Bernhard Rust - Political Career

Political Career

Rust joined the NSDAP in 1922, and became the district leader for Hannover and Brunswick. In 1930, he was elected to the Reichstag. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Rust was appointed as the Prussian Minister for Cultural Affairs. On 1 June 1934, he was selected as Minister of Science, Education and National Culture (Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung), and set about to reshape the German educational system to conform to his ideals of National Socialism. Considered by many to be mentally unstable, Rust would spuriously create new regulations and then repeal them just as quickly. One noted example was in 1935, when he changed the traditional six-day school week to five days, with Saturday to be "Reich's Youth Day" when children in the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls would be out of school for study and testing. He then ordered the creation of a "rolling week", with six days for study, followed by the "youth day" and a rest day, in 8-day periods. Thus, a rolling week starting on Monday would end with rest on the following Monday; the next rolling week would start on Tuesday and end 8 days later on the next Tuesday. When the 8-day week proved unworkable, Rust went back to the former system.

It was Dr. Rust who, in 1933, issued a rule that students and teachers should greet each other with the Nazi salute "as a symbol of the new Germany". He added his opinion that it was "expected of every German" regardless of membership in the party. Rust was instrumental in purging German universities of Jews and others regarded as enemies of the State, most notably at the University of Göttingen. Nazi Germany's future leaders received their instruction elsewhere, in an NPEA or "Napola" (NAtionalPOLitische erziehungsAnstalten), of which there were 30 in the nation, where they would receive training to become administrators of conquered provinces.

Dr. Rust once remarked, "The whole function of education is to create Nazis." He bluntly informed teachers that their aim was to educate ethnically aware Germans. Rust also believed that non-Aryan science (such as Albert Einstein's "Jewish physics") was flawed, and had what he felt to be a rational explanation for this view. In an address to scientists, he said, "The problems of science do not present themselves in the same way to all men. The Negro or the Jew will view the same world in a different light from the German investigator." Erika Mann, the daughter of Thomas Mann, wrote an exposé of the Rust system in 1938 entitled School for Barbarians, followed in 1941 by Gregor Ziemer's Education for Death.