The Annihilation of Tradition?

Abstract

When it came to founding new Napolas, the NPEA authorities often used the strategy of laying claim to educational institutions with venerable traditions, Nazifying and ‘Napolising’ them. This could include the appropriation of well-known humanistic boarding schools with a Protestant ethos such as Schulpforta (alma mater of Nietzsche, Ranke, and Fichte), or the Klosterschule in Ilfeld, which were both taken over as going concerns. However, the National Socialist regime’s deep hostility towards Catholic foundations also led to the forcible expropriation of former monastic schools such as the Ursuline convent school in Haselünne, or the Missionary School of the Society of the Divine Word (Steyler Orden) in St. Wendel, which were transformed into NPEA Emsland and NPEA Saarland respectively. Expropriation could also be used to punish oppositional non-religious schools such as the aristocratic Landschulheim in Neubeuern, Bavaria. Although most of these schools still retained the curriculum of a ‘humanistic Gymnasium’, teaching both Latin and ancient Greek, by the end of World War II, their existing traditions had been almost completely expunged. We can therefore see these forms of expropriation and Napolisation as part of a more general movement towards the de-Christianization of education during the Third Reich, with the NPEA in the vanguard. This chapter treats the schools at Schulpforta, Ilfeld, Haselünne, St. Wendel, and Neubeuern as case studies, concluding with a brief treatment of NPEA Weierhof am Donnersberg, a former Mennonite school which had collaborated with the Nazi authorities even prior to its transformation into a Napola.