Cultural Genocide
Main article: Polish culture during World War IIAs part of the plan to destroy Poland, the Germans engaged in cultural genocide in which they destroyed or closed universities and high schools, libraries, museums and national monuments as well as scientific institutes and laboratories. Millions of books were destroyed, including an estimated 80% of all school libraries, and three-quarters of all scientific libraries. Polish children were forbidden from acquiring education beyond the elementary level so that a new generation of Polish leaders could not arise in the future. According to a May, 1940, memo from Heinrich Himmler: "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable." By 1941, the number of children attending elementary school in the General Government was half of the pre-war number.
The Poles responded with the "Secret Teaching" (Tajne Nauczanie) a campaign of underground education.
Read more about this topic: Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)