Fritz Hippler - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Hippler grew up in Berlin as the son of a petty official. His father died in 1918 in the First World War in France. Hippler resented the Treaty of Versailles and its associated regulations, such as the assignment of the Danzig Corridor, the occupation of the Rhineland and the disarmament of Germany as unjustified humiliation, and rejected the Weimar democracy.

In 1927, Hippler became a student member of the 1927 Nazi Party. Later he studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin. He was a member of the Teutonia dueling team in Heidelberg and the Berlin Arminia country team. In 1932 he became NSDAP district speaker . In 1933 he was appointed the district and high school group leader for Berlin-Brandenburg in the National Socialist German Student Federation.

He then started studying jurisprudence in Heidelberg and Berlin. He joined the student corporation Teutonia and took part in academic fencing.

Hippler was a supporter of expressionism. As the leader of the National Socialist German Students' League of Berlin he organized an exhibition in the Berlin university for expressionist painters, for which he was vehemently attacked by Rosenberg.

In 1932, Hippler was expelled from the University of Berlin for inciting violence. On 19 April 1933, the new National Socialist Education Minister Bernhard Rust repealed any disciplinary actions against students associated with the Nazi party, thus reinstating Hippler.

On 22 May 1933, he gave a speech initiating a march from the student house in the Oranienburgerstrasse to Opera Square with books which were then burned.

Hippler was later involved in a dispute over the direction of arts policy. Although he was satisfied with the anti-Jewish orientation of the arts policy and the consequent banishment of that art from museums and art dealers who had been created by people of Jewish faith, he criticized in July 1933 at a rally of the National Socialist Student League in the lecture hall of the Berlin University of the harsh action of some Nazi circles against the German modern artists like Nolde and Barlach, the artists group Die Brücke, the parts of the Nazi leadership as part of efforts against the Degenerate Art was propagated. Although Goebbels was a lover of Nolde, this direction after a word of argument was in favor of the more radical of Hitler's National Socialists, whose spokesman Alfred Rosenberg and his Combat League for German Culture.