Helen Roche's impressive study of Nazi Germany's National Political Education Institutes, or Napolas, is deeply researched, carefully contextualized, and thoroughly engaging. These elite boarding schools, established between 1933 and 1944 in former cadet schools, monasteries, and other appropriated facilities, formed a network of forty-three institutions that eventually extended from the Netherlands to Poland and Slovenia. With the goal of “creating an ideological and ‘racial’ elite” (425) to be future leaders in all facets of German society, the Napolas represented, as Roche argues, the most completely realized examples of the Nazification of education, as seen especially in the emphasis on war, race, and space.
One distinctive feature of the Napolas was an elaborate, week-long admissions examination, which subjected applicants, usually ten-year-old boys, to a selection process based on their racial and physical qualities as well as their academic promise. For enrolled students, lessons that claimed German entitlement to territory in the East consisted not simply of maps and texts, but also of trips to borderlands, from Poland to Romania, during which pupils were to promote National Socialism and reinforce their own sense of racial and national superiority. The Napolas’ lessons about warfare extended well beyond militarized physical education and history lessons that glorified war, to include elaborate cross-country war games, which culminated each year in multi-day maneuvers that brought together boys from different Napolas. Pupils in the upper grades received a special course of ideological instruction, which was increasingly under the auspices of the SS. The dechristianization of education was more complete at the Napolas than at other schools. Roche shows how their controlled and closed environments, their staffs of committed Nazis, and the availability of superior facilities and resources enabled the Napolas to become the Nazi educational vanguard and successfully carry out the Third Reich's educational experiment.
Roche not only provides a comprehensive history of the Napolas, from their creation to their demise, but she also presents them as a “prism through which many key aspects of Nazism are refracted” (7). The administration and structure of the Napolas offer evidence of systemic tensions, between the center and the periphery, among agencies and organizations within the Nazi power structure, and between elitism and claims of equality and shared community. Roche also uses the Napolas to provide insight into the Nazi colonial project and knowledge about the wartime experience of German youth, including their military roles. A chapter about the little-studied Napolas for girls highlights debates among Nazi leaders about the role of women and the desirability of preparing them for leadership roles of any kind. The first of four Napolas for girls came into existence only in 1939, after the annexation of Austria brought a girls’ boarding school under German auspices. The brief history of the girls’ Napolas confirms that educating girls to be leaders was not a Nazi priority. Roche uses a substantial body of memoirs by former Napola students and her own remarkable collection of correspondence with alumni to consider why many had fond memories of their student years and how their memories mesh with other scholarship about memory of the Nazi years.
In addition to contributing to scholarship about varied aspects of the history of Nazi Germany, this book provides revealing, interesting, and sometimes harrowing details. For example, an important aspect of the Napola admission examination, known as the “test of courage,” could require a boy to jump from a third-floor balcony without knowing that he would be caught. Enrolled students experienced a highly regimented, supervised, and militarized daily routine that included many inspections, encompassing even personal items such as toothbrushes and combs. Meals at the Napolas were preceded by the reading of “table slogans,” such as, for example, “Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a very attractive one” (95). In addition to mandating a full program of sports, physical education, and military exercises, the Napolas required every pupil to learn to play a musical instrument, preferably one that could be played while marching. Theatrical productions, performed both in-house and while traveling, included not only classics by Schiller and Kleist but also plays that mocked Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt. Prewar student exchanges with boarding schools in the United Kingdom and the United States incorporated such welcoming gestures as flying the swastika flag at some American host schools. In addition to opportunities for travel and artistic expression, the Napolas required pupils to spend several months working at factories or mines, where they reportedly performed demanding assignments well. Perhaps the most dramatic stories in Roche's book are those of the Napolas’ evacuations during the final weeks of the war. Although some boys at the Napola on the Baltic island of Rügen insisted on staying behind to fight the Russians, the headmaster decided to use the Napola's small fleet of sailboats to escape by sea. Only after evading an Allied aerial attack did the boys and staff members arrive in Holstein. The memories of alumni tended to minimize the ways that Nazi ideology permeated life and study at the Napolas, but Helen Roche uses telling examples to remind her readers of the ubiquity of this influence, which took both blatant and subtle forms.
The inclusion of material gleaned from eighty archives in six countries enables Roche both to generalize about the common purpose, organization, and pedagogy that linked all of the Napolas, and to examine the distinctive features of different groups of schools, based on their locations and origins. This outstanding book merits the attention of those who seek to understand how National Socialism worked and how people became Nazis.
