Education For Death - Relationship To The Ziemer Book

Relationship To The Ziemer Book

Gregor Ziemer, an American author and educator who lived in Germany from 1928–1939, wrote the book Education for Death after fleeing Germany on the eve of World War II. The book highlights what was going on in the Nazi schooling of the German youth.

The narrative story focuses around a group of youth that under the guidance of a Nazi storm trooper, Franzen, take a hiking trip into the woods. As night falls, Franzen "lectures the troop on their duty to preserve the purity of the human race, and proposes they symbolize this task with a solemn ritual to 'impress on us all that fire and destruction will be the end of those who do not think as we do.'" Franzen then hands out six books: the Talmud, the Koran, the works of Shakespeare, the Treaty of Versailles, a biography of Joseph Stalin, and the Bible. The books are passed around the circle and each boy spits on the books, hands them back to Franzen who douses them with kerosene and lights them on fire. The troop then sings the "Deutschlandlied" ("Deutschland, Deutschland über alles") and the Horst Wessel anthem around the fire.

The book inspired two different adaptations; Education for Death and Hitler's Children (1943 film). The former took Ziemer's conclusions very seriously, as it showed the education of Hans from an innocent, kind youth into a chained and muzzled Nazi drone. The scene of the storm trooper and the hiking trip is transplanted to a classroom where the teacher instructs the students about nature's laws about the strong fox having the right to kill the weak rabbit. When Hans does not agree with the teacher, he is punished until he falls in line. The scene involving the book burning is part of the ending compilation of Nazi transformation and destruction. It shows a torch-bearing crowd setting fire to a pile of books of John Milton, Baruch Spinoza, Albert Einstein, Voltaire, and Thomas Mann. It then shows a burning of Felix Mendelssohn's wedding march, an allusion to the Nazi race laws, and the burning of a pile of art.