Germanization policy tout court, treating the Napola project as a genuinely pan-European enterprise which deserves to be considered in a fully transnational context.¹² As Bernd Wegner has put it, ‘Himmler regarded the integration of the “Germanic West” as a necessary complement to the subjugation of the Slavic East. Both goals were…two sides of the same coin.’¹³ Arguably, NPEA policy in different areas of the ‘Greater German Reich’ mirrored the varying occupation strategies, attitudes towards conquered populations, and prevalent styles of rule in each region (whether these were determined by local Gauleiter, SS officials, or the Dutch Reich Commissariat).¹⁴ And, while the Eastern Napolas and the Reichsschulen may only have made a symbolic contribution to swelling the ranks of dedicated National Socialists working towards the realization of an SS-led Greater-German or Greater-Germanic empire in numerical terms, the schools were still highly significant in exhibiting and putting into practice their political and racial aims, serving as a bellwether for further planned political, social, and educational reforms in the occupied territories more broadly.¹⁵

In this way, the NPEA in the occupied territories, even more than in Austria (see Chapter 7) represented what Hans-Christian Harten has termed an ‘experimental site for the realization of the National Socialist utopia’.¹⁶ This putative tabula rasa allowed SS and NPEA officials to dream of a Greater Germanic Reich led by dedicated graduates of the Reichsschulen, or of a version of the Generalplan Ost which gave pride of place to former Napola-pupils turned warrior-farmers, whatever costs this might impose upon those deemed to be racially ‘less valuable’.¹⁷

The body of this chapter is therefore divided into three main sections. The first section explores the genesis and praxis of the Reichsschulen in the West, with a particular focus on the schools in the Netherlands, where Nazi and NPEA education policy was most fully developed.¹⁸ The second section then turns eastwards to consider the Napolas’ role in the conquered Czech and Polish lands.¹⁹ Finally, the conclusion draws these two strands together, reflecting on the schools’ function in the Third Reich’s Eastern and Western Germanization programmes more generally, and the ways in which regional differences in policy were held in constant tension with broader Reich and SS centralization initiatives.

In July 1942, Heißmeyer’s extensive plans to establish a transnational network of Reichsschulen were only just getting under way—a concerted power grab which brought him into severe conflict with SS-Obergruppenführer (‘the Almighty’) Gottlob Berger, his chief rival for Himmler’s favour.²⁰ Berger was now Chief of the SS Central Office and head of the Germanische Leitstelle, a sub-department with particular responsibility for SS affairs in the Germanic lands, and thus he was extremely keen to include the Reichsschulen under his sway.²¹

Heißmeyer explained the reasoning behind the Reichsschule project as follows:

The objective of the National Political Education Institutes is the safeguarding and consolidation of Adolf Hitler’s Reich through the selection of the best German youth, and their education in an explicitly National Socialist stance. When Holland, Denmark, Norway, and Flanders were occupied, I immediately took in hand the expansion of the National Political Education Institutes in these territories also. These Germanic peoples must be tightly bound to the Germanic heartland—and that means Germany. I see the best opportunity of this if in these countries too, a selection of youth is carried out, and they in turn are educated and strengthened in the idea of the Reich. At that time, the task of developing the National Political Education Institutes in the Nordic lands was intended for the National Political Education Institute Plön, and National Political Education Institute Bensberg would be assigned the same task for Holland, Flanders, and Luxembourg, while Oranienstein would later be employed in Switzerland. I have had numerous discussions in Norway with Reich Commissioner Terboven, and in particular with SS-Obergruppenführer Redieß in this regard.²²

The Inspector of the Napolas was far from the only official to be convinced of the importance of the Reichsschulen for the endeavour of Germanizing Western Europe, however. Arthur Seyß-Inquart, the Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands, was also fully supportive of Heißmeyer’s ambitions:

The connection with the Reich’s National Political Education Institutes appears to me to be of particular importance. Otherwise we would be giving the Germanic countries a peculiar role model; that in the very first area in which we are beginning to work with Greater Germanic politics, we are incapable of creating or sustaining a unified organization for the entire Greater Germanic realm.²³

If, as Johannes Koll has argued, the occupation authorities in the Netherlands were keen to cultivate a ‘policy of the outstretched hand’ (though it was nevertheless an iron hand in a silken glove), tolerating a certain amount of national self-sufficiency so long as the conquered population were prepared to exhibit a genuine commitment to National Socialism, then the Reichsschulen undoubtedly reflected this Janus-faced policy of ostensible imperial cooperation combined with forcible colonializing Gleichsschaltung.²⁴ The schools promised equality between the German and Dutch boys who were being educated alongside each other as Jungmannen, whilst still ultimately aiming to Germanize and indoctrinate their Dutch pupils. It is within this context that scholars have often deemed the Reichsschulen to be one of the most insidious and potentially dangerous means of Nazification in the Netherlands—as opposed to the rest of the Dutch education system, which largely retained its previous structure and administration.²⁵

But how were the schools established in the first place? While the Reichsschule at Quatrecht in Flanders was directly funded by Himmler’s Germanische Leitstelle, given the absence of a Reich Commissar in the territory, the Dutch Reichsschulen were funded by Seyß-Inquart’s Reich Commissariat.²⁶ The wheels had been set in motion for the creation of Napolas in the Netherlands as early as autumn 1940, with the close cooperation of Seyß-Inquart, his immediate subordinate Friedrich Wimmer, General Commissar for Administration and Justice, and the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) for the Netherlands, Hanns Albin Rauter; the aim being to establish a school which would educate Dutch boys in the spirit of the NPEA.²⁷ The new collaborationist General Secretary in the Dutch Education Ministry, Professor Jan van Dam, then incorporated these ideas into his own plans for a ‘Nederlandsche Instelling voor Volksche Opvoeding’ or NIVO (Dutch Institute for Völkisch Education). The names of promising Dutch Erzieher with National Socialist sympathies were put forward as potential members of staff, and six of these were then invited to spend two months at NPEA Bensberg and NPEA Oranienstein, so that they could get the requisite sense of the Napolas’ ethos.²⁸ Van Dam announced the NIVO’s founding on 12 August 1941, when he gave a widely reported speech on the radio defining the broader outlines of his new, Nazified educational programme.²⁹ The school opened on the same date at the former sanatorium in Koningsheide, which had previously been requisitioned by the Wehrmacht.³⁰

However, the German occupation authorities very quickly came to consider the NIVO experiment as a mere stopgap; both Himmler and Seyß-Inquart were adamant that if the Reichsschulen were to succeed in their mission, they must under no circumstances continue under joint German and Dutch leadership; rather, they must become wholly ‘schools of the Reich’.³¹ Particular concerns were raised about the quality of the Dutch teachers—since the institution was financed by the Dutch government, German Erzieher could only be seconded to positions there, and the Dutch staff apparently resented their presence bitterly.³² Seyß-Inquart was of the opinion that only around 50 per cent of the current staff could unproblematically be reassigned to the Reichsschule, and therefore recommended that the NIVO should be closed, and its pupils either transferred to the Reichsschule in due course, or sent home.³³ NPEA Bensberg, which had already taken on a mentoring role at Koningsheide, and had regularly exchanged classes with the NIVO, took on the relevant cohorts while the first Reichsschule at Valkenburg, near Maastricht, was still under construction. Classes of German boys from Bensberg then continued to make up the numbers at Valkenburg after the school opened in September 1942.³⁴

In financial and practical terms, Seyß-Inquart was wholly supportive of Himmler and Heißmeyer’s efforts to establish the Reichsschule, pledging 5 million Reichsmarks to assist with building costs, as well as undertaking to cover half of the annual running costs, which would come to approximately 500,000 RM per year.³⁵ Moreover, Seyß-Inquart was keen to facilitate the founding of two new Dutch NPEA in the near future: a second Reichsschule for boys in Soestdijk Palace, a former possession of the Dutch Royal Family, and a Reichsschule for girls in Heythuysen. Once again, the Reich Commissioner generously offered to pay half of the costs for these two schools also—coming to a grand total of 7–8 million RM out of the total 15 million RM projected expenditure over the next two to three years.³⁶ Although the local SS leaders were unsure whether it was desirable for the Reich Commissariat to be so extensively involved in the project, they were aware that if they attempted to curtail Seyß-Inquart’s influence completely, there might be unfavourable consequences.³⁷ Thus, Seyß-Inquart was able to ensure that this Germanic prestige project bore his mark, whilst simultaneously strengthening his standing within the SS hierarchy.

The two Dutch Reichsschulen at Valkenburg and Heythuysen both appropriated sites belonging to Catholic religious orders—a familiar modus operandi for Heißmeyer and the Inspectorate (see Chapters 6 and 7); both campuses were requisitioned in July 1942. The Franciscan nuns who ran the St. Elisabeth girls’ boarding school in Heythuysen were forced to leave the building within three days, while the Jesuits in charge of the St. Ignatius College in Valkenburg were given less than one and a half hours to leave the premises.³⁸

In the end, only two of the original NIVO teachers were kept on at Valkenburg after the school’s opening, and Himmler’s express desire to have the Dutch boys educated alongside German Jungmannen in a ratio of 1:2 was impossible to realize in practice. The school began its life with fifty-seven Dutch pupils and sixty-six German pupils; a state of affairs which Kemper blamed on German parents’ reluctance to send their sons to the Reichsschule, despite a concerted propaganda campaign via the German press in Holland.³⁹ At times, this dearth of German applicants appears to have led the authorities at NPEA Bensberg to send boys with poor academic records to Valkenburg, rather than expelling them tout court.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, Kemper’s deputy, acting Anstaltsleiter Debusmann, was able to ensure that German remained the primary language of instruction at the Reichsschule, although the Dutch and German pupils had to have separate German classes. The girls at Heythuysen were taught in Dutch, but also underwent a year of intensive coaching (around ten hours a week) to improve their facility in the German language.⁴¹

The fortunes of the girls’ school in Heythuysen, which opened its doors on 1 September 1942, appear to have been fundamentally shaped by the whims and pedagogical incompetence of its headmistress, Baroness Julia op ten Noort, who had no previous experience working in the education sector, nor any professional qualifications (save three years’ secondary schooling at a Gymnasium).⁴² Nevertheless, as one of the founding members of the Dutch National Socialist Movement’s women’s organization, the Nationaal-Socialistische Vrouwenorganisatie (NSVO), as an aficionado of Moral Rearmament, and an active member of the clique of Dutch fascists around Meinoud Marinus Rost van Tonningen, she had become a particular favourite of Himmler’s.⁴³ As early as 1941, the Reichsführer had already earmarked her as the future headmistress of a putative NIVO for girls.⁴⁴ However, Op ten Noort’s lack of experience, as well as problems with underqualified teachers, poor hygiene, and outbreaks of diphtheria, meant that the school was never fully able to realize its academic potential.⁴⁵ Tensions also ran high between Op ten Noort and Debusmann over which school could claim to be the best; apparently the teachers at Heythuysen styled their charges as ‘diminutive goddesses’, and generally behaved with offensive arrogance towards the boys from Valkenburg.⁴⁶

However, Valkenburg was not immune from serious teething troubles either. The number of applications from Dutch families was extremely low, and many Dutch parents were unhappy not only with the lack of religious instruction at the Reichsschule, but also with German being the school’s official language. Apparently this fact had gone (conveniently) unmentioned in the initial prospectus, so that many of the Dutch Jungmannen were faced with severe linguistic difficulties when they first arrived.⁴⁷ General Commissar Wimmer also complained that the Dutch staff were of thoroughly inferior quality, lacking in empathy and ‘any sympathy for the soldierly mindset’, while some of the German Erzieher similarly lacked understanding for the Reichsschule’s sense of Volk; in his view, the only true solution to this problem would be for all of the Erzieher, Dutch and German, to serve at the front together.⁴⁸ Furthermore, the racial selection of pupils had, in Wimmer’s opinion, been based far too much on superficial physical criteria, rather than on a true assessment of the applicants’ intellectual talents and capabilities.⁴⁹ Finally, to add insult to injury, the uniforms which had been ordered for the Reichsschule were simply too small, so that Anstaltsleiter Debusmann had to confess to the clothing manufacturers that ‘we must conclude that the Dutch lad is consistently taller and broader than the German lads from whom the measurements of the uniform have been taken (Jungmannen from NPEA Bensberg)’.⁵⁰

In general, pupils and staff had to contend with constant disruption from the Allied bombing campaign, with the resulting chaos, lack of heating, and deficient sanitation leading to an epidemic of scarlet fever, as well as giving rise to numerous opportunities for petty theft by the Dutch personnel. During the Christmas holidays in 1942, every easily removable object, including lightbulbs and door handles, apparently disappeared, while urine and faeces (allegedly belonging to the kitchen maids) were discovered on the floor of the building’s third storey.⁵¹ Tensions also arose between the Hitler Youth at the Reichsschule and the local branch of the Dutch fascist youth organization, the Jeugdstorm.⁵² According to Debusmann and Kemper, the Jeugdstorm’s influence on the Jungmannen was potentially ‘catastrophic’, since the Dutch group merely promoted ‘running riot, brawling, dancing, and cheap pop hits’.⁵³

Nevertheless, life at Valkenburg seems to have settled on a fairly even keel by mid-1943, air raids notwithstanding. And, as accounts by pupils on an exchange visit from NPEA Ballenstedt show, the Reichsschule’s joint propaganda campaign with the Germanic SS in Leeuwarden and Groningen the following year also proved extremely efficacious:

In the presence of the most high-ranking guests, including Reich Commissar Dr. Seyß-Inquart, the Reichsschule sings, speaks, and plays, and Standartenführer Feldmeier speaks on ‘Youth and the Reich’. The influx of the population is vast, the biggest halls are only just sufficient for the thousands of people in the audience, and the success can be perceived by the applications to the Reichsschule. The editors of the Dutch newspapers seek the Reichsschule out and reinforce the idea of the Greater Germanic Reich in the public eye.⁵⁴

This glowing account is borne out by Kemper’s official report from 19 May 1944, which mentions that 1,300 spectators attended the demonstration in Leeuwarden, while 950 attended the event in Groningen. All visitors were given a copy of the school prospectus, while the Jungmannen sang propagandistic songs such as ‘Germaniens junge Mannschaft’ (‘Germania’s Youthful Rank and File’), and chanted speech choirs with refrains such as ‘We, the youth of the Netherlands, we, the youth of the German Reich, we proudly greet the Führer of all Germanic people’.⁵⁵ However, further demonstrations which were supposed to take place shortly thereafter in Amsterdam and The Hague had to be cancelled due to the D-Day landings.⁵⁶ By September 1944, the Jungmannen from Valkenburg had had to be evacuated to Bensberg, partially on foot, while only nine of the girls from Heythuysen, most of whom had recently returned from a holiday trip to Austria and were spending a few days at home with their parents, could be brought to safety in Reichenau (see Chapter 11).⁵⁷

In sum, one might consider journalist Dr. P. H. Keuler’s contention that the Reichsschulen had truly succeeded in their aim of eliminating differences between German and Dutch youth, and moulding them into future bearers of the Greater Germanic Reich, to be somewhat premature.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, scholars of Nazi occupation policy in the West have tended to agree on the potential Nazificatory power of the Reichsschulen—indeed, J. C. H. Pater has dubbed them one of the most dangerous institutions involved in the annexation of the Netherlands tout court.⁵⁹ By contrast, the significance of the Germanizing potential of the Napolas in the Eastern occupied territories—which performed an analogous, if complementary, function—has rarely been considered; scholars have largely been oblivious or indifferent to their role, perhaps because those Volksdeutsche who were specifically targeted for inclusion in the NPEA formed a lesser (and scarcely marginalized) proportion of the occupied population in toto.⁶⁰ In the service of comparison and contrast, then, it is to these institutions which we shall now turn.

It is not for nothing that Mark Mazower has termed the SS in the Eastern territories ‘a motor of Germanization’.⁶¹ Whether in his capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKfDV), through subsidiary bureaus such as the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office), or through the network of ‘racial experts’ employed by the SS Race and Resettlement Office (RuSHA), Himmler aimed to seek out two constituencies within local populations in particular, and win them back to the Reich.⁶² Firstly, there were the Volksdeutsche or ‘ethnic Germans’, who were believed to possess largely German blood; secondly, there were those native Czechs, Poles, and members of other Eastern European nationalities who were supposedly ‘racially sound’ enough to be ‘Germanizable’ (eindeutschungsfähig).⁶³ These sectors of the population of Eastern Europe would then form the core of a new Greater German Reich based predominantly on racial criteria.⁶⁴

In this constant battle to rescue ‘racially valuable’ elements within the conquered nations, the role of education was considered paramount. Those children who passed through the SS’ process of ‘racial sieving’ would be educated and indoctrinated accordingly—in the most extreme cases, through kidnapping and forced relocation to German families and boarding schools.⁶⁵ Meanwhile, those children who were deemed racially ‘unworthy’ could expect to be condemned to an education so limited that they would only possess levels of literacy and numeracy sufficient to enable them to serve their German masters as enslaved helots.⁶⁶

As Isabel Heinemann has noted, such policies (which were inextricably linked with longer-term plans for Slavic genocide) were deliberately aimed at children, ‘in order to weaken what, according to Himmler’s logic, were the “blood foundations” of the peoples under German occupation.’⁶⁷ Thus, in the Polish General Government, Himmler aimed to institute ‘an annual sorting of all children…aged between 6 to 10 into those with good blood and those with valueless blood’; the former would be sent to Germany, where either their parents would accompany them and become loyal citizens of the state, or their children would be taken away from them.⁶⁸ The Eastern Napolas were therefore one more cog in this apparatus of effective Germanization—though arguably a crucial one, since they deliberately set out to estrange the most capable future leaders from their own peoples, putting their talents instead at the service of the Greater German Reich.⁶⁹ In a speech to SS-leaders given in Zhitomir on 16 September 1942, Himmler expressed this sentiment more forcefully, with reference to future plans for the Napola network to extend into occupied Ukraine:⁷⁰

Our task is to seek out what is racially valuable. We will take it to Germany, send it to a German school, and those who are even better qualified will come to a Heimschule or a Napola, so that the boy grows up from the beginning as a conscious bearer of his blood and as a conscious citizen of the greater Germanic Reich, and is not brought up as a Ukrainian national. No one need have any concerns that in carrying out this selection the SS might taint the blood of the German race.⁷¹

This, then, was the context within which the Napolas in the East came into being. As with Seyß-Inquart in the Netherlands, the local authorities, in the form of the Gauleiter, were extremely keen to cooperate with Heißmeyer and the Inspectorate, and to push for further NPEA to be established within their sphere of influence.⁷² In fact, the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of the Sudetenland, Konrad Henlein, had long been so intrigued by the work of the Napolas that in 1935 he had even sat in on classes at NPEA Plön incognito, and had maintained contact with the school’s headmaster, Hermann Brunk, ever since.⁷³ In a preface to the second edition of the NPEA Sudetenland school newsletter, Henlein also declared that he would always dedicate his full attention to the Napola’s development and triumphs.⁷⁴

Founded in April 1939, NPEA Sudetenland in Ploschkowitz (Ploskovice) was the first non-German or Austrian Napola to be established, in Ploschkowitz Castle near Leitmeritz (Litoměřice), which had formerly been the property of the Czech Government. The focus of the school’s Germanizing endeavours lay above all on the ‘restoration’ of Sudeten ethnic Germans to their supposedly rightful heritage. Indeed, August Hellmann, Anstaltsleiter at NPEA Naumburg (the Stammanstalt charged with mentoring the new Napola), was so committed to furthering this cause that he instituted a special class at Naumburg for those boys from the Sudetenland who were too old for the official entrance exam; lessons were taught in Czech by Sudeten-German Erzieher who were learning the ropes at Naumburg, who would then go on to teach at Ploschkowitz.⁷⁵ NPEA Sudetenland also made a point of having pupils work on the land in the Sudeten region, in order to instil in them a suitable connection with their native soil—indeed, during their ‘harvest mission’ in August 1940, Jungmannen from the Napola completed a total of 2,118 working days bringing in the harvest for local farmers.⁷⁶

The first Eastern Napola to be founded in wartime, meanwhile, was NPEA Wartheland, which was located in Schloss Reisen (Rydzyna) near Lissa (Leszno). Formerly the property of the noble Sułkowski family, following the Great War, the palace had become a state boarding school run by the Polish provincial school board in Poznań.⁷⁷ Here, under Gauleiter Arthur Greiser’s tutelage, the school aimed to educate the most promising ethnic German children not only from the Warthegau and Danzig-Westpreußen, but also from Upper Silesia and the General Government. However, among the c.110-strong group of boys aged 12–16 who comprised the school’s first cohort, there could also be found the children of ethnic German resettlers who had been uprooted from the Baltic States, Volhynia, and elsewhere, and brought to the Warthegau between October 1939 and January 1940.⁷⁸ The school’s brand of Volkstumspolitik was particularly bellicose; at times, at the Anstaltsleiter’s behest, Jungmannen even participated in the expulsion and forced resettlement of ethnic Poles who were living in the region.⁷⁹ The school authorities and Gauleiter Greiser were also keen to encourage families from the Altreich to send their sons to NPEA Wartheland, in the hope that they would then be inspired to settle and make their careers in the Eastern territories.⁸⁰

NPEA Loben (Lubliniec), founded in April 1941 in a building which had formerly housed a school for deaf Polish children, saw recruiting in the Polish rump state as an important part of its mission too.⁸¹ A report from Deutschlanddienst celebrating the school’s foundation waxed lyrical about the life of the Jungmannen there, and their future potential for the Third Reich’s Germanization project:

Today, ‘Bubi’ and the ‘Professor’—those are their nicknames—are still on the school bench, bickering with each other at their ballgames and creeping around through the former borderland forests of Upper Silesia in their cross-country war-games as Winnetou once did; who knows if in ten or fifteen years’ time they may not be holding some leading position in political life? Or whether in the meantime the ‘Jungmann’ will have become a Wehrmacht officer or a warrior-farmer, and important manoeuvres will have replaced the war-game? At any rate, the world lies wider open to these lads here…than to any youth before them.⁸²

However, former pupils could testify that the attrition rates at NPEA Loben were extremely high; of the seventy successful candidates (out of 350 applicants) who were selected to form Zug 3 and Zug 4, only thirty-five remained after the probationary first six months (Probehalbjahr).⁸³ From this perspective, it scarcely helped matters that the class from Naumburg which had been assigned to help the new pupils settle in to life at the Napola considered them to be ‘barbarians from the East’, who self-evidently needed to be exposed to all of the drills and hazing which the former cadet school particularly favoured, in order to be fully ‘confronted with German culture’.⁸⁴

Meanwhile, presumably not wishing to be outdone by his fellow Nazi satraps, Governor General Hans Frank was immediately willing to cooperate with Heißmeyer’s suggestion, made only a couple of weeks after Loben’s opening, that the General Government should be furnished with an NPEA of its own—the suggested ‘object’ in this instance being the secondary school in Zakopane. Frank instructed his subordinate, Hofrat Adolf Watzke (the former chief of the Central Directorate of the Austrian Bundeserziehungsanstalten, who was now serving as one of the heads of the General Government’s education department), to get in touch with Heißmeyer directly in order to hasten the building’s procurement.⁸⁵

As Michal Šimůnek has amply demonstrated, Karl Hermann Frank (whose own son attended NPEA Sudetenland) was also equally keen to kick-start the establishment of a number of NPEA in his own sphere of influence, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.⁸⁶ The first potential location, Iglau (Jihlava), suggested in May 1939, was favoured in part because of the consolidating effect which this would have on the ethnic German population in this German ‘language island’ (Sprachinsel).⁸⁷ This strategy appears to have been part of a conscious effort by the Inspectorate and the local authorities to use the Napolas as tools in their policy of forming German-speaking ‘land-bridges’ (Landbrücken) across the Czech lands, which would gradually be broadened and extended until the Protectorate had become ‘fully German’.⁸⁸ However, due to the difficulty of finding a suitable property to appropriate (since the Order Police had already managed to secure the former lunatic asylum in Iglau), it was eventually an Adolf-Hitler-School which had the dubious honour of making its mark upon the area, rather than an NPEA.⁸⁹

The scheme to open NPEA Moravia in the former seminary in Brünn (Brno) also foundered due to escalating building costs; nevertheless, the Lobkowicz family residence at Raudnitz (Roudnice na Labem) was considered suitable by the Inspectorate, and was later opened as a ‘branch’ of NPEA Sudetenland. Getting permission for the use of this building had caused significant difficulties, however, for although Karl Hermann Frank and Heißmeyer both favoured the establishment of a Napola, Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath wished to turn the residence into a ‘Baroque Museum’ which could showcase the substantial—and highly valuable—Lobkowicz collections. From this perspective, Heißmeyer’s task was eased considerably with the advent of Reinhard Heydrich as von Neurath’s successor in September 1941, since Heydrich was happy to treat the establishment of new Napolas as a priority, and presumably agreed with the Inspector’s own estimation of the schools’ ‘beautiful political task’.⁹⁰

Indeed, at this point, the unholy trinity of Himmler, Heydrich, and Heißmeyer seem to have been collaborating very closely in order to realize a shared vision of the Napolas’ role in the Protectorate—Himmler envisaged that, eventually, two NPEA for boys and one for girls would also be established, which would mainly take children from the Altreich, whilst ‘racially suitable’ Bohemian, Moravian, and volksdeutsch children from the Protectorate would be educated at Napolas in Germany in their stead.⁹¹ Although this wholesale Germanization programme was never fully realized, with the first intake of ‘racially suitable’ Czech boys being scheduled for September 1945,⁹² it may be significant that the initial selection of pupils for NPEA Bohemia in Kuttenberg (which, despite Heißmeyer’s best efforts during the preceding years, only opened in 1944) contained only pupils from the Sudetenland (67 per cent) and the Altreich (33 per cent), but none from the Protectorate itself.⁹³

In the early 1940s, Himmler had even envisaged that the NPEA should extend their reach into Slovakia; a first phase was suggested in June 1941—alongside other measures which would help to ensure Nazi control over the Slovakian puppet state—in which one hundred Slovakian boys and fifty Slovakian girls would be sent to Napolas in Germany.⁹⁴ In January 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle then became heavily involved in plans for the establishment of an NPEA for Slovakian Volksdeutsche in Bojnice Castle. However, the final decision on whether to go ahead with the idea was shelved until after the war, since it was doubted whether enough ‘suitable’ pupils could currently be found to fill an entire school. Himmler seems to have been the driving force behind both suggestions; the very real nature of his desire to see a Slovakian NPEA in action may be inferred by the number of times that he requested an update on the current state of affairs between February 1942 and April 1943.⁹⁵

While the exhaustive process of racial selection of supposedly ethnically irreproachable human ‘material’ for the Napolas had always been deemed crucial even for children from the Altreich, in the Eastern territories, this process took on a new and wholly sinister tenor—the selection was now merely part of a whole raft of racial measures which, at their most inhumane, could include the kidnapping of thousands of children whose blood was deemed sufficiently ‘valuable’.⁹⁶ And, just as organizations such as the Waffen-SS and the Polish paramilitary Sonderdienst (Special Service) deliberately aimed to recruit the racial and ideological ‘cream’ of the ethnic German population of Eastern Europe, in order to ‘recapture’ German blood and bind the scattered ethnic German inhabitants to the fortunes of their Nazi rulers, instilling them with the requisite ‘racial consciousness’, the Napolas also formed a key component in Himmler’s concerted attempts to return erring Volksdeutsche to Germandom.⁹⁷

In a sense, then, the Napola selection process can be seen as the peak of the pyramid of all of the ‘racial sieving’ processes which ethnic Germans, Czechs, and Poles had to undergo at the Nazi state’s behest—inextricably bound up with the Third Reich’s wider race, resettlement, and extermination policies. Thus, the Napolas in the Eastern territories were part of the other side of the coin of the Nazi programme of ‘Säuberung’ or ethnic cleansing; privileging mechanisms of racial inclusion rather than exclusion.⁹⁸ In so doing, they also represented a genuine attempt to mitigate the ever-present tensions between Reichsdeutsche and Volksdeutsche—even if, in practice, the Napolas sometimes fell short of the ideal (as when Jungmannen from Naumburg treated the ethnic German pupils at Loben as lesser breeds without the law). However, in theory, Himmler and the Napola authorities genuinely desired that the most ‘valuable’ volksdeutsch pupils should go on to become future leaders of the Greater German Reich, on a par with their Reichsdeutsch counterparts—even if it was envisaged that their careers would largely be forged in the Eastern marches of the Nazi empire.⁹⁹

So, what comparative conclusions can we draw from this analysis? Scholars such as Gerhard Hirschfeld and Konrad Kwiet have tended to draw stark contrasts between the extremely harsh measures undertaken by the Nazi imperial administration in the colonized ‘settlement territories’ in the East, and the more lenient and accommodating treatment of the ‘Germanic’ populations of the West.¹⁰⁰ While this distinction can indeed be fully justified, given the far more extreme levels of violence directed at those elements of the populations of Eastern Europe which were deemed ‘racially inferior’, there are certain similarities on the level of Germanization policy at the Napolas and Reichsschulen which may usefully be noted here.

Firstly, although the Eastern NPEA and the Reichsschulen were aiming, on the one hand, to unite Germandom (Deutschtum) into a Greater German Reich and, on the other, to forge a Greater Germanic Reich, the boundaries between these two imperial conceptions were inherently fluid in practice, given that graduates of the Reichsschulen would also have been expected to play their part in the Germanization and resettlement of Eastern Europe. Secondly, while it is true that the various nations within this putative empire operated within a hierarchy of racial esteem, with the ‘Germanic’ inhabitants of the Dutch and Flemish nations at one end of the spectrum, gradating down through Czechs and Poles to Baltic and, eventually, Ukrainian or Russian ‘ethnic Germans’, the authorities’ interest in the Germanization of potential Napola candidates of all nationalities seems to have been genuine. In fact, more sympathy appears to have been extended to Jungmannen from the Eastern territories who struggled with linguistic competence in German due to enforced estrangement from their cultural heritage, than to the ‘Germanic’ Jungmannen of the Netherlands, who were ostensibly expected to gain instant fluency through some form of racially tinted osmosis.¹⁰¹

We also find similar initiatives for expediting the Germanization process by mingling Reich German and ethnic German or Germanic Jungmannen, educating the two groups alongside each other, with the ultimate aim of creating a unified cohort of future leaders of a Nazi empire spanning the European continent in its entirety, all moulded into fanatical bearers of a truly National Socialist attitude. From this perspective, once again, we can see the obsession with homogenizing Jungmannen of all backgrounds into a unified political fighting force as representative not only of broader centralization aims within the SS, but also of more fundamental de-regionalization initiatives which had long lain at the heart of Napola policy even in the Altreich (see Chapter 5)—aiming to secure the ultimate triumph of the centre over the periphery.

In sum, then, the inextricable entanglement of educational and racial policy which we find here fundamentally reflects broader patterns of Germanization policy in each region. Despite the varying nature of collaboration with authorities on the ground, and the very different conditions of occupation in Eastern and Western Europe, the Inspectorate’s programme followed a unified pattern which was then shaped to fit local circumstances, as Heißmeyer had envisaged—in line with broader SS racial and imperial policy. The differences which did then emerge were largely due to the differing nature of the populations in the regions in question, and, in particular, the varying positions which those populations occupied within the Nazi racial hierarchy of empire.