Carefully taught

Bias and hatred indoctrinated

For the past couple of years, I have been writing another book, titled “Nazi Germany Through the Eyes of a Child.”

Actually, what I am doing is organizing in chapters the childhood experiences as told to me through interviews with Hilde. She was born in 1938 during the rule of Adolf Hitler and Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. During the war years, she lived a few clicks southeast of Frankfurt, Germany.

Hilde said that fear of the Gestapo got so bad that neighbors and even family members were afraid to talk to each other because they had seen too often that those who said too much wound up with their entire family being hauled off and never seen again.

Hilde had been indoctrinated in school that the Aryan race was to be the super-race of the world, and that her generation had the responsibility to rule the world because all other races and nationalities were inferior and thus incapable of leading the world into the new Aryan utopia.

They were told that especially Black people and Jews needed to be annihilated completely.

Hilde said she hated her father. He was a corporal in Hitler’s army and, fortunately for Hilde, he was gone most of the war. All of her life he was mean to her. The only time she could remember his ever being thoughtful to her was when he sent her a ceramic doll.

Later, Hilde found out that her father had stolen the doll from a little Jewish girl he had captured and sent off to a concentration camp. Hilde was so angry that she crushed the doll and threw it in the trash.

Joseph Goebbels’ almost daily radio announcements characterized American and British airmen as evil monsters. Children of Hilde’s age were indoctrinated to believe that literally.

One night in the closing days of the war, Hilde’s neighborhood was on fire from American and British bombings. Homes were in ruin and there was screaming from pain and chaos all around. Hilde was on her front porch, and she could see, intermittently through the smoke and flashes of the bombs exploding, two enemy monsters just like Goebbels had described.

They had two big bug eyes, a canister-shaped nose and a round mouth to match. They had big hands and feet and a large, long tail. Hilde was so scared she couldn’t move. Now as the smoke rose, she could see the two monsters were in her front yard and she could now see clearly that they were not American demons, but instead they were German firemen wearing gas masks.

I wonder if all of us should get more involved in what indoctrination might be going on in our schools. Bias and hatred can be taught, and we all need to be sure that is not part of our school’s curriculum.